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Craig Raine

What a scorcher: bearing the brunt of Harold Pinter’s temper was one of life’s central experiences

The night I kissed Harold Pinter

Craig Raine 22 September 2018 9:00 am

Craig Raine remembers Harold Pinter

Blinded by love: Sylvia Plath with her son Nick in Devon in 1962

‘Ted is liar. Ted beats me up. Ted wishes me dead’: Sylvia Plath descends into madness and misery

Craig Raine 15 September 2018 9:00 am

In 1923, a Frenchman, Emile Coué, persuaded millions of Americans to finger a piece of string with exactly 20 knots.…

Volcano of invention: Alexander Calder at Hauser & Wirth Somerset

Alexander Calder was a volcano of invention

Craig Raine 23 June 2018 9:00 am

In the Moderna Museet in Stockholm there is a sculpture by Katharina Fritsch, which references Chekhov’s famous story ‘Lady with…

Worth a trip for the David Joneses alone: Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ reviewed

Craig Raine 24 February 2018 9:00 am

To bleak, boarded-up Margate — and a salt-and-vinegar wind that leaves my face looking like Andy Warhol’s botched 1958 nose-peel…

Megan Marshall explores Elizabeth Bishop's lifelong lesbian escapades in a new biography

Craig Raine 16 September 2017 9:00 am

We are gripped by gossip. Curiosity is a tenacious emotion. In her essay on Push Comes to Shove, the autobiography…

Czesław Miłosz in Paris in 2001

Czeslaw Milosz’s highly acclaimed poetry does little for Craig Raine

Craig Raine 1 July 2017 9:00 am

Milan Kundera’s novel Immortality wryly depicts Goethe preparing for immortality — neatly laying out his life in Dichtung und Warheit…

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…

Ezra Pound as a young man

Was Ezra Pound mad?

Craig Raine 18 February 2017 9:00 am

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

Craig Raine 12 March 2016 9:00 am

F.R. Leavis once denounced the Twickenham edition of Pope’s Dunciad for producing a meagre trickle of text through a desert…

Hughes in 1986: Bate simply fails to make the case his book stands on – that the poet was a sadist

An unauthorised, and unconvincing, biography of Ted Hughes

Craig Raine 3 October 2015 8:00 am

Craig Raine says that Jonathan Bate’s unauthorised biography of Ted Hughes gets it wrong on every level

Family photo of Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow’s fiction: a warehouse of stolen property

Craig Raine 2 May 2015 9:00 am

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 in 1996

Seamus Heaney: no shuffling or cutting — just turning over aces

Craig Raine 13 December 2014 9:00 am

The impersonator — Rory Bremner, Steve Coogan — speaks, in different voices, to a single primitive pleasure centre in his…

Was he anti-Semitic?

Craig Raine 11 November 2009 12:00 am

Letters give us the life as lived — day-to-day, shapeless, haphazard, contingent, imperfect, authentic.

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