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Brown, Richard

Richard Brown is a stay-at-home dad and occasional historian. Of all the (non-fictional) cities he has loved, his favourite is still York, where he lives with his wife and children. His article was a joint winner of the 2022 Slightly Foxed Writers’ Competition.

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For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

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20230901141232 Richard Brown on Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Beyond the Safe Zone

Richard Brown on Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Of all the hopeless tasks I have ever set myself, perhaps the most quixotic has been my attempt to persuade undergraduate historians to read fiction. In my experience the average student is pretty well allergic to the idea that they might ever venture beyond the safe zone of their set reading, let alone engage with something that (as they sometimes put it) ‘isn’t even true’. They may accept in principle the idea that fiction might in some vague and abstract sense prove personally enriching, but to suggest to a world-weary undergrad that a specific novel might have direct relevance to the actual topic they happen to be working on is to invite, nine times out of ten, a look of blank incomprehension.

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