A Laureate for Elizabeth
BBC Radio 4

When Ted Hughes died in 1998, at least one Cabinet minister leapt up to declare that Paul McCartney was just the man to fill the newly vacated Poet Laureateship.

Mercifully this call was resisted, but the questions that it posed lay at the heart of William Sieghart’s excellent survey of 70 years of royal poets. Two of the most obvious might be: what do we expect of a Poet Laureate, and who qualifies for the job? To which might perhaps be appended a third: will what the chosen candidate writes be any good?