Articles & Extracts

The Sound of a Leaf

The Sound of a Leaf

In lateish middle age we sold our house in Devon and moved to France, planning a new project in a new place. Living in a caravan for a year while we renovated, we vastly improved our French (words for ‘beam’, ‘wheelbarrow’ and ‘high blood pressure’ proving useful) and only one of us was ever homesick. For some reason I’d taken with me Ronald Blythe’s Outsiders: A Book of Garden Friends (2008) and, although on balance I was enjoying living in France, this did make me slightly wistful. It’s a collection of his essays on gardeners, gardening, botanists, plantsmen, great gardens, garden memories, writers’ gardens, the seasons. To anyone even mildly interested in gardening it’s a collection of treasures.
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The Agony and the Ecstasy

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Half a century after it was first published in 1973, Portrait of a Marriage still delivers a powerful depth charge, still intrigues and amazes in equal measure. The story it tells, of a marriage made all the stronger by the centrifugal forces of bisexual love affairs forcing it apart, is profoundly moving, and in Nigel Nicolson’s graceful telling, as relevant now as ever. We live in an age of soundbites, where complex lives are often reduced to simplistic labels – Vita Sackville-West? Ah, yes, the gardener, the lover of Virginia Woolf, the inspiration for Orlando – and need to be reminded of the fire and passion, the agony and ecstasy, that combined in the making of two such singular lives and one such singular marriage.
Last Waltz in Vienna | ‘The Ringstrasse was uniquely Franz-Josef’s own creation . . .’

Last Waltz in Vienna | ‘The Ringstrasse was uniquely Franz-Josef’s own creation . . .’

The Ringstrasse was uniquely Franz-Josef’s own creation. In 1858 the Emperor, who wanted a capital worthy of the Habsburg Empire, determined that Vienna needed to grow outward beyond the narrow confines of the old inner city. He ordered the destruction of the moats and bastions that had surrounded the city for centuries. But before Franz-Josef could realize his plan, he had to overcome the determined opposition of his generals.
Where Past and Present Meet

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

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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Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

Extract from Life in Our Hands | Chapter 2: Relief and Reflection

It was good to lie in bed stretching my legs against the rough blankets, aloof from the rattle and prattle of the unit beginning a new day. I watched Tait washing a pair of socks in the portable washbasin. Scottie was already asleep, her two dark plaits falling over the edge of the low camp bed on to some crushed yellow trefoil and her underclothes lying like a pool on the grass floor of the tent. Her shirt and trousers were carelessly thrown on to the only canvas stool where lay a copy of the unit’s ‘daily orders’ and unopened letters.
Terror among the Wheatfields

Terror among the Wheatfields

When the BBC asked me to make a radio programme about Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966), I had not yet read it, and didn’t want to. I’d mentally filed it in the same category as Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and American Psycho: books that I might have liked in my teens and twenties but that now seemed insufferably macho. I’d not that long ago had a baby and I had no interest in reading about a family being murdered in their beds.
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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.
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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Academic Angst

Academic Angst

In one sense Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) is very much a book of its time; but in another sense it is timeless. When I came to reread it recently, I feared it might not have worn well. It was, after all, pub­lished seventy years ago; it was received then as a satire on the stultified and snobbish society of 1950s provincial Britain. I first read it in about 1970 when I was in my teens, and it still seemed relevant then; but attitudes have changed considerably since, just as I have myself, alas. I need not have worried. The tone of the book still rings true today. And it remains very, very funny. Take, for example, Amis’s famous description of a hangover:
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