Issue 90

Miss Bracegirdle and Others

Miss Bracegirdle and Others

Researching a book about cricket, I came across Stacy Aumonier’s ‘The Match’, a short story written in 1916, recalling a game played at the height of summer two years previously, just before the Great War was declared. The devastating contrast between ‘the clean sanity of that sunlit field’ and the battleground that followed is a familiar literary idea, but Aumonier was one of the first to employ it. He looks back with disbelief at the innocence and generosity of spirit with which the game was played, the ‘good luck’s’ and the ‘well played’s’, the kindness and the cheerfulness of all those involved, the lunch, the drinks and the farewells, and can’t believe that so many of the players have since died. It’s a loving, elegiac and painful tale.
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Roman Voices

Roman Voices

In a seafront café, waiting for the boat to Piraeus, I saw a book nestling in a cardboard box of discarded holiday thrillers: The Ides of March (1948) by Thornton Wilder, a 1960s Penguin Modern Classic. Scuffed and grey, it beckoned with the modest allure of a vestal virgin in a troupe of painted harlots. An epistolary novel about Julius Caesar in the last year of his life – how could I never have heard of it? I paid one euro and hurried on to the boat with my prize. Wilder was a gregarious loner who loved nothing so much as a ship’s deck ‘amid the careening smoke stacks and the flying spray’ – it was the perfect place for us to meet.
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Catching the White Whale

Catching the White Whale

There are a few books that are fixed in the popular imagination as much by their illustrations as by the text. Winnie-the-Pooh springs to mind as a prime example of such a collaboration between author and illustrator. E. H. Shepard’s pictures of the bear and the piglet are seen everywhere, especially on social media memes peddling folksy platitudes, completely divorced from A. A. Milne’s words yet instantly recognizable. Shepard is also responsible for the original and iconic images of the characters from The Wind in the Willows, while you can barely think of Roald Dahl’s books without envisioning Quentin Blake’s BFG.
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The Man Behind the Myth

The Man Behind the Myth

I was going to solve the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’ mystery. As a devoted Famous Five reader I just knew I would. I’d find a pattern the police had missed, like one of those Hitchcock puzzle pictures where the killer slips up by leaving his bicycle clips behind. Because the Ripper was as much a part of my 1970s world as Basil Brush and the Phantom Raspberry Blower, his reign of terror very often on the Six O’Clock News. With tea on my lap, I watched serious men report from streets of gloom and drizzle and orange sodium.
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Bad Decisions and Bitter Pills

Bad Decisions and Bitter Pills

If, like me, you’re a slow reader, you’ll know what it is to choose books carefully. How I’d love to be like my university friend who could speed-read a whole whodunnit in the bath, solving the mystery before the water was cold. But because of the snail-pace of my consumption, I often feel obliged to bypass thrillers and doorstop blockbusters. Life is short, after all. So I reach dutifully for literary fiction, relying, like P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves, on ‘some improving book’ to inform and entertain me.
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Mystery and Bliss

Mystery and Bliss

One day, many years ago, I half-listened to a reading on the radio in the middle of some chore. Suddenly, the prose caught my ear. I had to pay attention. What I heard was extraordinary: a memory of lying on a hillside on a summer’s day that bloomed and soared into the most ravishing, hypnotic account of an ecstatic union with nature and its healing powers that I had ever come across. ‘I was rapt and carried away,’ the author confessed. And so was I.
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Growing up Regency-style

Growing up Regency-style

Sometimes, if I am asked why I spend my career thinking about the literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, I joke with more truthfulness than I care to admit that it is because of Georgette Heyer. For a period in my adolescence I would mark the beginning of the weekend by taking the bus into Oxford and heading for Blackwell’s Paperback Bookshop on Broad Street. Not for me the sparkly delights of Accessorize and Top Shop: instead my place of teenage safety was an under-the-stairs corner by two basement shelves filled with the uniform white spines of Heyer’s Regency romances.
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Sailing On

Sailing On

I chose a few sentences from the first chapter of Arthur Ransome’s Peter Duck (1932) for my mother’s funeral. I often read his books to her when she was old, demented and dying in a care home. When she couldn’t remember what had happened on the page or even the paragraph before, I whittled my reading down to selections from chapters I knew to be her favourites and which I loved myself. The opening of Peter Duck was one of them. Imagine an old seafarer, long retired, sitting on a bollard in Lowestoft’s inner harbour, watching the crew of a little green schooner preparing for a voyage.
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