The White Stones
by JH Prynne (NYRB Books, £8.99)
At the English Faculty in Cambridge, everyone has a story to tell about JH Prynne, poet and life fellow of Gonville and Caius College: his mind-expanding lectures, his nocturnal hours, his personal generosity, his pithy opinions, his unchanging dress code, and his vast scholarship. Latterly, the legend of Prynne—who will be 80 in June— has spread to the national press, with one broadsheet resorting to a telephoto lens to get a shot of a tall, suited, unsmiling man on a bicycle, and Private Eye inventing a shadow-Prynne, “AD Penumbra,” for their books pages (a descendant, perhaps, of the distinctly Prynne-like don “Simon Undark,” who appears in Iain Sinclair’s 1994 novel Radon Daughters, speaking “obliquely to make all things clear”).