Czeslaw Milosz’s highly acclaimed poetry does little for Craig Raine
Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit…
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…