Carcanet were greatly saddened to hear the news that Professor C.B. Cox (Brian Cox) died last week. Alongside Carcanet's editorial director Michael Schmidt, Cox was one of the co-founders of the magazine PN Review and a long-standing friend of Carcanet's.


Michael Schmidt celebrated his life and work in The Guardian on Monday:

Charles Brian Cox, who has died aged 79, was known as C.B. Cox in his roles as professor, editor and activist, and as Brian Cox in his post-academic and creative career. He reconciled in one fortunate and paradoxical life these two identities, marked by complementary conservative and radical impulses. An Englishman of a "new" type, from an unprivileged background, he made his own way. Much of his education work had to do with enhancing opportunity and resisting what he believed obstructed it.


Born in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, into a frugal, lower middle-class Methodist household, Cox won a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, where Ted Hughes and Kamau Brathwaite were among his contemporaries. His teaching career began at Hull University (1954-66), where he wrote his first critical book, The Free Spirit (1963). Cox then taught for many years at the University of Manchester, where he was John Edward Taylor professor of English literature, dean of the faculty of arts (1984-86) and pro vice-chancellor (1987-91). In 1969-77 he published the famous Black Papers on Education, followed later by the Cox Report and Cox on Cox.

After retiring from academia Cox contributed valuably to arts in the North West, chairing the Arvon Foundation (1994-97) and the North West Arts Board (1994-2000) and serving as a member of the Arts Council (1996-98). He was also the editor of Critical Quarterly, a literary and critical journal he established with Dyson in the late 1950s.


In latter years he concentrated on his poetry. In his fourth and last collection, My Eightieth Year to Heaven (Carcanet, 2007), its themes are personal: his prostate cancer, his good fortune in surviving to the brink of four score years, his travels, love. The poems are marked by the civility and humanity of a generous man whose life of service made a difference in the worlds of literature, the arts and education.

Click here to read Michael Schmidt's obituary in full at www.guardian.co.uk