Raine pours scorn on his critics

LAST week poet Craig Raine was mocked mercilessly on Twitter for his new poem Gatwick, his ode to the airport printed in the London Review of Books. It described a frisson between him and a young female border control officer, and then a good leer at a 22-year-old woman on the coach to Oxford whose breasts and hips are described lingeringly.

Raine, right, writing in this week’s New Statesman, said he was unaware of the furore until The Londoner told him. “I don’t think my poem needs defending from the misreadings of malicious and/or stupid people,” he says in the NS. “If I worried about bad readers I’d have given up writing poetry long ago. This furore is an example of what Bellow, after

MARK Carney has found himself linked to an art scandal. He bought a painting through Evan Solomon, the TV correspondent fired from CBC for using his influence to profit from art deals. A spokesman for Carney insists he has “no enduring professional relationship with Mr Solomon” but at least we see his tastes: he bought a $22,500 painting by Kim Dorland, known for vivid nature scenes. Wyndham Lewis, called the Moronic Inferno ... More depressing was the ironic spectacle of intelligent people, people readily contemptuous of Joyce’s moralising detractors, taking up the censorious position.” He adds that his intentions were honourable. “My attitude to the young woman is kindly. The word ‘bust’ is a term taken from tailoring. I like her big bust because she doesn’t. A form of redress. What I intend is joy — a kind of love for the whole world: the girl, her parents, Gatwick. The Greek word for hospitality, xenia, literally means love of strangers.” Well that settles it then. Sort of.

TRAVEL bore of the day: model Cara Delevingne, who takes a Playstation 4 with her every holiday. Which explains why we never get a postcard.