Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets, his work infused with myth; a love of nature, conservation, and ecology; of fishing and beasts in brooding landscapes.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as capacious as any poet in history, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality a...

The most important critical work for decades' Bryan Appleyard, Sunday TimesIn the brilliantly engaging style that characterised The Genius of Shakespeare, Jonathan Bate has written a series of compelling pieces on the link between literature and the environment and why poetry matters in the new millennium. In fascinating detail, Bate explains how words like 'culture' and 'environment' have evolved since the writing of Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy and the Romantics to...

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZEA magisterial life of Ted Hughes – identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness and one of Britain’s most important writers – to be published on National Poetry Day by prize-winning biographer Jonathan Bate.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 ...

A Times and Sunday Times Best Book of 2020‘Radical Wordsworth deserves to take its place as the finest modern introduction to his work, life and impact’ Financial Times‘Richly repays reading … It is hard to think of another poet who has changed our world so much’ Sunday TimesA dazzling new biography of Wordsworth’s radical life as a thinker and poetical innovator, published to mark the 250th anniversary of h...

‘What distinguished Clare is an unspectacular joy and a love for the inexorable one-thing-after-anotherness of the world’ Seamus HeaneyJohn Clare (1793-1864) was a great Romantic poet, with a name to rival that of Blake, Byron, Wordsworth or Shelley – and a life to match. The ‘poet’s poet’, he has a place in the national pantheon and, more tangibly, a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner, unveiled in 1989.Here at last is Clare’s full story, from his ...

A dazzling biography of two interwoven, tragic lives: John Keats and F. Scott Fitzgerald.‘Highly engaging … Go now, read this book’ THE TIMES‘For awhile after you quit Keats,’ Fitzgerald once wrote, ‘All other poetry seems to be only whistling or humming.’John Keats died two hundred years ago, in February 1821. F. Scott Fitzgerald defined a decade that began one hundred years ago, the Jazz Age.In this biography, prizewinning author ...

An illuminating and authoritative study of the 20th-century English poet and children's writer's life and work.Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. He was one of Britain's most important poets.With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he was also a prolific children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English letter-writer since John Keats. His magnetic personality and insatiable appetite for friendship,...

‘Enlightening, moving’ SIR IAN MCKELLENFrom the acclaimed and bestselling biographer Jonathan Bate, a luminous new exploration of Shakespeare and how his themes can untangle comedy and tragedy, learning and loving in our modern lives.‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’How does one survive the death of a loved one, the mess of war, the experience of being schooled, of falling in love, of growing old, of losing ...

The story of a man searching for a new identity, living on a boat high and dry in the yard, in a town very much like Port Cypress, Washington.There, he becomes tied to a boatyard community of like souls. These widely divergent characters find in each other the catalyst to move on from their personal doldrums to a new sense of purpose.

With an introduction by Simon CallowJudgements about the quality of works of art begin in opinion. But for the last two hundred years only the wilfully perverse (and Tolstoy) have denied the validity of the opinion that Shakespeare was a genius.Who was Shakespeare? Why has his writing endured? And what makes it so endlessly adaptable to different times and cultures? Exploring Shakespeare's life, including questions of authorship and autobiography, ...

Emmy's Frenzy is a novel set on the shores of Lake Erie in 1947. Emmy Brooks has given up her dream of figure skating in the Olympics after the death of her mother. She and her brother Matt run the family-owned Bohemian Cafe and Hotel while caring for their mentally incapable younger brother Paul and their emotionally distraught father, Tom.The novel is about the unpredictable flow of life and the dramatic events that have shaped their world. They live an intricate, insular existen...

From one of our most eminent and accessible literary critics, a groundbreaking account of how the Greek and Roman classics forged Shakespeare’s imaginationBen Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having “small Latin and less Greek.” But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he moved to London, a city that modeled itself on ancient Rome. He worked in a theatr...