Tom Paulin
| Date of Birth: | 25 January 1949 |
Thomas Neilson Paulin (born 25 January 1949) is a Northern Irish poet and critic of film, music and literature. He lives in England, where he was the G. M. Young Lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford. In the 1990s and 2000s, Paulin was noted for his frequent appearances on British television as a commentator, particularly on the programme Newsnight Review. Paulin is the eldest of three boys and was born in Leeds, England in 1949 to a Belfast-born mother, a GP who had worked in London hospitals during the Blitz, and a father from Tynemouth who became a headmaster in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The family moved to Belfast when Paulin was four, and he grew up immersed in discussions of politics, history, and ideas, as his parents were moderate unionists and supporters of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. His childhood was shaped by post-war stories, his father’s military experiences, and the legacy of World War II, including an aluminium school built from wartime scrap with houses named after Ulster field marshals. Paulin’s early education was rigorous but uneven: he attended a large Victorian primary school described as grim, followed by a more stimulating secondary education under his father’s headmastership, where he was encouraged to explore literature and poetry. Belfast’s intellectual and cultural life in the 1960s, including exposure to contemporary poets such as Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Michael Longley, and the city’s political debates, further influenced him. He also engaged with socialist and Trotskyist ideas as a teenager, reading writers like Isaac Deutscher and joining the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League, though he eventually recognised the primacy of national identity in Northern Ireland, a view which clashed with Trotskyist viewpoints. Paulin was educated at Annadale Grammar School, Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford. Source: Wikipedia.org
