The story has the simplicity of folklore, but the straightness of the narrative keeps arriving at moral crossroads.

NEWYORKER: Ring Cycle

Straightness and abstraction, he insists ignoring countless scientists and thinkers starting with Newton and Locke are not English, any more than lofty theorising is: Englishness is about muddle, practical experiment, miniaturising and embarrassed detachment from the act of creation in all its forms.

ECONOMIST: Englishness

The straightness of his back came from something else: that on his third attempt at escape from prison camp he was beaten senseless, and his skull and neck broken, by two Breton peasants with pitchforks, and was invalided out in exchange for a U-boat commander.

ECONOMIST: M.R.D. Foot