Ted Hughes

A captivating life of Ted Hughes, told with great depth by the prize-winning author of *The Genius of Shakespeare*, and biographer of John Clare, Jonathan Bate.

Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. With an equal gift for poetry and prose, he had a magnetic personality and an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life.

But he attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron.

Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. Here for the first time is the full story of Ted Hughes's life and work. At its centre is Hughes’s lifelong quest to come to terms with the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath.