100% agreement with this thread that A Round of Golf Courses is the best book on courses ever written. The unique and engaging flavour is established in the very first paragraph of the first chapter, where Dickinson writes that Aberdovey requires 'that kind of striking a balance between length and line which one finds, so to speak, in the couplets of Alexander Pope'. Beat that, as they say.
A bit of research on Wikipedia and in golf archives tells me that
Patric Thomas Dickinson (26 December 1914 – 28 January 1994) was a British poet, translator from the Greek and Latin classics, and playwright. He also worked for the BBC, from 1942 to 1948. He wrote full-time from 1948, and lived (as 'A Round...' makes clear) in Rye. Dickinson was born in Nasirabad, India, and studied at St. Catharine's College, Cambridge (where he won a golf blue in 1935). An autobiography The Good Minute was published in 1965.
He received the Cholmondeley Award in 1973 and published numerous titles in the Phoenix Living Poets series:
The World I See (1960)
This Cold Universe (1964)
More than Time (1970)
A Wintering Tree (1973)
The Bearing Beast (1976)
Our Living John (1979)
A Rift in Time (1982)[1]
Dickinson played in his University Match at Burnham in 1935, winning both his foursome (by one hole) and his single (by 4&3) in a very tight match that Cambridge won by a single point overall: then, as now, all matches were over 36 holes. In the foursomes Dickinson's conquered Oxford opponents including Kenneth Scott, of the celebrated Westward Ho! golfing dynasty who was winning the first of his four Blues (and was one of the very striking number of members of the Oxford & CambridgeGolfing Society who lost their lives in WW2).
Dickinson's time at the BBC would have coincided, I am pretty certain, with that of cultural luminaries including John Arlott (policeman, BBC poetry producer and, for the benefit of American readers, legendary English cricket commentator and writer), Dylan Thomas and George Orwell. Which would have itself made for a fascinating foursome!