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Articles & Extracts

Everyday Mysteries

The danger of being known as the author of a single masterpiece is that your other books may unjustly be neglected. Certainly Collis’s biographies and autobiographies, his ecology and fiction are too original to be forgotten.

SF magazine subscribers only

Sparkling Sydney

The Wild Irish Girl, by Sydney Owenson, was first published in 1806, since when it has rarely been out of print. I knew nothing of this novel or its author until a few years ago, when I was writing about the Italian poet and philosopher Leopardi and needed to place this tormented genius against a real background.

SF magazine subscribers only

Speaking Volumes

Speaking Volumes

When a people disappears, they say the last thing to be forgotten is its food. You might not teach your children your mother tongue, but the chances are you’ll still cook them your mother’s recipes.

SF magazine subscribers only

Strunking It

The problem for a writer like White when stepping into the stylist’s domain is the need to obey the rules he’s about to consider. He confined his revision of Strunk’s manual to the addition of a chapter that included his own ‘notions of error’, perhaps realizing that Strunk’s unequivocal commands – Do this, Don’t do that – did not reflect the idea of language, any language, as something evolving.

SF magazine subscribers only

Ploughing On

The writer Adrian Bell first arrived in Suffolk in 1920 – a delicate young would-be poet, fresh from public school at Uppingham and the polite drawing-rooms of Chelsea, under pressure from his father, who was news editor of the Observer, to get a proper job. He was, he says, ‘flying from the threat of office life’ when he first presented himself for work on the farm of an old-established farming family in the countryside near Bury St Edmunds.

An Unlikely Duo

An Unlikely Duo

Is it acceptable to be both happily married to a living man and physically attracted to a long-dead author? I know I’m not the only one. I have one friend who goes weak at the knees when she shows me photos of the late Patrick Leigh Fermor, and another who has a lasting physical pash for Joseph Banks (1743‒1820). Mine is for Peter Fleming (1907‒71), older brother of Ian.

SF magazine subscribers only

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

The Abyss Beyond the Orchard

For about a hundred and thirty years after his death in 1800, William Cowper was one of those figures about whom every keen reader had something to say. He was up there with Milton and Johnson, though people felt more intimately connected with Cowper than they were ever likely to feel with Milton. His long poem The Task (1785) seemed to articulate all the longed-for goodness of familiar, homely things; it was a tribute to ‘Domestic Happiness, thou only bliss of paradise that has survived the fall!’ Yet here, and in hundreds of the letters that began to be published from 1804 onwards, things of joy were surrounded by gulfs of loss and desolation.

SF magazine subscribers only

Inspired by Kipling

Inspired by Kipling

When recently I began to write a social history of British India, I realized I would have to keep Rudyard Kipling under control. I could not endlessly compare people to characters in a Kipling story or make points and then back them up with ‘As Kipling once wrote . . .’ Nor could I write about scandals in Simla and describe them as Kiplingesque scenarios.

SF magazine subscribers only

How long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree?

How long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree?

How long had I been standing here under the old cherry tree? Minutes or years? While the storm with its batteries of thunder deployed across the sky, letting fall but a few drops – for all its growling – which the boughs above me caught and shook till they sparkled . . .

Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry . . .

Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry . . .

Her name was Muriel Haidée Perry and she was born on 5 March 1890, or so I believed when I went to Somerset House to look up the registration of her birth. It wasn’t there. What I was really looking for – this was after she was dead and I had started to write about her – were the names of her parents. This was something that I had never been able to get her to tell me.

Ear Trumpets & Alternative Bestsellers

Not surprisingly, the highest selling novel was Robert Harris’s Conclave, but the splendid dark horse has been Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s Terms & Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding-Schools, 1939-1979, published by Slightly Foxed . . .

- John Sandoe Books

Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Radio Gorgeous

‘Lashings of jolly japes, inedible food, schoolgirl crushes . . . but no education! A captivating book reveals what really used to happen at girls’ boarding schools. Author Ysenda Maxtone Graham tells us about her bestselling book: Terms & Conditions: Life…

A Flickering on the Staircase

A Flickering on the Staircase

In 1994, Hilary Mantel joined the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, where I was working as Secretary. She was in her mid-forties, and her sinister and hilarious fourth novel, Fludd, had been a big hit with our President,…

Reading Maps

Last year the Bodleian Library paid £55,000 for a fold-out map torn from a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring and scribbled over by J. R. R. Tolkien. Maps, said one of the Bodleian curators, were central to Tolkien’s storytelling and he had annotated this one to guide the illustrator Pauline Baynes, who was making a poster map of Middle Earth (see SF no. 41). I was delighted that it had landed safely in a public collection. In my opinion a good map always enhances a good book, especially when the author and a skilled illustrator have worked on it together.

SF magazine subscribers only

The Book Cure

I wanted to call this ‘How Children’s Literature Saved My Life’, but the simple truth is that my life was never in any real danger. My imaginative life, however, was in grave peril. It hovered on the brink. This is the story of how it was resuscitated in the simplest of ways – by reading children’s books.

SF magazine subscribers only

Along the Old Ways

Along the Old Ways

I spend a couple of weeks each year walking on the Lake District fells, so it is inevitable that I should have fallen upon James Rebanks’s remarkable The Shepherd’s Life (2015). I loved it, and I learned much more about upland sheep farming than I could possibly have divined from hours of watching Herdwicks on the fell. Reading The Shepherd’s Life inevitably set me thinking about another book I read long ago and which, tellingly, turned the young Rebanks into a reader.

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