The largest of Ancient Egypt's monolithic statues once depicted the vainglorious tyrant, Rameses II (thirteenth century BC), also known as Ozymandias. Shelley's deeply ironic sonnet exposes and cautions against such futile human vanity and arrogance as the pretentiousness of Ozymandias.

'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

This inscription on the monument's pedestal is doubly ironic: nobody needs to despair as Ozymandias intended, because 'nothing beside remains' of his works but barren desert, and also, the sands of time ensure that such oblivion is the common, leveling fate that engulfs all men and their ideologies:

…boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

After its irregularity of assonantal half rhymes, the alliterative and monosyllabic conclusion allows the sonnet itself to dissolve quietly and tellingly.

The interviewees are Jean Binta Breeze, Kate Clanchy, Michael Donaghy, PJ Kavanagh, Jamie McKendrick and Owen Shears.