My friend, the writer and publisher John Lucas, who has died aged 88, was the author of more than 50 books, not only in his own academic field with studies of writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, George Crabbe, John Clare and William Blake, but also poetry, novels and memoirs.
His poetry collection Studying Grosz on the Bus won the Aldeburgh festival poetry prize in 1989, and John also wrote works of social history such as Closing Time at the Royal Oak (2021), the wonderfully idiosyncratic A Brief History of Whistling, with Allan Chatburn (2015), and The Trent Bridge Battery, a history of the Nottinghamshire Gunn dynasty, cricketers and bat manufacturers (1985, with Basil Haynes).
