Articles & Extracts

The Hard Stuff

The Hard Stuff

The beginning of my teens came ‘between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP’. I regard it as highly appropriate that Larkin made the first of those milestones a novel, because it wasn’t only sex and rock and roll that had begun. Penguin Modern Classics, in their distinctive slate-grey livery, had also arrived, providing us hungry young readers with a list of books to grow up by. In due course PMC introduced me to Kafka, Joyce, Hemingway and Camus – and, later, Gide, Hesse and Sartre – offering the chance to luxuriate in amoral existential disgust, in contemplation of the meaning of mean­inglessness.
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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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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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