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That's R-A-K-U-T-E-N.

I met a traveler from an antique land who said,

two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert.

Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip

and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read, which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed and on the pedestal these words appear

my name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my works, ye mighty and despair.

Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.

That was Oseman Diaz by Percy Bisch Shelley, and it's about a tyrannical Egyptian Pharaoh who had statues of himself built

all around his ancient land and yet all these millennia later all that remains is a shattered face with its cold sneer and a couple of half

legs and desert beyond that. I'm not really into poetry I I had to study it at university. I hated it.

I read English literature.

And I always opted for prose when I could because I found poetry a bit fuddy-duddy and really a bit

impenetrable. But this one which I came across in a history of love and hate in 21 statues

by today's guest Dr Peter Hughes just really worked for me.

Firstly because I actually understood the blasted thing

and also because it so beautifully gets across that sense of the vastness of time.

God I sound like Professor Brian time, but the superciliousness of these once venerated pharaohs and other world

...