Articles & Extracts

Hungry for Love

Hungry for Love

The past is a foreign country: they eat things differently there. At a picnic, for example, they might decant a tin of slimy boiled ham on to a dinner plate and eat it with a knife and fork, along with Heinz Salad Cream served in a sauce boat. They consume jelly with evaporated milk, cucumber slices in vinegar, plates of reformed cow’s tongue – and on special occasions they might serve them all at once on a wheeled trolley. Instead of vegetables they buy instant dried peas in cardboard boxes. They grill grapefruits. They’ve never heard of hummus.
Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Good Books and Artichoke Bottoms

Over fourteen years as a journalist, I have written more than 2,000 articles. I’ve filed book reviews, exhibition reviews, columns, features, interviews and an investigation into bubble-wrap recycling. Nothing has generated so much interest, passion and sheer steaming outrage as the piece I wrote about my love of ironing. Letters were sent to the editor of The Times, friends emailed, friends’ mothers emailed, comments poured in online, social media went mad. The world divided into those who thought I was a tragic throwback chained to an ironing board and those who, like me, felt that when life’s problems seemed insurmountable, there was comfort in a stack of handkerchiefs ironed into perfect squares.
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Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

Extract from Giving Up the Ghost | Part One: A Second Home

It is a Saturday, late July, 2000; we are in Reepham, Norfolk, at Owl Cottage. There’s something we have to do today, but we are trying to postpone it. We need to go across the road to see Mr Ewing; we need to ask for a valuation, and see what they think of our chances of selling. Ewing’s are the local firm, and it was they who sold us the house, seven years ago. As the morning wears on we move around each other silently, avoiding conversation. The decision’s made. There’s no more to discuss.
‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

‘I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent . . .’ | Extract from Conundrum

I was still only a boy, still unformed, when walking into the colonel’s tent on the banks of the Tagliamento river in Venezia Giulia, I found the commanding officer of the 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers rising to his feet to greet me. Yet I was entering a man’s world, the world of war and soldiery. I felt like one of those unconvincing heroines of fiction who, disguised in buskins or Hussar’s jacket, penetrate the battlefields to find glory or romance: and the colonel’s civilized gesture of welcome, to an undistinguished and unpromising reporting subaltern, seemed to me a happy omen. So it was.
‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

‘The plumage is a wonder to behold . . . ’| Extract from Ghosting

So strange and exotic is he that he could be a rare tropical bird that you might never come face to face with, even in a lifetime spent in the rain forest. The plumage is a wonder to behold: a large sapphire in the lapel of a bold striped suit, a vivid silk tie so bright that it dazzles, and when he flaps his wings the lining of his jacket glints and glistens like a prism. He sees that I am startled and he smiles. He takes my hand in his and lays it on the silk lining. You want to touch? Go on, touch! It’s best Chinese silk. I have only the best.
One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

One more day of clear, if frozen, sun | A Countryman’s Spring Notebook Extract

The yew tree appeared as wafers of snow to our waking eyes, when March dawned. The rest of it was lost in darkness. The prospect of March is usually (as Johnson said of a friend’s second marriage) ‘the triumph of hope over experience’. A visitor brought us some daffodils that had been raised under glass: ‘daffodils that take the winds of March with beauty’. Although these had never felt a breath of wind, they seemed to create a magic breeze about them, by their petals flung back from their jag-edged trumpets. Their perfume filled the room with spring, after our winter of scentless maidenhair and helichrysum.
Dorothy: The Highlights

Dorothy: The Highlights

It’s always risky to buy a second-hand book online, especially when the condition is described as ‘fair’, which embraces a wide variety of possible faults. When Dorothy Wordsworth’s Continental Journals, 1798–1820 (1897) arrived, a quick flick through revealed that the text on many pages had been made hideous by vivid green highlighting. This was annoying but not sufficiently so to make me return the book. In fact I’ve found that annotations can sometimes add to one’s enjoyment, as in the case of a copy of George Borrow’s Lavengro, chosen from the library of an old friend who had recently died. Reading the pencilled annotations in his familiar hand, it was as if I was reading it alongside him, enjoying again his questioning mind and gentle intelligence, bringing him back to life for me for a few hours.
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At Home With Mrs Thrale

At Home With Mrs Thrale

For those of us who cannot get enough of the Georgians, Hester Lynch Salusbury, who became Mrs Thrale and later Mrs Piozzi, is indispensable. At a time when Samuel Johnson was the greatest planet in the emerging literary firmament, she was one of his most important satellites, in fact more than that: a prop and stay without whom he might well have foundered. When they came to characterize themselves however, they were less portentous: Johnson was an elephant to Mrs Thrale’s rattlesnake. With his trunk he could ‘lift up a buffalo or pick up a pin’, she said, while he claimed, ‘Many have felt your venom, few have escaped your attractions and all the world knows you have the rattle.’ This last is a reference to her delight in conversation and her skill at maintaining its flow, what Johnson called her ‘stream of sentiment enlightened by gaiety’.
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His Fate Was Sealed

His Fate Was Sealed

I was Jack the Lad in 1962. I had just left school with a scholarship that would take me to university in the autumn, but I spent the summer months in Ottawa with my father and his second wife. I smoked a pipe, an expensive Dunhill with an ivory dot on the stem. And I was working as an intern for the Canadian government’s Department of Northern Affairs. Every evening I would return from town on the commuter bus in time for an air-conditioned cocktail hour. At the age of 19 I was an avid imbiber of Manhattans, Daiquiris and Whisky Sours. I wore button-down collars and loafers, and like all the young in North America at the time I basked in the glow of the Kennedy presidency.
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Joie de Vivre

Joie de Vivre

Idle speculation, of course, but occasionally I’ve fantasized that the great historian Richard Cobb and I chanced to be sitting together on a tram in Toulouse in 1946, when I was 4 and he was in his late twenties and just about to be demobbed. He’d have been on his way to visit a young woman he’d met at the British Fortnight organized in the city by the British Council. I’d have been riding the tram for the thrill of it, in the care of its conductress, who was a lodger in my maternal grandparents’ boarding-house behind Place du Capitole, as were my mother, sister, newly born brother and I, dispatched from England for a few months while my father, no longer able to support us properly, looked for a permanent teaching post.
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The Noblest Profession

The Noblest Profession

Helen McGill has a problem. A self-described ageing spinster – she is, good heavens, approaching forty – Helen is feeling unappreciated by the Sage of Redfield, her brother Andrew, whose books about life on the farm and the virtues of pastoral living have made him a literary celebrity – and to Helen’s thinking, very much at her expense. For it is Helen who bakes the bread and collects the eggs and cooks the meals on her wood-fired stove and cleans the house and darns the socks so that the Sage may amble down country roads and come home to lean on his fence, light his pipe and think big thoughts. Then, having handed his sister his dirty laundry, the Sage will retire to his study, warm and well-fed, to spin yarns about his adventures in ‘the bosom of Nature’ and reflect on the Simple Life. When Roger Mifflin, a caravan-driving itinerant bookseller, appears at her door hoping to meet the great man, who yet again has wandered off on ‘some vagabond jaunt to collect adventures for a new book’ and left Helen to run the farm, Helen decides she has had enough.
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Grace and a Great Heart

Grace and a Great Heart

I am not a frequenter of churchyards, but there is one grave I wish I could visit. It belongs to a London charlady who died in 1964 at the age of 42. She worked in the posh houses of Ladbroke Grove and South Kensington, and was a devoted mother and a battered, and then abandoned, wife. She could never make ends meet, and her health was poor. She shed more tears in her short life than most of us who live for twice as long. Her name was Lilian May – ‘Lily’ – Johnson. She was a heroine.
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