Includes bibliographical references and index.

David Thomson was a Scottish writer, folklorist and radio producer, who became an honorary Irishman. His life took a defining turn when as a student of history at Oxford, he came to County Roscommon in the early 1930s as tutor to an Anglo-Irish family, the Kirkwoods. He fell in love with his charge, Phoebe, the daughter of the house, and returned to London at the outset of World War II, becoming a radio producer with the BBC, where the spent the remainder of his working days.
He wrote his first book, The People of the Sea, an exploration of sea lore, when he was forty and went on to pen eleven published works before turning to the genre in which he most excelled, memoir. Woodbrook appeared in 1974 and is an Arcadian masterpiece about Thompson's time in Ireland and the history and landscape of the mid-west. forty years in it still resonates as a minor classic. He went on to write In Camden Town, an elegiac evocation of his neighbourhood's streetscapes and people. His final book, Nairn in Darkness and Light, returned him to his origins in the north of Scotland and won him Scottish Writer of the Year award in 1987.
The individual who gave shape to these books is no less worthy of celebration. David Thompson was affecting, febrile and uniquely talented. His life was dominated by his love of women and locale - Ireland, Scotland, London - sensuous worlds apprehended through the artistry of his written legacy. With over fifty unseen photographs, this biography speaks to the writer's 'delicate wildness' (the phrase is Seamus Heaney's) and to the contradictions and passions of a singular man. - Book cover.