In the month of my father’s birth, April 1909, John Galsworthy was in the midst of writing a play titled The Eldest Son, which was, however, not performed until 1912. Galsworthy was one of the proportionately many winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature on whom the conferral of the prize did not also confer literary immortality, or even much in the way of longevity.

Galsworthy is now generally regarded, I think, as irredeemably middlebrow. Virginia Woolf reprehended him because (according to her) he dealt only with the externals of life, presumably by contrast with life’s internals. Galsworthy was, so to speak, dermatologist to Woolf’s gastroenterologist.

Shakespeare weaves the personal and the political into a perfectly seamless robe.

For myself, I can’t quite decide whether the internals or externals are the more important to literature. After all, in the absence of consciousness, nothing in the universe could be of the slightest importance; conversely, only a very spoiled, self-obsessed, and superficial person could deny the impact of the external on the internal. Perhaps Shakespeare alone managed the perfect fusion of the two. Though we have never ourselves been destituted of great power, we learn when we listen to Richard II exactly how it feels to be so destituted, as if it had happened to us. But irrespective of how Richard felt himself, his destitution was to have enormously important effects on public events, provoking a civil war that lasted until the downfall of Richard III