My favourite moment, out of many superb moments, in Byron Rogers’s classic biography of the poet RS Thomas, is when the old curmudgeon received a letter from the Prime Minister offering him some kind of gong.
The clergyman poet did not answer the letter, of course. It went straight into the waste-paper basket where it belonged.
Yet many other intelligent people in Britain seem positively agog for a gong. My neighbour Jonathan Miller was a republican who had a huge range of talents – neurologist, opera
