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Articles & Extracts

‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

So strange and exotic is he that he could be a rare tropical bird that you might never come face to face with, even in a lifetime spent in the rain forest. The plumage is a wonder to behold: a large sapphire in the lapel of a bold striped suit, a vivid silk tie so bright that it dazzles, and when he flaps his wings the lining of his jacket glints and glistens like a prism. He sees that I am startled and he smiles. He takes my hand in his and lays it on the silk lining. You want to touch? Go on, touch! It’s best Chinese silk. I have only the best.
One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.
Dorothy: The Highlights

Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.
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At Home With Mrs Thrale

At Home With Mrs Thrale

For those of us who cannot get enough of the Georgians, Hester Lynch Salusbury, who became Mrs Thrale and later Mrs Piozzi, is indispensable. At a time when Samuel Johnson was the greatest planet in the emerging literary firmament, she was one of his most important satellites, in fact more than that: a prop and stay without whom he might well have foundered. When they came to characterize themselves however, they were less portentous: Johnson was an elephant to Mrs Thrale’s rattlesnake. With his trunk he could ‘lift up a buffalo or pick up a pin’, she said, while he claimed, ‘Many have felt your venom, few have escaped your attractions and all the world knows you have the rattle.’ This last is a reference to her delight in conversation and her skill at maintaining its flow, what Johnson called her ‘stream of sentiment enlightened by gaiety’.
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His Fate Was Sealed

His Fate Was Sealed

I was Jack the Lad in 1962. I had just left school with a scholarship that would take me to university in the autumn, but I spent the summer months in Ottawa with my father and his second wife. I smoked a pipe, an expensive Dunhill with an ivory dot on the stem. And I was working as an intern for the Canadian government’s Department of Northern Affairs. Every evening I would return from town on the commuter bus in time for an air-conditioned cocktail hour. At the age of 19 I was an avid imbiber of Manhattans, Daiquiris and Whisky Sours. I wore button-down collars and loafers, and like all the young in North America at the time I basked in the glow of the Kennedy presidency.
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Joie de Vivre

Joie de Vivre

Idle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
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The Noblest Profession

The Noblest Profession

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.
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Grace and a Great Heart

Grace and a Great Heart

I am not a frequenter of churchyards, but there is one grave I wish I could visit. It belongs to a London charlady who died in 1964 at the age of 42. She worked in the posh houses of Ladbroke Grove and South Kensington, and was a devoted mother and a battered, and then abandoned, wife. She could never make ends meet, and her health was poor. She shed more tears in her short life than most of us who live for twice as long. Her name was Lilian May – ‘Lily’ – Johnson. She was a heroine.
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Best of British

Best of British

Most books are confined to the straitjacket of their own generation, shackled and bonded to those who first bought them, read them, loved them and spread the word. It is a rare book that transcends its own time: a four-leaf clover, a repentant politician, a virgin queen. But I like to think that P. R. Reid’s three books on the Colditz prisoner-of-war camp, devoured by those of us who rejoice in being baby-boomers, will still be read by future generations.
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Laying It on with a Trowel

Laying It on with a Trowel

In the early 1920s Axel Munthe, the renowned physician born in Sweden in 1857, was going blind. Shrinking from the glare of the sun he retired to a dark tower and taught himself to use a typewriter. Henry James had suggested he write a memoir – it might cheer him up. Munthe was surprised when The Story of San Michele (1929) became an international bestseller and rightly predicted that in a hundred years’ time nobody would have heard of it. This neglected but altogether thrilling life story was a gift from an Argentine friend of mine, her favourite book, she said. ‘When people ask “Who is Axel Munthe?” I reply with a slight air of reproach, “Well, they’ve heard of him in Buenos Aires . . .”’
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The Sound of a Leaf

The Sound of a Leaf

In lateish middle age we sold our house in Devon and moved to France, planning a new project in a new place. Living in a caravan for a year while we renovated, we vastly improved our French (words for ‘beam’, ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘high blood pressure’ proving useful) and only one of us was ever homesick. For some reason I’d taken with me Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008) and, although on balance I was enjoying living in France, this did make me slightly wistful. It’s a collection of his essays on gardeners, gardening, botanists, plantsmen, great gardens, garden memories, writers’ gardens, the seasons. To anyone even mildly interested in gardening it’s a collection of treasures.
SF magazine subscribers only
The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Half a century after it was first published in 1973, Portrait of a Marriage still delivers a powerful depth charge, still intrigues and amazes in equal measure. The story it tells, of a marriage made all the stronger by the centrifugal forces of bisexual love affairs forcing it apart, is profoundly moving, and in Nigel Nicolson’s graceful telling, as relevant now as ever. We live in an age of soundbites, where complex lives are often reduced to simplistic labels – Vita Sackville-West? Ah, yes, the gardener, the lover of Virginia Woolf, the inspiration for Orlando – and need to be reminded of the fire and passion, the agony and ecstasy, that combined in the making of two such singular lives and one such singular marriage.

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