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The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

The Secret Life of Second-hand Books

I was halfway through reading a novel published in 1913: cloth- covered, rust-spotted and printed on slightly spongy thick cream paper. Mightier than the Sword, a semi-autobiographical newspaper thriller, was written by a young Fleet Street journalist called Alphonse Courlander, who would die three years later in the muddy trenches of France. It isn’t great literature and I was struggling to stay engaged when, between pp.192 and 193, I found a folded piece of blue paper: a letter dated 1964, sent from a guest house in Ryde on the Isle of Wight.
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An Insatiable Appetite

An Insatiable Appetite

Here’s a book to relish, savour and devour. I would say digest, too, but for reasons which will soon become evident, that may be easier said than done. There is a lot – and I mean a lot – of eating and drinking to get through and, for today’s readers at least, the quantities alone, never mind the richness of the dishes consumed, and the gallons of wine, apéritifs and digestifs which accompany them, propel us into territory clearly marked ‘Completely Indigestible’. Happily, that is the very opposite of the book’s prose, which is light, delicious and verging on the addictive.
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A Story of Love Denied

A Story of Love Denied

During the dry, hot June of 2000 I found myself at an Edward Thomas study weekend at Madingley Hall in Cambridge engaged in an intemperate debate with a fellow who insisted on denigrating Thomas’s incoherence as a philosopher, which I felt was about as fair as criticizing Maradona’s abilities as a submarine captain. Keeping a lid on this increasingly silly exchange was the weekend’s leader, a softly spoken and impressively moustachioed poet and academic called Jem Poster. Jem was blessed with extraordinary patience and tact. He coaxed us down from our respective teetering ledges by diverting our attention towards the delicacy of Thomas’s natural imagery, a subject upon which my tormentor and I could only agree, so that in the end neither of us felt as though we had either won or lost.
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Telling it Straight

Telling it Straight

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive . . .’ Well, it would be hard to argue it was a revolution, I suppose – that ‘new wave’ of English novels of my youth. But it was definitely thrilling to be reading new fiction in the late 1950s and early ’60s; and to be a young man buying those novels as soon as the booksellers would sell you them (if I remember rightly, once you were, or looked, 14) came pretty close to literary heaven. It wasn’t just the sex, though the authors of this new wave of literature seemed keen to treat the subject in as matter-of-fact a way as possible. It was also the settings, which were northern, provincial and predominantly working-class and were depicted as frankly as were the characters’ love affairs.
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A Kind of Psychosis

A Kind of Psychosis

We ended the twentieth century knowing less about the world than we did at the beginning. Physicists had robbed us of certainty. Newton and Faraday had lulled us into a false sense of security, then Schrödinger and Heisenberg pulled the cosmic rug from under our feet. In the twenty-first century how the cosmos is made and how it works have become impenetrable mysteries. Of course, the better- known disaster of the last century was murder on an industrial scale.
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Living in Someone Else’s Life

Living in Someone Else’s Life

In 1982, an advertisement for a nanny ran in The Lady. It read: ‘Disabled boy and his brother are looking for someone to look after them.’ The person hiring was Mary-Kay Wilmers, the co-founder of the London Review of Books, and the woman who answered the ad was 20-year-old Nina Stibbe, from Leicestershire. Stibbe didn’t have much experience of London or nannying. She had left school at 14 and was working in a nursing home, where copies of The Lady floated around. Stibbe drove down to Camden for the interview and her potential charges, Sam (10, with a neurological condition called Riley–Day syndrome) and Will (9) asked the questions. Eventually she was offered the job, packed up her stuff and moved into Wilmers’s large, terraced house at 55 Gloucester Crescent.
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Bats and Belfries

Bats and Belfries

At one time, travel books were mostly church tour books. I’m looking now at the description in the 1928 edition of the Ward, Lock travel guide to south Dorset of St Anselm’s chapel, which sits, looking out to sea, on a headland south of Swanage: The headland is crowned with a chapel, massively constructed and heavily buttressed. It is related that this chapel was erected in 1140 by a sorrowing father who witnessed the drowning off the Head of his daughter and her newly married husband. The architecture is Norman, but the ecclesiastical origin of the building has been much disputed.
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 Extract from Chapter 11 | A Sort of Life

 Extract from Chapter 11 | A Sort of Life

The Man Within was, it is true, the third novel I had completed, but the first two had been clumsy exercises. I had been in training only, and there still remained other possibilities – British-American Tobacco or the Lancashire General Insurance Company. With all its faults of sentimentality and over-writing The Man Within was professional. I found myself committed to the long-distance race. I sometimes find myself wishing that, before starting the second novel, The Name of Action, I had found an experienced mentor.
Hats Off to P. D. James

Hats Off to P. D. James

About six months ago I embarked on the entirely pleasurable project of rereading P. D. James’s fourteen Adam Dalgliesh novels in order. I first discovered P. D. James in the summer of 1997 when, as a teen age employee of the Edinburgh Book Festival, I was assigned to take tickets for an event at which she was promoting that year’s novel, A Certain Justice. To my surprise my scholarly lawyer grandfather appeared in the queue filing into the marquee. Afterwards I filched his newly signed copy before he could read it and then began to work my way through the back catalogue in fairly haphazard order.
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Village Voices

Village Voices

The village of Ulverton, somewhere on the chalk downland of the Wiltshire‒Berkshire border, is one of the most real imagined places I know. When I first visited it in the pages of Adam Thorpe’s eponymous book, published in 1992, I passed through too quickly. Aged 19, at university and having a reading list set each week, I saw books as a challenge. The faster I could read one, the better. This extended to the reading I did in my spare time. I rushed through Ulverton’s pages in the same way many people drive through an English village today: too fast, with all the resultant blurred vision and fragmentary impressions.
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Travelling for Kicks

Travelling for Kicks

‘Do chorus girls think?’ asked the headline of a newspaper article that appeared around the time that Constance Tomkinson won a spot in her first chorus line. As one soon discovers from her gloriously comical Les Girls (1956), they not only thought but were experts in navigating the rackety worlds of show business, finance and sex while defending their virtue as energetically as a Samuel Richardson heroine. Not that a spot in a chorus line was Constance’s goal when she started out in show business. Born the daughter of a Canadian Nonconformist minister, she headed to New York in 1933 at the age of 18, hoping to become ‘the Toast of Broadway’. Instead, she joined the mass of unemployed actors turned away from countless casting calls. She and a friend toured churches around the East Coast per forming Biblical dramas for a few months, but then the friend quit, declaring: ‘I’ve had enough of pulling curtains with one hand and playing God with the other.’
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Pure Magic

Pure Magic

‘I have laughed at White’s great Arthurian novel and cried over it and loved it all my life,’ wrote Ursula Le Guin of the tetralogy of novels by T. H. White now known as The Once and Future King. She encapsulates not only what’s so ravishing and so distinctive about it – its jagged blend of pathos and humour – but also the way in which White’s eccentric riff on Malory’s Morte d’Arthur can speak to children and grown-ups, in different voices, over the course of a whole life.
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