The poet Christopher Logue has died aged 85. The obituaries make for fascinating reading. For instance, did you know that the author of War Music also edited Pseuds’ Corner and collated the True Stories column in Private Eye? Or that he was an occasional actor? Aren’t some people almost too blessed?
Perhaps, but Logue’s beginnings were difficult. He joined the Black Watch in 1944 and was court martialled during a fractious tour of Palestine in 1946; he was imprisoned. Determined to write, he travelled to Paris in the early ‘50s, where he fell in with the expat writers’ crowd: that band of artistic Anglo-Saxons who fled the suffocating British Isles after the war. His career as a poet was very slow. Like many aspiring writers at the time, he to write a pornographic novel for the notorious publisher Maurice Giordias, for which he was well remunerated.
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