Align with Dissent: Alex Preston Pays Tribute to His Mentor, the Poet and Critic Tom Paulin

Preston, Alex, New Statesman (1996)

whenever I'm a panellist on the BBC's Review Show, I get a slightly.eerie feeling as the lights come up and Kirsty Wark or Martha Kearney introduces the programme. It's as if I'm still somehow at home, a pimply teenager sprawled on the rug in front of an archaic Grundig, watching Late Review. As the discussion begins and I mount the perilous critical tightrope between pretentious twerp and philistine berk, I half expect Tom Paulin to stride on to the set to perform a detailed Marxist analysis of Toy Story 2.

Throughout its various incarnations. The Review Show has been one of the few slots on television where culture is treated with the sort of respect it gets on the other side of the Channel. For many - though he hasn't featured on the programme now for almost four years - Paulin remains the tutelary spirit of our most intelgent television show.

I applied to study at Hertford College because of Paulin's appearances on Late Review. He was a celebrity intellectual at Oxford, one of the few living poets I'd heard of at 17. What's more, a volume of his critical essays - …

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Publication information: Article title: Align with Dissent: Alex Preston Pays Tribute to His Mentor, the Poet and Critic Tom Paulin. Contributors: Preston, Alex - Author. Magazine title: New Statesman (1996). Volume: 140. Issue: 5075 Publication date: October 17, 2011. Page number: 48. © Not available. COPYRIGHT 2011 Gale Group.

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