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Blackburn, Julia

Julia Blackburn has written many books, and her subjects are diverse – from Napoleon to Billie Holiday – but she thinks the underlying connection is her interest in people caught in a predicament of one sort or another.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

The Emperor’s Last Island, [1] 28; article by, [48] 28

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20230412103035 Ronald Blythe | From the personal collection of Ronald Blythe

Julia Blackburn | Eulogy for Ronald Blythe | Bury St Edmunds, 1 March 2023

It’s odd how one gets to know someone better, or at least in more detail, after they have gone. Ronnie was often in my mind ever since I first met him in 1991, but it’s only now that I begin to see him in his entirety, as it were. I watched a film made when he was in his 50s. The slight figure of a man with a shock of hair and very narrow hips, walking through the familiar streets of Aldeburgh and talking as he walks. ‘So many friends have died,’ he says, ‘but I have no sense of elegy. They are living because I am living. That must be it.’ And now he is living because we are living.
20230711170158 Foxed Pod Episode 45 | Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

Episode 45: Ronald Blythe: A Life Well Written

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

‘I would like to be remembered as a good writer and a good man . . . Writers are observers. We are natural lookers, watchers . . . it seems to me quite wonderful that I have so long been able to make a living from something I love so much.’ So wrote the writer, editor and famed chronicler of rural life Ronald Blythe for the Mail on Sunday in 2004. That Ronald (or Ronnie, as he preferred to be known), who died aged 100 in early 2023, will be remembered as a good writer is irrefutable. Many Slightly Foxed listeners will know and love not only Akenfield – his bestselling 1969 portrait of a fictionalized East Anglian village – and the ‘Word from Wormingford’ column for the Church Times but also his unparalleled collection of short stories, poems, histories, novels and essays and, most recently, his year-long diary published as Next to Nature, which celebrates the slow perpetual turn of the farming year, the liturgical calendar and the rhythms of village life.
20040301153630 David Wheeler on Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island - Slightly Foxed Issue 1

Napoleon’s Last Garden

David Wheeler on Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island

The bright orange spine of The Emperor’s Last Island shone conspicuously. The author’s name didn’t register, but the powerful word ‘island’ most certainly did, and when I took the slim volume from the shelf and saw the painted sketch of Napoleon and read the subtitle, A Journey to St Helena, my pulse began to quicken. My great-grandparents were married there, a place more remote than anywhere else on earth; of greater significance to me, in the mid-1960s my own teenage eyes gazed briefly upon this island with its fortress-like cliffs; but in the intervening years I had read nothing about it.
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Learning By Heart

Julia Blackburn on Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of Ballads

I was born in 1948 and so I stepped over into vague adulthood during the 1960s. My parents were what you might call bohemian, which meant they used Freud as the springboard for seeing sex in every aspect of life and they believed in doing whatever they felt like doing and to hell with the consequences. They were also good people in their way: my mother full of laughter and sociability, my father full of booze and poetry and fascinated by the transforming power of metaphor ‒ just so long as you could find the right one to fit the occasion . . .

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