A wonderful story about your copy of Clare, Simon! – Jonathan Bate’s fine Biography for Picador / Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003) has an excellent appendix that surveys the vexed question of the ownership of the copyright in Clare’s verse and the way it has affected publication over the past fifty years or so. Bate’s Selected (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2003, Faber and Faber 2004) is also a most useful volume.
No especial news to add, except that, as an atheist, I am attending a carol concert this evening at the church in Penistone, Yorkshire, not far from where I live. It looks to be a night of typical Pennine weather.
Clive Watkins
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