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Keay, Julia

Julia Keay worked as an exhibition designer in London before moving to a remote farmhouse in the highlands of Scotland. She wrote several BBC radio documentaries and plays, and acclaimed biographies including The Spy Who Never Was, With Passport and Parasol and Alexander the Corrector. Her most recent, Farzana, was completed just before her death in 2011, and published in 2014.

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, [2] 81; [3] 87; [11] 80; [16] 20

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Indexing on the Mekong

Julia Keay on indexing

I guess (but I don’t know, since it’s not often a hot topic of conversation) that every amateur indexer has his or her own way of working. Since our joint IT expertise would shame most 10-year-olds and certainly does not extend to using a computer’s indexing facility, my husband and I use pencil and paper. Tried and tested over the course of twenty-five indexes of varying lengths and complexity, this old-fogeyish no-tech method has served us well, but never more so than when compiling the index to Sowing the Wind, John’s twentieth - century history of the Middle East.
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In Dehra Dun

Julia Keay on Allan Sealy, The Everest Hotel

I found a copy of Allan Sealy’s The Everest Hotel in a small bookshop in Dehra Dun in northern India. It was the dust jacket that caught my eye – a pen-and-ink drawing of a pair of large gnarled feet in shabby sandals, crossed, and resting on a balcony rail. Irresistible. The bookseller peered over my shoulder. ‘He lives here,’ he said, with a wide smile of pride. ‘Did you know?’ I didn’t. I had never heard of Allan Sealy. But a local author writing about local matters, places, people? Whether it lived up to its cover or not, it was the right book to read then, and there.
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Shock Waves

Julia Keay on Anne Fadimann, The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

Anyone who has ever visited another country and found the food unidentifiable, the language incomprehensible and the rules of behaviour bizarre has experienced some degree of culture shock. Sometimes it’s exciting, often it’s disconcerting, and if you get ill or lost or inadvertently cause offence it can be frightening. Anne Fadiman’s book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down is about culture shock of a different order altogether. It is the story of what can happen when, even with the best of intentions on both sides, two cultures collide.

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