On Thursday Faber & Faber publishes a book of poems which, thanks to acres of editorial publicity in The Times, is going to sell in truckloads.

Birthday Letters comprises 88 poems written by West Yorkshire-born Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Their sole subject is Sylvia Plath, Hughes' first wife who committed suicide in February 1963 and is buried in an old church field at Heptonstall.

The myth-making circumstances of her death - her greatest poems had just been written in a rage of inspired creativity, she was only 30, Hughes had left her for another woman - fuelled her rise to literary stardom in the past 35 years.

Hughes, reviled by feminists ever since, has revealed nothing of his thoughts and feelings concerning Plath to the outside world - until now. There is an air of excited expectancy, just as there used to be before a new Beatles release.

The Times did a first-class job last week, giving over whole pages to the poems accompanied by just enough biography to identify the places and faces in Hughes and Plath's brief marriage of true but unlike minds.

It was great, and recalled other memorable literary sensations of the 1980s: The Hitler Diaries, Tony Harrison's poem V, and the campaign to free the Russian dissident and Christian poet Irina Ratushinskaya from prison camp in the Gulag Archipeligo.

Unlike Birthday Letters, the authenticity of The Hitler Diaries was questionable from the start. Could anyone seriously imagine Hitler penning the following little gem in his personal diary in 1936 : "Must get tickets for the Olympic Games."?

Yes, the executives of Stern magazine in West Germany could. Ditto the respected war historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, and Times Newspapers. All these experts were hoodwinked by a clever forger of Nazi memorabilia. The whole episode, like a grotesque cautionary tale by Gunter Grass or Graham Greene, enthralled the nation for weeks.

Tony Harrison's long poem hit the headlines after Tory MPs complained about its numerous expletives. V, which contains a long combative dialogue between the Leeds-born writer and the unemployed punk he might have become but for fame and fortune, was due to be screened by Channel 4. Hence the furore.

The Independent published the entire poem, swear words and all, so that the public could make up its own mind. What impressed me was the newspaper's refusal to under-estimate the public's general intelligence. People were less shocked by F and C words than by the desecrated graves in Leeds which had sparked Harrison into writing his modern and harsher version of Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard.

The Ratushinskaya campaign was very big in Bradford. There were vigils, and Shipley's then-MP Sir Marcus Fox took up the cause. It caught people's imagination at a time when Mikhail Gorbachev's warming winds of Glasnost and Perestroika were thawing the ice on the Soviet Union's side of the Iron Curtain.

She was released in the autumn of 1986 to great rejoicing, and world news coverage. Hundreds of Bradford people who had sent letters of protest to the Soviet authorities or lit candles of vigil on her behalf felt they had helped. Nation was speaking unto nation - the prelude to momentous 1989.

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