This major retrospective selection of Charles Madge’s poetry appears just over fifty years after the publication of his last Faber collection, `The Father Found’ (1941). He continued to write during the forties, and, more intermittently, after becoming Professor of Social Science at Birmingham University in 1950. `Of Love, Time and Places’ is a comprehensive selection, bringing back into print his published poems, and giving us his later work for the first time.

Charles Madge was born in Johannesburg in 1912, and was educated at Cambridge. He published his first collection of poetry `The Disappearing Castle’ in 1937, the year Mass-Observation became a fulltime occupation for him, at first with Humphrey Jennings, then with Tom Harrisson. During the war he did social and economic research under Lord Keynes, and edited `Pilot Papers’. From 1948 to 1950 he was Social Development Officer for the new town of Stevenage, until his appointment in 1950 as Professor of Social Science at Birmingham University, a position he held until 1970. His many publications include economic and sociological works, as well as several Mass-Observation collections under his editorship. Most recently he edited, with Mary-Lou Jennings, the late Humphrey Jennings’ `Pandaemonium’ (1985).