Byron Rogers' biography of Wales's national poet and vicar, R.S. Thomas has been hailed as a 'masterpiece', even as a work of 'genius', by reviewers from Craig Brown to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

J.L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: a man who spent most of his working life in the middle of Middle England, as headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, an enthusiastic follower of cricket and a tireless campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen of the quirkiest, most comic novels in English, a publisher (from his own back bedroom in Kettering) of some of the most eccentric, collectable - and smallest - books ever printed, and an enigmatic, elusive individual. Among Carr's novels are "A Month in the Country," his moving story of...