SOURCE: "History by Hindsight," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4775, October 7, 1994, p. 31.

Below, Imlah assesses the poetic and narrative strengths of History: The Home Movie, emphasizing Raine's anal and genital preoccupations.

Auden observed of the Old Masters (he had Bruegel principally in mind) that they understood how ordinary life carries on in the comers, regardless of the momentous event that is the painting's subject; how, for instance, in one (unidentified or imagined) picture, "the torturer's horse / Scratches its innocent behind on a tree". Since his sonnet "Arsehole" of 1983 ("I fed that famished mouth my ambergris")—which made A. N. Wilson feel "sorry for Mrs. Raine"—Craig Raine has committed his poetry and criticism to the promotion of that unheroic "behind" and its kin.

In the final section of his long-awaited magnum opus, Raine depicts himself visiting the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where he focuses on a similar tiny detail...