Was Ezra Pound mad?
On 21 December 1945, Ezra Pound was confined to St Elizabeths hospital in Washington DC. He had broadcast for Rome…
T.S. Eliot’s crisis year: exhaustion, hair loss and a wrecked marriage
F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…
An unauthorised, and unconvincing, biography of Ted Hughes
Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level
Saul Bellow’s fiction: a warehouse of stolen property
Saul Bellow’s lurid personal life — especially the triangular relationship with his wife and her lover — was the basis for his best work, says Craig Raine
Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces
The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his…
Was he anti-Semitic?
Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic.
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How to capture in words the bittersweet sport of boxing?
Craig Raine 29 April 2017 9:00 am
Thirty years ago, Russell Davies wrote a weekly sporting column in the New Statesman. It proved unsustainable and was soon…