works. Will Self's 2006 novel, The Book of Dave, has a quote from The South Country as the book's epigraph: "I like to think how easily Nature will absorb London as she absorbed the mastodon, setting her spiders to spin the winding sheet and her worms to fill in the graves, and her grass to cover it pitifully up, adding flowers – as an unknown hand added them to the grave of Nero." The children's author Linda Newbery has published a novel, Lob (David Fickling Books, 2010, illustrated by Pam Smy) inspired by the Thomas poem of the same name and containing oblique references to other work by him. Woolly Wolstenholme, formerly of UK rock band Barclay James Harvest, has used a humorous variation of Thomas' poem "Adlestrop" on the first song of his 2004 live album, Fiddling Meanly, where he imagines himself in a retirement home and remembers "the name" of the location where the album was recorded. The poem was read at Wolstenholme's funeral on 19 January 2011. Stuart Maconie in his book Adventures on the High Teas mentions Thomas and "Adlestrop". Maconie visits the now abandoned and overgrown station which was closed by Beeching in 1966. Robert MacFarlane, in his 2012 book The Old Ways, critiques Thomas and his poetry in the context of his own explorations of paths and walking as an analogue of human consciousness. In his 2012 novel Sweet Tooth, Ian McEwan has a character invoke "Adlestrop," as a "sweet, old-fashioned thing" and an example of "the sense of pure existence, of being suspended in space and time, a time before a cataclysmic war".<ref>Ian McEwan, 2012, Sweet Tooth," Ian McEwan Nan A. Talese, 2012, pp 177-178</ref> The last years of Thomas's life are explored in A Conscious Englishman, a 2013 biographical novel by Margaret Keeping, published by StreetBooks. In the 9 November 2018 issue of The Wall Street Journal, an opinion commentary by Aaron Schnoor honored the poetry of World War I, including Thomas' poem "Gone, Gone Again". Pat Barker's 1995 Booker Prize-winning novel of World War I, The Ghost Road, has as its opening epigraph four lines from Thomas's poem "Roads": "Now all roads lead to France/ And heavy is the tread/ Of the living; but the dead/ Returning lightly dance." Poet Laureate Andrew Motion has said that Thomas occupies "a crucial place in the development of twentieth-century poetry" for introducing a modern