T H White

During a lecture given in the last year of his life, T.H. White explained how, throughout his life, he had armed himself against disaster by exploring new fields of knowledge. Sylvia Townsend Warner has written a biography which reveals White's humour and vivid imagination, and also his passionate enthusiasm - the manner in which he would see a skill, pursue it with passionate curiosity and having mastered it, move on to something else, whether this was falconry or flying, painting or ploughing a field. The book traces White's brilliant career at Cambridge and his employment as a teacher at Stowe until a publishing contract allowed him to devote himself entirely to his novels. It explains how the journal he kept of his ill-fated attempts to train a falcon provided the basis for his book "The Goshawk", and how his continuing preoccupation with the Arthurian legends led eventually to the four books of "The Once and Future King". The biography also describes his periodic dependence on alcohol, brought on by bouts of recurrent melancholy.