Hoyles, John

John Hoyles was marked by books from a young age: Huckleberry Finn (my first book from a Cardiff bookshop 1944); Hardy's Wessex novels (at my Berkshire prep school 1948, as inoculation against pessimism); War and Peace (read in boarding school courtyard 1950 - I fell in love with Natasha); Lawrence Collected Poems (forbidden texts, banned in school library, seen in mad music master's room in school tower); Shelley's Complete Poems (BEAUTY, pure and absolute from Cirencester bookshop 1952, aged 16); Urquhart's 1653 RabelaIs (Renaissance high jinks for Christmas 1953); Lady Chatterley unexpurgat...