Sloggering

That was all right,’ said my husband after listening to Paul Scofield read the whole of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ on Poetry Please. I hope they are not going to axe Poetry Please as part of Radio 4’s improvements. It’s the sort of thing that happens after 33 years of success.

We have grown so used to the verbal innovations of Gerard Manley Hopkins that the surely derivative language of Dylan Thomas sounds merely playful.