The poet as spy

"He was a man of many parts who had an amazing helter-skelter of a life. The author of Briggflatts, hailed as the greatest long poem produced in Britain since T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, Basil Bunting (1900-85) was also a sea captain, a music critic, an RAF Squadron Leader, a convict, a political correspondent for The Times, a builder's labourer, and a British intelligence agent specializing in the Middle East."--BOOK JACKET.