Scholarly work is a testament to Hughes’s savage brilliance

Biography; Ted Hughes: The; Unauthorised Life; By Jonathan Bate; William Collins, €23

Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath: their relationship and her suicide shaped the course of his later workEmory University

To write about either Ted Hughes or Sylvia Plath is to enter a kind of Bermuda Triangle of bad luck and hurt feelings: it never goes well, as if these two savage and stormy talents clashed so powerfully in life that they left behind them only wreckage. The latest victim of the curse of Hughes and Plath is Jonathan Bate, a scholar of high standing – an Oxford don recently knighted for services ...