Colin Bull was born in Birmingham in 1928. Spending his formative years near Hereford, he went onto gain a degree in Physics from the University of Birmingham and PHD in solid state physics. Throughout his career Bull participated, and went onto organise, many scientific expeditions to the polar regions. One of these was the pioneering British North Greenland Expedition of 1952 to 1954 in which Bull participated as a geophysicist, part of a team of over 20 who undertook ground-breaking research in areas including geology, gravimetry, seismology, physiology and the logistics of large scale polar exploration.

After returning from Greenland Bull married Diana Gillian Garrett in 1954 and later accepted a position at the University of Wellington in New Zealand where he would lead a successful Antarctic expedition in 1958-1959 and a further expedition to Greenland in 1960-1961. Later in 1961 Bull accepted a position at Ohio State University where he taught glaciology, with successive promotions becoming the Dean of the College of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. He also participated on several committees including spending time as Chairman of the Glaciology panel of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research, and on the Polar Research Board and the Council on Polar Research. Bull retired in 1986 and spent time travelling and trading books about the polar regions. He died in 2010.

Basil Bunting is one of the most important British poets of the 20th century. Acknowledged since the 1930s as a major figure in Modernist poetry, first by Pound and Zukofsky and later by younger writers, the Northumbrian master poet had to wait over 30 years before his genius was finally recognised in Britain - in 1966, with the publication of Briggflatts, which Cyril Connolly called 'the finest long poem to have been published in England since T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets'. Born in Northumberland in 1900, Bunting lived in Paris in the 20s, where Ezra Pound rescued him from jail and fixed him up with a job on the Transatlantic Review. He later followed Pound to Italy - giving up his job to Hemingway - where Yeats knew him as 'one of Pound's more savage disciples'. For the next 30 years he led a sometimes wild and always varied life - in Italy, England, Berlin, Tenerife, America and Persia - as a struggling, penniless writer, a music critic, sea captain, RAF officer, Times correspondent and Chief of Political Intelligence in Tehran. During these years he built up a reputation in America as the best English poet of his generation, at the same time as his poetry was neglected in Britain. In 1954 he returned to Northumberland, and worked for several years as a sub-editor on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. It was not until the publication of Briggflatts that his genius was finally recognised. He died in 1985.

Complete Poems (2000) was reissued by Bloodaxe for Bunting's centenary and includes his original Collected Poems alongside the posthumous Uncollected Poems. It also contains a new introduction by Richard Caddel. A companion double-cassette recording of his own reading of his poems, Briggflatts & Other Poems, was also published by Bloodaxe at the same time.
A new Bloodaxe edition of Briggflatts (June 2009) includes a CD with an audio recording Bunting made of Briggflatts in 1967 and a DVD of Peter Bell’s 1982 film portrait of Bunting. As well as his own notes to the poem, the book includes his seminal essay on sound and meaning in poetry, ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966).

Historian of the Alnwick printing industry.