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Issue 87

To Read or Not to Read

One morning in the summer of 2009, my obliging postman carried indoors for me the box of books I’d been waiting for. Here, together with their source texts, were that year’s ten last-standing contenders for the Scott Moncrieff Prize, awarded to the best French book in English translation, which I and two colleagues were to judge.

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Faith, Hope and Decency

Rosamunde Pilcher had already enjoyed several decades of consistent if modest success as a novelist when, in 1987, her family saga The Shell Seekers propelled her on to the bestseller lists. By then in her early sixties, she followed it three years later with September. A sequel of sorts, it proved to be a worthy companion to the book that had made its author a household name.

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Have What Is Beautiful

The last time I saw Elisabeth Russell Taylor, I’d emerged from the tube to find myself transported to Jerusalem. Shabby streets were filled with Hasidic men in drape coats and high-crowned black hoiche hats with long side-curls; women were wearing a variety of wig styles. Over the phone a nurse advised me that if I wanted to bring Elisabeth anything edible I should purchase it on Golders Green Road in a supermarket called Kosher Kingdom.

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Alice in the Margins

The first school play I took part in was Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which Alice was played by a small boy who went on in adulthood to be a judge: evidence if you like for the determinism of early experience, for Alice is the only character, at the climax of the story, to stick up for due pro cess in the trial of the Knave of Hearts. Like most children she has sharply twitching antennae when it comes to injustice or unfairness, both of which she meets on every side. In his Annotated Alice, the editor Martin Gardner draws parallels with Kafka, and there is much in that. Neither author depicts a world with out rules: it is just that the rules are incomprehensible.

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Marriage Guidance

I first came across Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives (1983) a decade after it was published, thanks to a mention in a footnote of a now-forgotten book. I liked the sound of a study of five Victorian marriages and promptly ordered a copy. I have that (paperback) copy still, though later I ordered another (hardback), on the principle that when you find something really good – a perfect pair of jeans for example – it’s often worth buying two.

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Taking the Short View

When Sydney Smith, a reluctant cleric, was given the living at the remote village of Foston in Yorkshire, this most urbane of men described his predicament as being ‘twelve miles from a lemon’. The country, he thought, was a ‘healthy grave’.

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The Idol of the Odeons

Who remembers Dirk Bogarde? Doctor in the House? Or was it Summer Holiday? Even when his boyish good looks aren’t muddled with those of Cliff Richard, Bogarde is decreasingly likely to be recalled for the successful books he wrote.

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One of the Few

The great Australian cricketer Keith Miller was once asked how he coped with the pressures of Test cricket. ‘Pressure’, responded Miller, who’d flown a Mosquito during the war, ‘is a Messerschmitt up your arse.’ I was reminded of this by something Geoffrey Wellum said in an interview: ‘If you were in one-on-one combat and you could see the man behind you trying to shoot you down, you knew the meaning of the word fear.’

Paradise Lost

The other day, I had what I like to think of as a ‘George Bowling moment’: I had been looking at the face reflected back at me from our small bathroom mirror, telling myself that age had been, so far, not unkind to me, when the sun emerged from behind a gloomy- looking cloud on the horizon and illuminated a broad expanse of scalp through my thinning hair. Within the hour, I had booked myself an appointment with my hairdresser, and within the week I had adopted, on their advice, a more flattering haircut for a man of my age.

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Where Past and Present Meet

Lucy Boston’s The Children of Green Knowe (1954) is one of the most enchanting children’s books ever written, set in the perfect time and place. The time is unspecified, but it would seem to be after the war, when trains still stopped at little stations like the one called Penny Soaky. It’s not long before Christmas and there will be snow. It is also a time when a little boy like Tolly, who is 7, can travel on a train to his unknown great-grandmother all by himself.

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Scenes from Parish Life

Some twenty years ago, inspired by the hymns and sacred music she’d sung at school and in a Cambridge chapel choir, Ysenda Maxtone Graham set out to explore the life of the Church of England. Sustained by British Rail sandwiches and mugs of vicarage tea, she spent a year travelling the country, listening to the views of High Church bishops and newly ordained curates. She talked to believers and unbelievers in their congregations, absorbed the beauty and ancient liturgy of cathedral Eucharist and evensong, and the fervency of born-again evangelical gatherings.

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Glimpses of Paradise

In the early 1970s, as a young man new to London, I visited the Tate Gallery for the first time. The gallery wasn’t very full on a spring weekday morning, but one middle-aged couple came into the room where I was standing in front of a picture. Obviously, they were intent on doing the whole gallery at a brisk pace as they moved diagonally across the floor, glancing from side to side, like pigeons looking for food. Near the doorway, the woman halted to looked at a painting. She read the label out loud, ‘A Hilly Scene. Samuel Palmer,’ then stood back, and said, ‘My goodness, but it’s so small.’ And then they hurried off into the next room, perhaps to comfort themselves with some huge Victorian landscape.

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Flying High

I have a friend with bipolar disorder. She self-medicates with books, reading widely, constantly. Highbrow, lowbrow; fiction, non-fiction. They flow in and out of our local library and charity shops. Recently, she held one back for me.

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The Smell of the Greasepaint

When the great actor-turned-director Michael Blakemore died in December last year, aged 95, his obituarist on the BBC reminded listeners that, as well as being the collaborator of choice for the play wrights Michael Frayn and Peter Nichols, the guiding hand behind A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and Noises Off, a double Tony-award winner for Kiss Me Kate and Copenhagen, the almost-head of the National and the actual and much-fêted head of both Glasgow Citizens and the Lyric Hammersmith, he was a gifted and iconoclastic author. Personally, the commentator said, his favourite book about theatre was Blakemore’s Stage Blood (2013), a coruscating, vengeful memoir of the author’s five years as an associate director at the then nascent National Theatre.

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A Man on a Journey

‘In the great days that are gone I was walking the Journey upon its easy smiling roads and came one morning of windy spring to the side of a wood.’ That first sentence of the first story in A. E. Coppard’s first collection, Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921), has always drawn me on.

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How Sweet the Music

Something rather magical happened to me last summer when, walking along the river path by the Great Ouse in Huntingdonshire, I came across an old iron gate set into a stone wall. A small sign said ‘Visitors welcome’ so I pushed the gate open and found myself in a lovely English garden with some curious details. Ahead of me lay a velvety swath of lawn, edged with a row of dark green yews trimmed neatly into coronation orbs and crowns. Walking further, I discovered more topiary in the shape of giant chess pieces, and rare irises standing tall. Old roses carelessly cast their petals at my feet as I looked up to see a mysterious old house.

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Issue 87

To Read or Not to Read

Faith, Hope and Decency

Have What Is Beautiful

Alice in the Margins

Marriage Guidance

Taking the Short View

The Idol of the Odeons

One of the Few

Paradise Lost

Where Past and Present Meet

Scenes from Parish Life

Glimpses of Paradise

Flying High

The Smell of the Greasepaint

A Man on a Journey

How Sweet the Music

The Magazine

Slightly Foxed Books

General Bookshop

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Issue 87

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