"Ronald Duncan" was a writer, poet and playwright, now best known for preparing the libretto for Benjamin Britten's opera The Rape of Lucretia, first performed in 1946.

Duncan was born, with the surname Dunkelsbühler, in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harare, Zimbabwe), in 1914. He became a pacifist during the 1930s, and his first publication, in January 1937, was The Complete Pacifist, a pamphlet appearing from the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) and carrying endorsements by Canon Dick Sheppard (priest)/Dick Sheppard,Cooke, Mervyn. Britten: War Requiem. Cambridge University Press, 1996

ISBN 0521446333, (p.12). Gerald Heard,

and Sylvia Townsend Warner.Ian Patterson, "Pacifists and Conscientious Objectors", in Adam Piette and Mark Rawlinson,

The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century British and American War Literature, Edinburgh University Press 2012.

ISBN 0748638741 (p. 311). Later that year he wrote the words for a Pacifist March composed by Benjamin Britten (also a pacifist) for the PPU, but the work was not a success and was soon withdrawn. In the same year also he visited Gandhi in India, and from 1938 was on friendly terms with the British Hispanist Gerald Brenan.

More Ronald Duncan on Wikipedia.

E M Forster was like a tea cozy, but I quite liked him. I was at a wedding party with him once, sitting opposite Queen Mary. I asked if he would like to be presented. "Good Lord," he said. "I thought it was the wedding cake."

Where in this wide world can man find nobility without pride, friendship without envy, or beauty without vanity?