A fine biography Rogers has done a wonderful jobDaily Telegraph
J. L. Carr was the most English of Englishmen: headmaster of a Northamptonshire school, cricket enthusiast and campaigner for the conservation of country churches. But he was also the author of half a dozen utterly unique novels, including his masterpiece,A Month in the Country, and a publisher of some of the most eccentric and smallest books ever printed.
Byron Rogers acclaimed biography reveals an elusive, quixotic and civic-minded individual with an unswerving sympathy for the underdog, who led his schoolchildren through the streets to hymn the beauty of the cherry trees and paved his garden path with the printing plates for his hand-drawn maps, and whose fiction is quite remarkably autobiographical. Much more than the life of a thoroughly decent man,The Last Englishman is a comic and touching anatomy of the best kind of Englishness.
Conveying the significance of the author ofCarrs Dictionary of Extraordinary Cricketers to anyone unfamiliar with his books, or what may now fairly be called his myth, was always going to be difficult. Somehow, Rogers has managed it D. J. Taylor,Sunday Times
A great success, and more life-affirming than F. R. Leaviss entire outputIndependent on Sunday
Byron Rogers is a Welsh journalist, essayist and biographer. He has contributed to The Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian, and was once a speech writer for the Prince of Wales. He is also author of seven books published by Aurum, including: An Audience With an Elephant, one of several collections of his journalism; The Man Who Went into the West, a critically acclaimed biography of the iconic twentieth century Welsh poet, R. S. Thomas, which was awarded the James Tait Black Prize for Biography in 2007; and The Last Englishman, a biography of the quintessential Englishman and celebrated novelist J.L. Carr. Me: The Authorised Biography, was published in 2009. His most recent book is Three Journeys. He currently lives in Northamptonshire and Carmarthen.
