Articles & Extracts

Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

Stiff Martinis and Bitter Marriages

I was an innocent when I first read Updike, and I can still remember those late teenage afternoons when, in an agony of tedium, I haunted the aisles of second-hand bookshops and Manchester Central Library, reading feverishly, hunting for sex. Moll Flanders promised much but remained, finally, coy. A copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, bought furtively from a basement bookshop in Charlotte Street, proved a great disappointment. No sooner had a glance been exchanged than the scene faded away into modest ellipses . . . it was only embarrass­ingly late that I realized it was a pre-1960 edition. But John Updike’s Couples (1968) was very definitely a product of the Swinging Sixties. ‘Welcome to the post-pill paradise,’ Georgene Thorne tells the main character, Piet Hanema, as we embark on the first of very many couplings in a novel where the sex is mostly adulterous, sometimes loving, always luxuriantly described. Wide-eyed, I fell into the featherbed of Updike’s post-lapsarian prose.
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Something Cooking

Something Cooking

I was passing through Newark, New Jersey, in 2002 when I picked up a paperback thriller in the airport bookstore. It was by Robert B. Parker, a writer I had never heard of, and I can’t remember what attracted me to it: almost certainly its portability and low price. I was at that time the New York correspondent of the Daily Telegraph. My beat was everywhere east of the Rockies, and I frequently took short-hop flights to cover stories. A banker had absconded with a bunch of cash in Baltimore; a stripper had been elected mayor in a small con­servative town in Colorado; there was a videogame convention in Chicago – and I hopped on a plane.
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I Too Am Here

I Too Am Here

I have a valued friend who lives a long way away and doesn’t do email or social media. We phone, occasionally, but once or twice a year I’ll sit down, choose a pen, assemble paper, pour a glass of wine, and spend the evening writing her a letter. It feels at once deeply self-indulgent and extravagantly generous. I write about myself but I’m thinking of her, knowing she will be pleased at being chosen. Jane Welsh Carlyle, a woman Sir Leslie Stephen described as ‘the most wonderful letter-writer in the English language’, put it simply: she liked ‘writing to people who like to hear from me’.
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A Classical Education | Chapter 6: Booterstown

A Classical Education | Chapter 6: Booterstown

It had been decided at the lunch that Edward’s mother would come to the speech day in the following summer and that I would introduce her to my parents, with a view to arranging for Edward to spend a fortnight at my home in Tunbridge Wells and for me then to follow on, later in the summer, and stay at her house in Dublin for a fortnight. I did not much relish the prospect of having Edward on my hands at home for a fortnight. I did not know how to keep him occupied, and Tunbridge Wells was a place I had never felt much like sharing with anyone, even my best friend; I had grown accustomed to keeping it to myself. And I was none too keen to stay with his mother; but the idea of visiting, for the first time, a foreign country quite outweighed these considerations.
Counting My Chickens

Counting My Chickens

My extraordinary mother, the writer Elspeth Barker, died in April 2022. She left this life on a balmy, sunny afternoon, just as if she was wandering down through her garden to the river with her dogs, pausing to stare at primroses and notice shades of green brightening on the canopied branches of her beloved beech tree. Her last days had been beatific in some ways as we, her five children, gathered around her and talked to her about some of her favourite things – picnics, beech trees, bluebells, jackdaws, poems, books. We read her Moorland Mousie, which had been a treasured book of her childhood, and felt the incredible privilege of walking beside her on her last journey.
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The Land of Lost Content

The Land of Lost Content

Nineteen twenty-two was a good year for poetry. It saw the publication of two very different works which would prove to be of lasting popularity – A. E. Housman’s Last Poems, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I love that bizarre conjunction, Housman’s traditional, rhyming, apparently artless verse jostling for shelf space with the arch-modernist exciting and outraging the world with his wilful obscurities and cunning vulgarities. None of the doomed country lads who inhabit Housman’s poetic world were ever to ‘wash their feet in soda water’ as Eliot’s Mrs Porter and her daughter did, let alone dry their ‘combinations touched by the sun’s last rays’.
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Brits Behaving Badly

Brits Behaving Badly

The decayed spa town where I grew up during the 1950s was full of people who had been ‘out in’ somewhere or other across the British Empire. If those two semi-detached prepositions denoted something special and exotic about dwellers in the Victorian mansions lining Graham Road or the Italianate Regency villas along the hilltop terrace known as Bello Sguardo, they also suggested a certain precariousness, that of an echelon abruptly robbed of its status and forced to live the life of bewildered refugees.
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Not Utterly Oyster

Not Utterly Oyster

I first picked up Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses (1950) a few years ago, when I was preparing for a television documentary on the early life of Queen Elizabeth II. Even then, reading in a hurry on a train journey, I remember being struck by the richness of the detail in it. My paperback edition has an off-putting pink jacket, but it would be a mistake to judge The Little Princesses by its cover. Recently I reread it while researching my own book on the late Queen, and I realized that it’s a gem – essential reading for anyone interested in the Royal Family in the twentieth century.
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Live Fast, Die Young

Live Fast, Die Young

Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and Rosemary Sutcliff offer stiff competition; nevertheless I can’t help thinking that Smith (1967) by Leon Garfield might just be the single most accomplished novel for children in the English language. Garfield (1921–96) was a prolific author who also wrote splendid ghost stories, but Smith is his masterpiece. So deeply embedded in literary tradition that it amounts to a child’s gateway to Dickens, Fielding and Stevenson, this London novel par excellence has a brilliance of style, depth of characterization, vividness of description, thrillingly twisty plot and above all an indomitable child hero who wouldn’t disgrace any of those illustrious writers.
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Joining the Grown-ups

Joining the Grown-ups

I’ve been reading The Borrowers books with my daughter. I loved them when I was her age, and it’s been a joy to rediscover Mary Norton’s tales of these tiny people who live alongside humans. Their miniature world is described in glorious detail – they are small enough to take up residence in a boot, make a roaring fire from matchsticks, or feast for days on a single roasted chestnut. We’ve been thrilled as they are menaced by ferrets, scooped up into pockets or swept downstream in a tea kettle.
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