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Gardner, Anthony

Anthony Gardner is an Irish author and journalist based in London. He edits the Royal Society of Literature’s magazine RSL and writes for a variety of newspapers and magazines, including the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times Magazine. He is the author of two novels, The Rivers of Heaven and Fox.

www.anthonygardner.co.uk

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.

articles by, [29] 81; [34] 84; [36] 34; [38] 55; [41] 12; [42] 49; [46] 20; [53] 71; [57] 29; [59] 25; [67] 76; [76] 35; [81] 64

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20200901110013

An Irresistible Cad

Anthony Garder on Guy de Maupassant, Bel-Ami

Is it possible to love a book and hate it at the same time? That is the question that nags me whenever I think of Guy de Maupassant’s novel Bel-Ami (1885). It’s undoubtedly a masterpiece: the characterization is subtle, the social critique is incisive, the plot is completely absorbing. But its protagonist, nicknamed Bel-Ami because of his extraordinary good looks, is one of literature’s most despicable creations: a man who tramples on friend and foe alike – and above all on the women who love him – in his pursuit of wealth and status. With another writer, you might stomach such behaviour in the sure expectation of a spectacular come-uppance; but Maupassant’s amoral universe is one in which some people can get away with anything. What keeps us turning the pages is the brilliance of his writing and a fascination with how far his anti-hero can go.
20120601111244 Anthony Gardner on Nicholas Best, Daniel Macklin

A Term at Haggard Hall

Anthony Gardner on Nicholas Best, Tennis and the Masai

Over the years I have been sent many proof copies of books, but very few that I have bothered to keep. They are, in general, unattractive creatures, with their misprints and vainglorious boasts of future bestsellerdom. But in a corner of an attic shelf I have half a dozen which seem too interesting to throw away, and chief among them is Nicholas Best’s Tennis and the Masai. The mere sight of its dog-eared, pale green cover – embellished only by the Hutchinson logo, with its curious resemblance to a buffalo’s skull – is enough to lift my spirits.
20180901110000 Anthony Gardner, Osbert Lancaster SF Issue 59

Growing up Edwardian

Anthony Gardner on Osbert Lancaster, All Done From Memory & With an Eye to the Future

I wonder if I have ever stayed in an English house that didn’t contain a creased and dog-eared book by Osbert Lancaster. In my childhood his collections of pocket cartoons were always a disappointment: the comic sketches on their covers promised hilarity, but the jokes inside – no doubt wonderfully topical in their day – meant little to me. His architectural books, which I noticed as I grew older, seemed forbiddingly esoteric. Not until I acquired parents-in-law who owned almost his entire oeuvre did I discover the memoirs that convinced me of his brilliance: All Done from Memory (1953) and With an Eye to the Future (1967) are remarkable not just for their wit and powers of observation, but for their highly individual take on Britain’s path to two world wars.
20180301162915

Out of the Celtic Twilight

Anthony Gardner on Lord Dunsany, The Curse of the Wise Woman

A teenage boy is talking to his father in the library of their rambling Irish house. His father tells him to look at a particular picture; the moment he obeys, four armed men enter the room. But when he turns round, his father has vanished – apparently into thin air. So, in brilliantly dramatic fashion, begins Lord Dunsany’s The Curse of the Wise Woman (1933). As a novel it defies categorization, but if you imagine a John Buchan thriller with an overlay of the Celtic Twilight and Rachel Carson-style eco-prophecy you will be almost there.
20170301154100

Age of Innocence

Anthony Gardner on Godfrey Smith, The Business of Loving

Although the core of the story is set during the Second World War, the conflict barely registers beside what is, to the young hero, his raison d’être: the pursuit of an idealized lover. I must have been 16 when I first read it, and nothing I had come across described more perfectly my own state of mind. It clutched at my heart; returning to it in middle age, I found certain phrases and sentences echoing across the years with haunting vividness, like a bell tolling from a submerged city.
20150601124903

A Bonza Town

Anthony Gardner on Nevil Shute, A Town Like Alice

I first heard of Nevil Shute’s A Town like Alice (1950) when I was a schoolboy, and long before I read it I was fascinated by the title. How, I wondered, could a town possibly be like a person? When I eventually discovered that ‘Alice’ was short for Alice Springs, a remote settlement in the Australian Outback, I was still baffled – for from what I knew of the plot, the novel’s main focus was wartime Malaya. And though I have now read it half a dozen times, and come to love its combination of far-flung romance, desperate endurance and old-fashioned stoicism, there remains a conundrum at the heart of it which continues to tantalize me, like a stubborn morsel of crabmeat wedged in the corner of a claw.
20140601152539 Anthony Gardner on Irma Kurtz, The Great American Bus Ride

Hound Dogs

Anthony Gardner on Irma Kurtz, The Great American Bus Ride

When I was 18 I travelled around America by Greyhound bus. I still have the Hagstrom folding map I took with me, my gap-year odyssey marked out in black felt-tip pen: west from New York, skirting the Great Lakes; across the vast prairies of Minnesota and North Dakota; over the Rockies to Salt Lake City and San Francisco; back through Arizona, Texas and the Deep South. It was the first great adventure of my life – one that has yet to be surpassed.
20140301104715 John Hackett, I Was a Stranger, Plain Foxed Edition

The Strength of the Gentle

Anthony Gardner on John Hackett, I Was a Stranger

Among Britain’s defeats in the Second World War, the Battle of Arnhem comes second only to Dunkirk in the popular imagination. The parachute troops’ hopeless bid for control of the Rhine crossing in September 1944, waiting for reinforcements that never came, has been described as the greatest ‘might have been’ of the war; the phrase ‘a bridge too far’ has passed into everyday speech.
20130601171719

An Eye for Absurdity

Anthony Gardner on Michael Frayn, The Russian Interpreter

Village fêtes are dangerous places to buy books. The conviction that somewhere among the ancient almanacs and dog-eared Jilly Coopers lurks an underpriced treasure is so strong that I find it hard to come away empty-handed, and habitually end up with a selection of curios I will never read. But now and again I strike lucky, as I did with my 1966 first edition of Michael Frayn’s The Russian Interpreter.
20121201093451 Anthony Gardner on evelyn Waugh, David R. Godine

The Tortoise of Total War

Anthony Gardner on Evelyn Waugh, The Sword of Honour trilogy

I don’t suppose anyone who buys Slightly Foxed can forget the sheer, joyful, all-absorbing intensity with which we read as adolescents; but it took a remark of T. S. Eliot’s to bring home to me the pattern of it. Young people, he observed, seldom explore a large number of authors: instead, they tend to seize on a handful of favourites, and try to read everything they ever wrote. For me, one of those authors was Evelyn Waugh: when I came across Decline and Fall in my early teens, I wanted to immerse myself for ever in his hilarious, anarchic world where the names alone were enough to bring on fits of helpless laughter. Lady Circumference and little Lord Tangent – not even Dickens could match that combination.

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