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Are famous writers accident-prone? Some are

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Paul Johnson on what one should and should not know about a writer

I don’t want to know too much about writers. The endless revelations about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have put me off their poetry. Nothing can shake my love of Keats’s Odes but I don’t have any desire to see his full medical records. Nor do I care to learn anything more about Byron’s club foot (though I am fascinated by the fact that the painter John Glover, who founded the Australian school of art, and whose masterpiece ‘Dovedale at Dawn’ I possess, had two club feet). We know quite enough about Shakespeare personally, and I am happy he is still surrounded by mysteries. Of course, if his diaries were suddenly to appear, or autographed letters, that would be another matter.

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