By Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
Jonathan Cape £16.99
A curse must have been placed on those teaching English at Oxford University.
Richard Ellmann died of motor neurone disease (MND), and never saw the publication of his Oscar Wilde masterpiece, which he'd been researching for 30 years.
The poet Mick Imlah, my contemporary, also succumbed to MND, aged 53. His posthumously produced (2015) is criticism at its finest. Humphrey Carpenter, the first-rate biographer, spent his last years ‘shaking, rattling and
