Clive Branson (1907-1944) was born in Ahmednagar, India, the son of a major in the Indian army. He studied at the Slade School of Art and exhibited at the Royal Academy when he was just 23. Five of his paintings are today in the Tate. His daughter is the painter Rosa Branson.

The Selected Poems of Clive Branson brings together, for the first time, the best of his surviving poetry. Passionate and committed, it’s a first-hand account of the most violent years of the twentieth-century – Britain in the Slump, Spain during the civil-war, Fascist prisons, the London Blitz, the cultural shock of India and its poverty, the war against Japan – recorded with a painterly eye and a communist faith in the power of the people.