Nick and I read poetry together once a month for the best part of thirty years. We had been close neighbours in Kentish Town in the 1980s, when I got to know Nick and his family, but our routine only became regular after I moved across the river to Kennington in 1993. We visited each other on Sunday evenings alternately and cooked supper for one another before we got down to things. That could delay our readings. Nick enjoyed his food, especially if it was well salted, and was always appreciative. Warmth and appreciation of others were shining features of his personality.

Our usual fare was long English poems of the kind we might not have persisted with on our own – though quite often Nick would find pencil notes in his copy showing that he had read the poem years before and forgotten about it. He was indeed very well-read. The last thing we read was Cowper’s The Task. Nick claimed he did not know it, bought a copy, then found another on his shelves covered with his own annotations.

There was no programme – we just followed our noses. We tended to read about 100 lines each at a time. Our biggest hits were Paradise Lost and Don Juan, both of which we got through twice. Some poems could take over a year; Don Juan is in sixteen cantos, and a canto a month was as much as we could usually manage. Aurora Leigh, which is in nine long books, was a real effort but we stuck with it to the end. We often had the old men’s problem of forgetting what had happened the previous time, but we ploughed on regardless, not often discussing the poetry in much detail, just passages we liked.

Of American poems I best remember Longfellow’s Evangeline – we never tackled Hiawatha. We had two failures: we abandoned both The Ring and the Book and The Testament of Beauty. We read shorter poems too, for relief; also some works in translation: Dryden’s Aeneid, MacNeice’s Georgics, and Coleridge’s translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein – not so well known. Nearly everything we did was present on Nick’s bookshelves, though often I had to get my copy from the library. He would have liked to do more German, but my German was not up to it, nor did we find French work.

Latterly we got on to verse plays, notably a set of Roman ones ranging from Ben Jonson’s Sejanus to Dryden’s All For Love and Addison’s Cato. Nick invariably took the most joy from Shakespeare. I think we read all the history plays, getting a good deal out of less popular ones like King John and Henry VIII. Most of what we read was English and pre-modern, in which respects our tastes for better or worse coincided, despite Nick’s expert knowledge of twentieth-century German poetry.

We never read prose, but we often discussed it. In one respect he was un-English – he could not abide Dickens, to my disappointment. (But then I could not abide Wordsworth; we did get through The Prelude once, and Nick often called for a repeat, which I always vetoed.) Generally, he did not care much for English novels. The big exception was Middlemarch, which he ranked beside Madame Bovary. (In that his taste was rather Leavisite.) Then there was William Hale White, to whose minor and quietly moving books he introduced me. That enthusiasm is covered elsewhere on the website.