"[2] While at Queens' College, White wrote a thesis on Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur,[4] and graduated in 1928 with a first-class degree in English.

The same year, he left Stowe School and lived in a workman's cottage nearby, where he wrote and "revert[ed] to a feral state", engaging in falconry, hunting, and fishing.

"[4] The novel, which White described as "a preface to Malory",[4] was titled The Sword in the Stone and published in 1938, telling the story of the boyhood of King Arthur.

[1] In February 1939, White moved to Doolistown in County Meath, Ireland, where he lived out the Second World War as a de facto conscientious objector.

[9] In Ireland, he wrote most of what became The Once and Future King: The Witch in the Wood (later cut and rewritten as The Queen of Air and Darkness) in 1939, and The Ill-Made Knight in 1940.

[5] The same year, he published Mistress Masham's Repose, a children's book in which a young girl discovers a group of Lilliputians (the tiny people in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels) living near her house.

White lived to see his Arthurian work adapted as the Broadway musical Camelot (1960) and the animated film The Sword in the Stone (1963).

White died of heart failure on 17 January 1964 aboard ship in Piraeus, Athens, Greece, en route to Alderney from a lecture tour in the United States.

Higham gave Sylvia Townsend Warner the address of one of White's lovers "so that she could get in touch with someone so important in Tim's story.

"[13] Lin Carter portrays White in Imaginary Worlds as a man who felt deeply but was unable to form close human relationships because of his unfortunate childhood.

It shows in his prodigious correspondence and in his affection for dogs, and in the bewildered and inarticulate loves his characters experience in his books; but he had few close friends, and no genuine relationship with a woman.

"[6] Fantasy writer Michael Moorcock enjoyed White's The Once and Future King, and was especially influenced by the underpinnings of realism in his work.

[24] White features extensively in Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk, winner of the 2014 Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction.