Articles & Extracts

Artefacts, Arguments and Ideas

Artefacts, Arguments and Ideas

Did William Shakespeare once perform in Boots’ car park, opposite the common in the Essex town of Saffron Walden? Well . . . possibly. While there is no documentary evidence that he took a curtain call in what was then the yard of the Rose and Crown, he did have some intriguing connections to this ancient market town – as can be traced through the books of rhetoric, poetry, dictionaries and dramas held in the historic local independent library.
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Imperfect Priests

Imperfect Priests

I’ve long been a fan of literary priests, like Septimus Harding, the unlucky precentor of Barchester Cathedral; or William Collins, the sycophantic suitor of Elizabeth Bennet; or Father Brown, the ama teur detective with a deep insight into the psychology of sin. Then there’s The Diary of a Country Priest by Georges Bernanos, and the Gilead novels by Marilynne Robinson, and the whisky priest of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. Whether pious and pompous, or saintly and sombre, I’m pleased each time a member of the clergy appears in the novel I’m reading.
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The People’s Queen

The People’s Queen

If you could choose to live in any period of history, which would it be? For me there was only ever one answer: the Elizabethan. The writers were a major part of it – Shakespeare, Spenser, Marlowe and Jonson, those supreme wizards with words. Then there were the splendid soldiers, sailors and adventurers – Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Francis Drake, Sir Walter Raleigh. I may even have fancied myself in a doublet and ruff. But the crucial factor was Elizabeth herself, the extraordinarily wise and courageous Virgin Queen.
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Skating on Thin Ice

Skating on Thin Ice

Nazi Germany has retrospectively formed the subject of many novels of varying authenticity, but there are relatively few – for obvious reasons – by contemporary German authors that capture the texture of everyday life for its civilian populace from within. Foremost among them must be Klaus Mann’s Mephisto, Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, Vicki Baum’s Berlin Hotel, Lion Feuchtwanger’s The Waiting Room trilogy – and After Midnight (Nach Mitternacht) by Irmgard Keun.
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A Wry Eye on the Ward

A Wry Eye on the Ward

I was never the sort of girl who wanted to be a nurse and nor, on the evidence of One Pair of Feet, was Monica Dickens. Her account of training as a probationer at ‘Queen Adelaide, Redwood’ (in fact, the King Edward VII in Windsor) was published in 1942 to immediate acclaim. Immediate, but certainly not universal. While literary critics greeted the book with delight, the nursing journals were another matter. One sniffed that Miss Dickens was seemingly not acquainted with the ‘wholesomely-humoured’ women who nursed with ‘balanced minds and intelligence’. The Nursing Times, clearly misreading Dickens’s wry tone, castigated her for choosing a hospital to train in on the basis that the bath water was reputedly always hot. What seemed to annoy them, more than the revelations about the appalling working conditions, the petty discipline and the intricacies of the sluice room, was that Nurse Dickens had dared to be funny about such a deadly serious subject.
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A Necromantic Imagination

A Necromantic Imagination

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, the nineteenth-century English poet- physician, remains a shadowy and largely unknown figure. His farcical grotesquerie was said to have influenced Samuel Beckett but when I wrote to Beckett in 1986, he replied tersely: ‘I have not heard of him. Sorry.’ Assuming Beckett was telling the truth, here was further proof of Beddoes’s strange oblivion. In modern times perhaps only T. S. Eliot approached Beddoes for his comically nauseated vision of our mortality. That may be why Ezra Pound wrote: ‘Strange, is it not, that Mr Eliot has not given more time to Mr Beddoes, prince of morticians.’ Beddoes’s great poem ‘Dream-Pedlary’, written in 1830 under the spell of Keats and Shelley, is one of the most sublimely tender lyrics in the English language.
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The Enigma that Was Vera

The Enigma that Was Vera

My hairdresser is based near London’s Marble Arch, so before my last cut I dived behind Selfridges to visit Orchard Court. Today, it’s a luxury mansion block, and you’re not allowed past the entrance colonnades – ‘NO THOROUGHFARE’. There’s no indication that, during the Second World War, the building was one of the bases for the Special Operations Executive (SOE) F (French) Section, which on moonlit nights flew spies trained in espionage and silent killing over the Channel and dropped them behind enemy lines in France. Of roughly 470, 118 never came home.
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Privy Counsel

Privy Counsel

In these days of the high-tech Japanese superloo it would be hard to think of a suitable publication to accompany its use. In earlier times, when it was considered more correct to say ‘lavatory’ rather than ‘toilet’, there would have been little hesitation in the selection of Charles Sale’s The Specialist (1929) for that purpose. At a time when the nuances of class-defining language were more finely tuned than now, most middle-class households across the country would have owned a copy of this modest little book.
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A Quintuple Life

A Quintuple Life

In a spy’s sly smile a book was born. Five days after being exposed in the House of Commons as the Fourth Man in the Cambridge spy ring in November 1979, Anthony Blunt – KCVO, renowned art historian, Surveyor of the Royal Collection and director of the Courtauld Institute – gave a press interview screened on TV. I remember it well: the cadaverous figure in a houndstooth jacket sitting defensively hunched as he attempted to justify his treachery in such patrician tones as further to inflame national outrage. For the public, Blunt was worse than a traitor. He was a traitorous toff.
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Completely Hooked

Completely Hooked

The sheer volume of literature about fishing is astounding: Harvard’s Fearing Collection contains some twelve thousand books on the subject – a branch of writing known as ‘halieutics’. It can roughly be divided between works by fishermen who like writing, and works by writers who like fishing (Hemingway, Orwell, Ted Hughes, Thomas McGuane, for example), and much of it is agreeably idiosyncratic, embracing as it can topics as diverse as meteorology and magic. In the right hands, this admixture gives it strength, like ancient mortar fortified with oxblood and crushed shells. Quite a lot of what I call pisc. lit., however, is overblown, derivative and barnacled with clichés.
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No Accidental Dramatist

No Accidental Dramatist

In a side road behind a suburban railway station, where Surrey begins its slow elision into the western fringes of London, is a large circular depression. It sits at the bottom of a once grand garden, surrounded by banks topped with mouldering rhododendrons, a natural if secretive arena. On a damp day in November 2025, all it contains is a distinctly unremarkable block of 1930s flats. But just over a century ago, this was the site of a tiny, private playhouse called the Gables, where one of British theatre’s most unjustly forgotten writers leapt from the blocks.
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The Man Who Saved England

The Man Who Saved England

In the spring of 1936, James (‘Jim’) Lees-Milne, a young man of 28, eagerly approached the offices of the National Trust opposite the shunting yard at Victoria Station. Curly-haired, well-born and per sonable, he was about to take up his dream job. He wrote to a friend: ‘The National Trust is starting a scheme for preserving country houses, trying to induce landowners and proprietors to join. It would necessitate going all over England. I think if I searched the whole world there is no job I would rather have.’
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