I stumbled across this strange, little book by chance on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime. A man is writing a book about Ted Hughes. His wife dies in an accident, leaving him to raise their two small boys alone. Four or five days after her death (“the friends and family who had been hanging … More Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter
Hoylake Community Cinema is no more. After 10-ish years and several awards it closed its doors in September, purportedly to make way for a commercial cinema that will almost certainly fail. HCC succeeded because it was like a film club with no membership subscription. It screened one film a month. The programme for the ‘season’, … More Emily Dickinson – poems selected by Ted Hughes
“The wall-eyed nurse came back.” That’s how it began, an extract of The Bell Jar my English teacher handed out for us to study. That single image made such a deep impression on me as a sixteen-year-old that, thirty years on, I still remember it. Before term was over I’d sought out and read the … More The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
I first remember hearing about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in an English lesson after reading an extract from Plath’s The Bell Jar. I was sweet sixteen, it was an all-girls school, and my teacher was young, female, and romantic; Ted Hughes (we all agreed) was not a nice man. Thirty years on, I’m old … More Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes
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