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20160301124450 David Eccles illustration -Oliver Pritchett on literary inspiration

Getting the Idea

Oliver Pritchett on seeking inspiration

I wonder what the business was that the person from Porlock wanted to discuss when he (or possibly she) knocked on the door of the isolated farmhouse in Nether Stowey on that day in the summer of 1797? Maybe he (or she) said something like: ‘Sorry to bother you, Mr Coleridge, but I am honorary secretary of the Porlock Young Writers’ Circle, for my sins, and we were just wondering whether you might be good enough to judge this year’s poetry competition.’ . . .
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Old Devil in a Dog-collar

Linda Leatherbarrow on Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

I first read Lorna Sage’s deeply absorbing and funny memoir Bad Blood in 2001, just before it won the Whitbread Award for Biography. A week later she died of emphysema, aged only 57, and, although I’d never met her, I felt as if I had. Her printed voice still flowed in my head, witty and full of insights into the rocky worlds of children and the adults who are supposed to care for them; a precise voice, rich with details that reminded me of my own semi-rural childhood: ‘hedges overgrown with hawthorn, honeysuckle and dog roses’.
20160601122241 James B.W. Lewis. Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh

London at War

Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War

Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by ordinary ‘Tommies’, by nurses in the front line and those involved on the Home Front, from the ‘Munitionettes’ who filled shells and assembled guns to the society ladies who rolled bandages and handed out tea and buns to departing soldiers. The catalogue of the London Library currently lists 1,475 titles on the First World War, and there will be many more to come during the remaining centenary years . . .

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Lost Cities

Charles Elliott on John Lloyd Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America

Between 1839 and 1841 John Lloyd Stephens made two long and arduous trips through Central America in search of lost Mayan cities. What followed were two huge books (respectively 900 and 700 pages long), both best-sellers in their day. Even now Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan are a splendid introduction to the Mayan world, since except for a few of the most famous sites, the ruins they describe remain as remote and untouched as they were 150 years ago. I have never been to Chinese Turkestan or to Egypt, worse luck, but from my own experience (far less extensive than his) I can testify that Stephens has got Central America and its lost cities dead right, in all their complexity, discomfort and absolute fascination. He claims to have explored no less than forty-four sites, many for the first time.
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A Victorian Quartet

Sue Gee on Penelope Fitzgerald, The Knox Brothers

Last spring, I visited the hamlet of Knill, deep in the Herefordshire countryside. Knill lies on the river Lug, a tributary of the Wye, and in the 1930s Penelope Fitzgerald’s father, Eddie Knox, used to come here and fish with his brothers, taking the lease on a cottage. I had learned this from The Knox Brothers (1977), Fitzgerald’s beguiling biography of four remarkable men; loving it as much as her novels, I was keen to find this cottage, of which she had happy childhood memories.
20160301104954 Anna Trench. Matthew Adams on F.M. Cornford

Wisdom from the Ivory Tower

Matthew Adams on F. M. Cornford, Microcosmographia Academica: Being a Guide for the Young Academic Politician

The title, which translates as ‘A Study of a Tiny Academic World’, refers to the enclave that was Cambridge University in the 1900s, at which time Cornford was a fellow of classics at Trinity College (where he had been an undergraduate in the late nineteenth century). There was much about this world that he disliked, and many of these dissatisfactions can seem rather minor and arcane. But his principal and most important objections ‒ objections from which Microcosmographia Academica would arise ‒ were related to such minutiae.
20160301103219 Anna Trench. Sarah Bakewell on Cortázar & Dunlop

Motorway Madness

Sarah Bakewell on Cortázar & Dunlop, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute

As with many of the books I’ve come to love most, I bought Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (1983) impulsively, knowing nothing about it, and mainly because of its cover. This features a doughty old red Volkswagen camper, with its forward-pitched roof raised like a sceptical eyebrow as a bearded man climbs out through its sliding side door. In the foreground, we see two lurid, flowery chairs. Above is only blue sky. Inside, you can make out a cooker, a folding table and a checked curtain. It is the kind of van in which you could go a long way.
20160301144431 Ronald Welch, Mohawk Valley - Foxed Cubs

Learning from the Wilderness

Galen O’Hanlon on Ronald Welch, Mohawk Valley

You should never camp in a ravine. Look for higher ground, and a windbreak – a fallen tree is fine, but rocks are the best. Gather balsam wood for bedding, and use your tomahawk to cut firewood from a dead tree. Make two fires. Set the bigger one against the rocks for warmth, and spread the ashes of the smaller one over the ground you wish to sleep on – they will stop it being so cold and damp. Catch fish from the river, but keep an eye out for Indians moving silently through the forest on moccasined feet. This much I have learnt from Ronald Welch’s Mohawk Valley . . .
20160301151449 Anna Trench - Helena Drysdale on Alison Lurie, Real People

All for Art

Helena Drysdale on Alison Lurie, Real People

What a perfect basis for a novel: hole up some highly charged ‘creatives’ in a secluded location and propel them from Eden into a Sartrean existentialist hell. Published in 1969, Real People is a subversively mocking but also poignant coming-of-middle-age comedy. Janet Smith (she adds ‘Belle’ to make herself seem elegant) is a priggish ‘lady writer’ who converses on highbrow matters over dinner. She and her fellow artists smugly agree that here at ‘Illyria’ they blossom into Real People ‒ their real best selves as they would be in a decent world, away from the stress of daily life. Janet is thankful to see the back of unreal people, particularly her boring insurance executive husband and tiresome children.
20160301150013 David Eccles crop - Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, Troubles

Murder at the Majestic

Patrick Welland on J. G. Farrell, Troubles

On 11 August 1979, a humane and singular man, who after long periods punctuated by adversity declared himself ‘happier than I’ve been in years’, left his isolated cottage near Bantry Bay in the west of Ireland to fish from his favourite rock. There he was swept away by a huge wave, outrider of an unprecedented storm which two days later would claim the lives of eighteen crew in the Fastnet yacht race. A witness said no cry left the fisherman’s lips and he made no visible attempt to save himself. The body of the novelist J. G. Farrell was found a month later. With his death at 44, contemporary literature lost a unique voice and the prospect of even greater riches to come. John Banville said it was ‘nothing short of a disaster for English fiction’.
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The Spell of Stout Angus

Robert Macfarlane on James Stout Angus, A Glossary of the Shetland Dialect

In a poem written near the end of his life, W. S. Graham imagined himself as a ‘wordy ghost’, ‘floating across the frozen tundra / of the lexicon and the dictionary’. Like Graham – like many people – I am also a ‘wordy ghost’, who loves haunting the pages of lexicons, dictionaries and glossaries. Unlike Graham I find the pages of such books to be not ‘frozen tundra’, sterile and barren – but fabulous forests, alive with delving word-roots and spreading canopies of connotation.
20160301111451 Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

Evasions and Deceits

Peter Parker, Preface to Diana Petre, The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley

Among the small horde of papers Diana Petre left me as her literary executor when she died in 2001 was a folder labelled: ‘Excuses. Lies. Evasions. Deceits.’ I thought at first that it might contain further notes about her mother, whose unhappy story is so brilliantly told in The Secret Orchard of Roger Ackerley and whose attempts to hold on to her many secrets involved all these ploys. In fact, it merely contained material Diana had collected for an anthology she once thought of compiling about the ways in which people get out of awkward or unwanted social engagements . . .
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The Sadness of Mrs Bridge

William Palmer on Evan S. Connell, Mrs Bridge

Mrs-Bridge---9780141198651

As a fan of early jazz, I’ve read a great deal about Kansas City as it was in the 1930s. A most attractive place it seems in retrospect, of twenty-four-hour drinking and gambling, to the accompaniment of wonderful music provided by young, prodigiously talented and mostly black instrumentalists and singers; a wide-open city ruled over by a corrupt mayor, Boss Pendergast, whose main duty seems to have been to keep the good times rolling . . .