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The Man Who Climbed the Matterhorn

The Man Who Climbed the Matterhorn

I have known three mountaineers, but I feel funny standing on a chair to wind the clock if I have nothing to hold on to. Given my fear of heights, it may seem surprising that, as a teenager, I read mountaineering books. But we read, not least in youth, partly to find out who we are and who we are not. I read about what terrified me – Hunt on Everest, Herzog on Annapurna and, most memorably, bridging the gap from childhood, James Ramsey Ullman. Ullman was an adventure-story writer with an eye for film rights who for several decades was the objective but inspirational voice, in history and in fiction, of mountaineering literature, a field dominated by first-person memoirs. His Banner in the Sky (1954) told the Matterhorn story for children, while The White Tower (1950), a fine Second World War mountaineering novel, wonderfully evokes the space, the weather and the neck-craning heights.
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On the Broad Shoulders of a Eunuch Cat

On the Broad Shoulders of a Eunuch Cat

In 1917, Kathleen Hale arrived in London, fresh out of art school, ‘with only a few shillings in my pocket, my pince-nez delicately chained to one ear and no qualifications whatsoever for earning a living’. Her appalled mother wrote demanding that she return at once to Manchester, and take a shorthand-typing course. Not for the first time, Kathleen refused to obey. ‘I am not going to learn to type. I am going to be an artist. You can send a policeman to fetch me, but I shall come back to London again and again.’ Mother gave up.
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Frogs, Books and Bears

Frogs, Books and Bears

‘Where is Patrick Spotter?’ The Japanese customer looked somewhat annoyed. She had been told that the staff of Heffers Children’s Bookshop in Cambridge were so knowledgeable that they could help with tracking down any book, even if the visitor didn’t know the title or author. We looked at each other in dismay. Was this an author we didn’t know? Then our manager appeared and courteously offered to take the lady round the shop: the first shelf they reached was Young Classics. ‘There!’ shouted the Japanese lady triumphantly. ‘Oh, Beatrix Potter!’ we smiled. She smiled; our reputation was intact and calm returned.
SF magazine subscribers only

A Certain Idea of France

In 2011 a French popular novelist called Alexandre Jardine was vilified in both Le Figaro and Le Monde for writing that his grandfather was complicit in the crimes of the Vichy regime. Over seventy years after the country’s defeat by Germany, the subject of occupation and collaboration is still a touchy one in France. The war is viewed through the prism of good and evil, collaboration and resistance, de Gaulle and Pétain. This was the narrative needed for France to recover its place at the top table of world nations after the Second World War. Of course the majority of Frenchmen did not fit into this neat analysis: their motivations are unknowable. Some initially collaborated and only later resisted, and almost everyone was compromised in some way.
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Catlike Carrington

Catlike Carrington

On New Year’s Day 1917 Carrington noted in her diary that her portrait of Lytton Strachey was finished; knowing her achievement, she hugged it to herself. ‘I should like to go on always painting you every week, wasting the afternoon loitering, and never, never, showing you what I paint . . .’ Today her loving tribute is on display in the National Portrait Gallery – an exception for this ambitious yet secretive painter, whose work rarely appears in public collections.
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Honourable Rebel

Jessica Mitford found the act of sitting down to write formidably hard. ‘’Tis now 12:30 on the first day I was to really work all day on the book,’ she reported to her husband and daughter in May 1959. ‘As you can see, in spite of the good news I’m as bad as ever – ANYTHING to keep from it.’ The ‘good news’ was that after several attempts to place her book she had finally secured publishing deals in both Britain and the United States. The book in question was a memoir which she wanted at various points to call ‘Red Sheep’ and ‘Revolting Daughters’ but which is known today as Hons and Rebels.
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