The Letters of T S Eliot: Vol 1 1898-1922

“Gripping and at times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the poetry. It will be the standard biography of Hughes for a long time to come” -Sunday Times

“Captures the great poet in all his wild complexity. Powerful and clarifying, richly layered and compelling” -Melvyn Bragg, Observer

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain s most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.

Ted Hughes left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts, unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost complete record of Hughes s inner life, preserved by him for posterity.

Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. Shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, his book offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes’s life as it was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes s poetry and the art of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty answerable to Hughes s own.

“A wonderful, fascinating account of two stars of the post-war literary generation, and their mutual influence.”— –Good Book Guide

Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin were close from the moment they met as undergraduates at Oxford. They were, however, very different personalities. Kingsley was charming, sociable, and completely amoral whilst Larkin was awkward and insecure. Their relationship with one another is fascinating in part because it provided the inspiration behind their work. In fact, parts of Lucky Jim were based on Larkin’s life, a fact the poet begrudged for the rest of his life. An extraordinary study of one of the most controversial literary friendships of the twentieth century.