New Statesman: After a long preamble on Ted Hughes’ gatekeeping on Sylvia Plath’s posthumous legacy, Ian Hamilton decries the stranglehold T.S.Eliot’s widow has on his reputation.

So, one day, one day. In the meantime, let us hope

that, by the time an Eliot biography gets nodded

through, he won’t be consigned to the popular

histories as an anti-Semite who wrote amusingly

about pussy cats and had his first wife locked away

for keeps in an asylum – a first wife who may have

written certain of his best-known lines. Eliot’s

posterity, one feels, will always need an extra

measure of protection from the philistines, and

maybe, in his case, disclosure will serve his

reputation more effectively than reticence.