"Misreading a minor, early work, from an oeuvre as substantial, as varied and as uneven as Hughes’s – plays, stories, children’s books and volumes of critical essays and translations as well as poetry, not to speak of the hinterland of unpublished writings – could be called a minor lapse in a biographer. But Bate has other readings just as bizarre, and cumulatively they suggest a careless approach to his subject’s work – even though “The biographical impulse must be at one with the literary-critical”, his Prologue reminds us. And, as with the detail, so with the central contention of his book." Alan Jenkins • TLS

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