Articles & Extracts

As Old as the Hills

As Old as the Hills

Like space, the past is always nearer than we think. As a boy, I knew a woman who once cut Thomas Hardy’s hair. For his part, Hardy knew an old countryman who had set eyes on Napoleon when the Bellerophon put into Plymouth Sound, en route to St Helena. The Napoleonic Wars are just three human lifetimes away and if you get to my age you will know that a lifetime is no vast span. Anthropologists have a thing called the ‘long generation’ – the era extending from the birth of one person to the death of the latest-born person that he or she could have met. This is where it gets hair-raising. As James Hawes puts it, in the foreword to his exhilarating The Shortest History of England (2021), ‘Seven long generations . . . the old and the young holding hands – and we are back at the Battle of Hastings.’ This inspires the same sort of vertigo as the knowledge that standing in central London you are nearer to outer space than you are to, say, Market Harborough.
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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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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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War’s Long Tail

War’s Long Tail

One vivid May morning eight years ago, the hawthorn hedgerows of Sussex effervescent with blossom, I took my younger son to help a group of volunteers restore a patch of woodland near Sedlescombe. Turning off the A21, we drove up a tree-lined drive to the meeting point, an old manor house surrounded by low, brick-built dormitories. A large sign saying ‘Pestalozzi International Village’ stood out in front. As my son got out of the car, some childhood memory began to tug at me. When I turned the car round to leave and saw a red and black ladybird logo on the corner of the sign, the memory crystallized. A woman selling ladybird badges on the high street; a school assembly on refugee children; 1970s-era Blue Peter fundraisers; and, yes, The Silver Sword.
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From World to World

From World to World

We are observing a group of people trying to find a log. The log is not where they left it. They have been away for some time. Now it is not where it was, and they are perturbed. It is, we gather, a long log. They need it in order to cross a marsh. Finally one of them – he is called Lok – has the bright idea of finding another log, and putting it where the old one was. His companions are deeply impressed by this. A new log is located and moved by communal effort. Now they can cross the marsh to get to where they want to go. They take it in turns to walk along the log, but one of them, an old man, falls into the water. They pull him out, but he is wet and cold, and starts shivering. This seems to trouble them much more than we might expect. We infer that being cold represents a mortal threat.
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