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A Taker of Heads

A Taker of Heads

Chinua Achebe’s first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), was an early and spectacular part of the flowering of West African literature after independence from colonial rule. It seemed, perhaps especially to a South African like me living under increasingly draconian controls, a wonderful illustration of what liberation might mean. Now, I suspect, it is one of those books which almost everyone knows about but very few people other than students actually read.
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Gone to Earth

Gone to Earth

There’s a classic type of resourceful, unassuming hero that they just don’t make any more (think Richard Hannay), and the narrator of Geoffrey Household’s novel Rogue Male, a ‘bored and wealthy Englishman’, is far too well bred ever to give his ‘widely known’ name away. The first fifty pages of this sharp little thriller – which I have a particular personal reason for enjoying, as will become apparent – form a self-contained adventure set in the summer of 1938, in which the aforementioned Englishman, after a fortnight’s sport in Poland, finds himself at a loose end in the Bavarian Alps and in possession of a Bond Street rifle complete with telescopic sight.
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Slow Train to Malgudi

Slow Train to Malgudi

I’m not sure whether it was India that introduced me to R. K. Narayan or R. K. Narayan who introduced me to India. Each superimposed itself on the other so that they became indistinguishable. Travelling round India any time in the 1970s meant reading a Narayan; and reading a Narayan anywhere else meant being transported to India. An Indian train journey was unthinkable without one. In a sense it was one, for the Narayan experience began as soon as you ventured on to railway property. This was his world. His dozen or so novels had been inspired by the vision of a unremarkable town on the main line to Madras with a station nameplate that announced it as MALGUDI. Railway life loomed so large in his fictional Malgudi that attentive readers came to know exactly what to expect and could stroll from ticket barrier to tiffin room as if to the platform born.

Confessions of a Manuscripts Curator

Literary manuscripts began to be collected in the eighteenth century – though in the case of Shakespeare, none of whose handwriting was known to survive, with the exception of a few signatures, all different, they had to be manufactured first by the enterprising hand of W. H. Ireland. In the 1790s, Ireland revealed to an astonished world examples of Shakespeare’s correspondence and even a hitherto unknown play, Vortigern, before the final exposure of his forgeries.
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Straw Hat with Red Plaits

Last summer, during a trip to Canada’s maritime provinces, my husband and I went on a literary pilgrimage. After attending a wedding in Nova Scotia we drove northwards across the Confederation Bridge to Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. From the bridge we drove further north still, up to the Gulf of St Lawrence. We were looking for a settlement called Cavendish, and for a small, green-gabled farmhouse that draws visitors from all over the world.
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Chips with Everything

I first encountered the work of Stephen Potter in a TV sketch show that conflated the great comedy quartet of his ‘Upmanship’ books: The Theory and Practice of Gamesmanship, Lifemanship, One-Upmanship and Supermanship, published by Rupert Hart-Davis between the late Forties and late Fifties. The TV series began in 1974, when I was 12, by which time Potter had been dead for five years. Having recently discovered A. G. Macdonell’s, England, Their England, I was just learning that sustained drollery is better than a series of gags, and these programmes seemed another lesson to that effect.
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Orders from Swaledale

Rupert Hart-Davis retired to Swaledale from the London publishing world two years before I joined it in 1965, so it was on the shelves of second-hand bookshops that his name first really registered with me. I often found myself spotting books which he had published before I could read his name on them, because in both design and production they had a distinct air of quality. And then, when I pulled them off the shelf, I often ended up buying them because they were to do with the Victorian era, a period that has always mesmerized me.
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Silly Suffolk

Silly Suffolk

The year 2004 was what I shall call my ‘Suffolk Year’, one in which I immersed myself in Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes through a workshop and performance at Covent Garden and a concert performance elsewhere. Britten is a magician. He can conjure up the sea, rivers and salt marshes of Suffolk, the battering North Sea storms and the endless blue skies that seduce you into believing the calm will endure; and the isolation too, which is one theme of the opera.
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Between Two Worlds

Between Two Worlds

I came late to magic. The stories of my childhood were mainly Greek myths (there was a Cyclops at the bottom of our garden) or the plots – with copious quotations – of Jane Austen’s novels, my mother, the storyteller, having a deep love for and knowledge of both. Later, with pretensions to intellectual sophistication, I had no time for kids’ stuff. So it was at a relatively advanced age that I discovered Lewis Carroll, George Macdonald, James Stephens, Masefield of The Midnight Folk, Tolkien, T. H. White. They burst upon my reading, fresh and new. Of the more modern books, the one that has gripped me most is Elidor by Alan Garner.
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