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The Maclean Effect

Paul Routledge on Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern Approaches

I defy anyone to read Fitzroy Maclean’s Eastern Approaches and not want to go to mysterious Central Asia. From the moment I read those seductive first paragraphs as a student, I was drawn to the murky world of Bokhara, Samarkand and Tashkent that Maclean observed at close quarters in the 1930s when working as a diplomat in our Moscow embassy. It was to be ten years before I travelled to the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan in the ‘year of stagnation’ – 1975 – and another three decades before I saw the country without the dubious assistance of a Soviet minder.

Needy Authors, Literary Hacks

Paul Routledge on George Gissing, New Grub Street

In a tiny seventeenth-century cottage, fashioned from stone stables, I found the Idle Bookseller. Not that Ros Stinton lives up to her trade name, presiding as she does over the largest collection of books and pamphlets by or about the Victorian novelist George Gissing to be found anywhere. The shrine-cum-bookshop is up a steep flight of stairs at the back of her home, in Town Lane, Idle, once an ancient village but now swallowed up in the suburbs of Bradford. To the rear, which would have suited the mildly reactionary novelist, is the Idle Conservative Club. Down the road is the Idle Working Men’s Club, for which I imagine there is a long, if rather desultory, waiting list.

Sharp Observations

Paul Routledge on the diaries of Robert Sharp

Deep in the archives of the municipal Treasure House in Beverley lies a cloth-bound volume of handwritten diaries, the work of Robert Sharp, schoolmaster, village constable, shopkeeper and tax-collector, who chronicled the daily round and common tasks about him in the east Yorkshire village of South Cave from 1812 to 1837.

‘By God, I’m going to spin’

Paul Routledge on the novels of Winifred Holtby

Winifred Holtby wrote South Riding, a grand sweep of 1930s life in Yorkshire’s sea-facing flatlands, quite literally against a deadline. She completed the novel only weeks before her death, and the manuscript was seen through the press by her lifelong friend Vera Brittain. The book was an instant success, and has never been out of print.

‘I know it’s planned, but it feels fortuitous and that’s quite an art . . .’

Paul Routledge

‘A quarterly box of delights - always something unexpected to excite the taste buds of the bookish. I know it's planned, but it feels fortuitous and that's quite an art.’

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