In the intervals of walking the Llyn Peninsula, I have been reading Byron Rogers’s spectacularly and oddly critical, whilst also possibly subtly reverential, biography of R.S. Thomas, The Man who went into the West, which I bought in the post office at Aberdaron.   It presents Thomas as a self-invented, self-obsessed, ruthless loner, seen through the eyes of his son Gwyddion.   But much of what is presented as evidence against him – the punctuality of mealtimes, the tendency to silence, the hostility to modernisation, the rigorous self-discipline – don’t strike me as symptoms of eccentricity, merely the characteristics of normal middle-class life in the post-war period.