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A Classical Education | Chapter 6: Booterstown

A Classical Education | Chapter 6: Booterstown

It had been decided at the lunch that Edward’s mother would come to the speech day in the following summer and that I would introduce her to my parents, with a view to arranging for Edward to spend a fortnight at my home in Tunbridge Wells and for me then to follow on, later in the summer, and stay at her house in Dublin for a fortnight. I did not much relish the prospect of having Edward on my hands at home for a fortnight. I did not know how to keep him occupied, and Tunbridge Wells was a place I had never felt much like sharing with anyone, even my best friend; I had grown accustomed to keeping it to myself. And I was none too keen to stay with his mother; but the idea of visiting, for the first time, a foreign country quite outweighed these considerations.
‘Every September day is born in a caul’ | A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

‘Every September day is born in a caul’ | A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook

Greetings from Hoxton Square where we are beginning to ready your pre-orders of Adrian Bell’s A Countryman’s Autumn Notebook. In this, the final selection from Adrian Bell’s weekly essays, written between 1950 and 1980 for his local newspaper the Eastern Daily Press, completes our seasonal quartet. ‘You can stand in the windless calm of an autumn evening and hear the heartbeat of the countryside,’ Bell writes, and it’s that steady, persistent, unchanging heartbeat that we can hear in these beautifully observed little pieces.
Counting My Chickens

Counting My Chickens

My extraordinary mother, the writer Elspeth Barker, died in April 2022. She left this life on a balmy, sunny afternoon, just as if she was wandering down through her garden to the river with her dogs, pausing to stare at primroses and notice shades of green brightening on the canopied branches of her beloved beech tree. Her last days had been beatific in some ways as we, her five children, gathered around her and talked to her about some of her favourite things – picnics, beech trees, bluebells, jackdaws, poems, books. We read her Moorland Mousie, which had been a treasured book of her childhood, and felt the incredible privilege of walking beside her on her last journey.
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The Land of Lost Content

The Land of Lost Content

Nineteen twenty-two was a good year for poetry. It saw the publication of two very different works which would prove to be of lasting popularity – A. E. Housman’s Last Poems, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I love that bizarre conjunction, Housman’s traditional, rhyming, apparently artless verse jostling for shelf space with the arch-modernist exciting and outraging the world with his wilful obscurities and cunning vulgarities. None of the doomed country lads who inhabit Housman’s poetic world were ever to ‘wash their feet in soda water’ as Eliot’s Mrs Porter and her daughter did, let alone dry their ‘combinations touched by the sun’s last rays’.
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Brits Behaving Badly

Brits Behaving Badly

The decayed spa town where I grew up during the 1950s was full of people who had been ‘out in’ somewhere or other across the British Empire. If those two semi-detached prepositions denoted something special and exotic about dwellers in the Victorian mansions lining Graham Road or the Italianate Regency villas along the hilltop terrace known as Bello Sguardo, they also suggested a certain precariousness, that of an echelon abruptly robbed of its status and forced to live the life of bewildered refugees.
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Not Utterly Oyster

Not Utterly Oyster

I first picked up Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (1950) a few years ago, when I was preparing for a television documentary on the early life of Queen Elizabeth II. Even then, reading in a hurry on a train journey, I remember being struck by the richness of the detail in it. My paperback edition has an off-putting pink jacket, but it would be a mistake to judge The Little Princesses by its cover. Recently I reread it while researching my own book on the late Queen, and I realized that it’s a gem – essential reading for anyone interested in the Royal Family in the twentieth century.
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Live Fast, Die Young

Live Fast, Die Young

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Rosemary Sutcliff offer stiff competition; nevertheless I can’t help thinking that Smith (1967) by Leon Garfield might just be the single most accomplished novel for children in the English language. Garfield (1921–96) was a prolific author who also wrote splendid ghost stories, but Smith is his masterpiece. So deeply embedded in literary tradition that it amounts to a child’s gateway to Dickens, Fielding and Stevenson, this London novel par excellence has a brilliance of style, depth of characterization, vividness of description, thrillingly twisty plot and above all an indomitable child hero who wouldn’t disgrace any of those illustrious writers.
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