By Linda Hart with readings by Max Hunt. Linda’s presentation is best characterised as the biography of a book. In 2019 she was at Trinity College, Cambridge, where the librarian showed her a very special copy of A.E. Housman’s celebrated collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad.  The book had been inscribed in 1909 by an unknown young man in Gloucester named Ivor Gurney to the internationally famous Rudyard Kipling.

Linda decided to find out where the book had been for 110 years; how did it get from Gloucester to Cambridge; what readers had it met on its cross-country journey? She explains the links that she discovered between A.E. Housman, Rudyard Kipling, and Ivor Gurney who would become Gloucestershire’s much-admired poet and composer.