You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. My name is Thomas Jones. My guest this week is Colin Barrow, a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford,

editor of Shakespeare sonnets and poems, and his most recent book is imitating authors, Plato to Futurity.

He last appeared on the podcast in January, talking about the fiction of Ursula Le Guin.

And his latest piece for us in the current issue of the LRB is on the critic Christopher Rix.

It's a review of Rix's recent essay collection along heroic lines.

Hello, Colin, and thank you very much for joining me again.

Hello, Tom. It's very nice to be here virtually.

It's of a small but also large question to begin with.

Who is Christopher Ricks?

Well, people say he's the greatest living critic. I think that's a case to be made for that.

He was Professor at Bristol for many years and then moved to Cambridge, where he was famous

during the period of the row over structuralism

and then moved to Boston, where he has an editorial institute.

And he tirelessly writes about every literary author, really,

from Keats to Milton to Tennyson to Bob Dylan,

and is also actually very good about Henry James and his key trick, as it were, is close verbal analysis.

And it was that focus on close verbal analysis, I suppose, which provoked the much whipped up

structuralism row in Cambridge, which was seen as a row

between traditional, close reading and on the one hand, and literary theory on the other.

But he has survived all those rows, gone on to have other rows with other people, and continues to

ride.

His first book, is this right, was published in

...