Tony Harrison

In his own lifetime, he'll be condemned as two-faced, a disgrace, a man who will sacrifice his principles and feelings to a little paltry gain.

And 150 years later, in his play Poetry or Bust, Tony Harrison would see his pliability, along with too much ale, as his tragic flaw.

For now though, Nicholson is on the up, a published poet and the toast of the Bradford art scene, as well as the pubs of Bingley and Eldwick.

He possessed at this season of his life a ready and abundant flow of conversation lighted up with humorous sallies and happy and ingenious turns of thought.

And we get the sense that he navigates the treacherous landscape of class and politics with confidence and a glint in his eye.

The infamous bust of Nicholson, made on a disastrous visit to London that we'll hear more about later, can add to our impressions of his powerful presence.

It's held in the Tony Harrison Archive in the University of Leeds Cultural Collections.

The battle-scarred plaster likeness was given to Harrison by an elderly woman who'd come to see a performance of Poetry or Bust and told him, "It was about as much use to me as a chocolate fire guard." Hadley Nicholson visits us in the Brotherton Research Centre, the home of cultural collections at the University of Leeds, to meet his ancestor's likeness and fill us in on his latest discoveries about his family history.

I do also just want to say it is interesting that Andy Burnham has made more of the influence of poetry on him personally, not just as an English literature graduate, but as an individual.

Tony Harrison's V, he said, was the poem that changed his life.

But it's also interesting that his favourite poet was Margaret Thatcher's favourite poet, Philip Larkin.

That's also another episode.

Those aren't actually John Nicholson's words.

They're the words of Nicholson's ghost, as imagined by the great Leeds-born poet and playwright Tony Harrison.

Harrison's 1993 play, Poetry or Bust, brought the Bingley Byron back from the dead to survey his chaotic, charismatic life and his meagre legacy.

Barry Rutter took the lead role.

The play has been both a help and a hindrance on our travels across West Yorkshire to uncover the real John Nicholson.

Tony Harrison's research for the production, maps, photographs, notebooks and the infamous bust of the poet is kept in cultural collections at the University of Leeds.

We're using some of Harrison's archive to retrace his steps in the steps in turn of John Nicholson and to find the remote locations that inspired the Bingley Byron.

But Harrison and Rutter brought the poet to such vivid comic life on the stage that it's sometimes been difficult to separate their version of him from the original.

To the day at St Francis Xavier's, when our Greek teacher wheeled a VCR into the sixth form classroom to show us a recording of the Oresteia.

It was the now legendary National Theatre production of 1981, in a translation by Tony Harrison, directed by Sir Peter Hall.

It seems an almost comical reaction in retrospect, but I was truly shocked to see Clytemnestra and Electra and the Watchmen glowering through the screen.

blew my tiny mind to realise that they had haunted this stage in London, actual physical embodied beings.