When I started teaching, my first Head of Department was a friendly but authoritative character, who would stand no nonsense from anyone: it made little difference to him whether his antagonist was a quaking, recalcitrant twelve-year-old waster or his own Headmaster. In fact, I soon heard stories of conflict with the latter, of confrontations which allegedly led to desks being violently pounded behind office doors. It gave his detachment and his reputation more lustre: his authority was unquestioned by his colleagues. He could finish a Times crossword during a fifteen-minute break; he could throw a crumpled essay back, annotated with salty insults; he could plumb character unerringly in a moment. He was exactly the sort of boss I hoped for, a legendary figure amongst his own fellow teachers, due to his invisibility: he was rarely spotted in the common room, and I suspect beneath it all, he was shy, if not retiring.

Every time I return to the poetry of Louis MacNeice, I give a thought to him because one day, coming across me reading, he growled something about what a wonderful poem ‘Snow’ was, and drew my attention to it. It has remained with me, because ‘Snow’ is a wonderful poem, a brief, philosophically complex meditation which, in twelve lines, hints and suggests vast vistas to the reader in a seemingly careless, conversational manner. A handful of images in the poem act as shorthand to suggest the complexity of MacNeice’s vision as he sits in a lounge and (rather wonderfully) eats a tangerine.

Making my hesitant way through the aftermath of personal grief, I recently read The Heart of Things: ...