Issue 5

M A G A Z I N EAUTUMN 2009 / ISSUE 5 £3.50

ANIMATIONMark Burton’s inside view of the industry

THE RESTORATION:TRIUMPH OR FAILURE?

Jenny Uglow on Charles II

PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESS

Andrew Marr assesses his appeal

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 5

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

CONTENTS

5 EDITORIAL LETTER

6 CONTRIBUTORS

8 OVER MY SHOULDERAndrew O’Hagan describes his working dayand how he uses the Library for research

11 READING LISTSelina Hastings selects the books that havehelped her with her new biography ofSomerset Maugham

12 PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESSAndrew Marr on J.B. Priestley and hisparticular brand of mid-twentieth-centuryEnglishness

16 THE MOUSE THAT ROAREDMark Burton gives an insider’s view of thefeature-animation industry

20 HIDDEN CORNERSMary Kenny on the Library’s varied andgrowing Irish collection

24 SIMON CALLOWThe writer and actor in conversation withErica Wagner

28 ANNUAL LECTURE‘The Restoration: Triumph or Failure?’ byJenny Uglow

32 MEMBERS’ NEWS

38 DIARY

39 RESTAURANT LISTINGS

J.B. Priestley stood for a type ofEnglishness that was plain-spokenand provincial, and very much ofits time. Andrew Marr argues thathis work is in need of reappraisal

12

Mark Burton examines the state ofanimation, and considers whetherthe rush towards technicaladvancement is destroying thebeloved art form that began withWalt Disney

16

From Irish political history to thegreat and obscure Irish novels andplays, the Library has a wealth ofbooks on the subject for exiles ofErin to water their roots, arguesMary Kenny

20

The writer, actor and directorSimon Callow talks to Erica Wagnerabout his life-long wish to be awriter, and how his literary careertook shape

24

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EDITORIAL LETTER


It is a rare delight to be allowed to take over someone else’s column,so I am very grateful to the Librarian for lending me this page – justthis once, she stressed – to introduce myself as the new Chairman ofthe Library’s trustees. That too is a delight, not least because I spent26 years working at the Economist, just around the corner in StJames’s Street, and have been a member since 1998, so the Libraryalready feels like home. I look forward to meeting members inperson at the AGM on 5 November.

Delight is, indeed, one of the themes of this issue. On 10 September,to accompany the reissue of J.B. Priestley’s 1949 book of essays, Delight, Waterstone’s and Faberwill publish a parallel volume, Modern Delight, with essays from many Library members (with,I confess, an introduction by yours truly). The proceeds from Modern Delight will be sharedbetween the Library and Dyslexia Action. One of the essayists, Andrew Marr, has written forthis issue a delightful article on J.B. Priestley and Englishness. Perhaps such a piece is best writtenby a Scot.

It is also a delight to bring you two pieces of good news. The first is that, in recognition of thedisruption caused by the building works this year and of the pressures of the recession, the trusteesdecided on 21 July to keep the fees unchanged in 2010. As the Librarian says in Members’ News(pages 32–4), we will still need to increase our income from fees in future, which means that we needmore members, or fee rises, or both. Any encouragement you can give to your friends andacquaintances to become members would be a great help.

The other good news is that the building is about to become delightful again. We decided to extendthe current works to bring forward the refurbishment of the issue hall and to add further readingspace, in order to bring Phase 2 to an end next June. Celebrations will certainly be in order.

Bill EmmottChairman

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Published on behalf of The London Library by RoyalAcademy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction byadtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published28 September 2009 © 2009 The London Library.The opinions in this particular publication do notnecessarily reflect the views of The LondonLibrary. All reasonable attempts have been madeto clear copyright before publication.

Cover ImageStill from the Wallaceand Gromit TV short,A Matter of Loaf and

Death (2008), createdby Nick Park.

© Aardman AnimationsLimited 2008.

EditorialPublishersJane Grylls and Kim JennerEditor Mary ScottArt Direction Cat CartwrightDesign Joyce MasonProduction Jessica CashResearcher Emma Hughes

Editorial CommitteeDavid BreuerMiranda LewisHarry MountPeter ParkerChristopher PhippsErica Wagner

AdvertisingJane Grylls 020 7300 5661Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658

Development Office, The London LibraryLottie Cole 020 7766 4716Aimee Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

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CONTRIBUTORS

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Mark Burton JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2002

Mark Burton has written for such comedy showsas Spitting Image and Have I Got News For You.He co-wrote Madagascar and Wallace & Gromit:Curse of the Were-Rabbit. He has recently workedon Miramax Film’s first full-length animation,Gnomeo and Juliet, due for release in 2011.

Andrew Marr JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2002

The journalist and political commentator AndrewMarr currently hosts the BBC One programmeThe Andrew Marr Show, and Start the Week onBBC Radio Four. His book Andrew Marr's Historyof Modern Britain was published in 2007.

Simon Callow JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1980

Simon Callow has recently played the part ofPozzo in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre RoyalHaymarket. He has written 12 books, includingBeing an Actor, Shooting the Actor and Love isWhere It Falls, as well as biographies of OscarWilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles. He was appointed CBE in 1999.

Andrew O’Hagan JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1997

Andrew O'Hagan has written three novels, OurFathers, Personality and Be Near Me. His work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His mostrecent book is The Atlantic Ocean: Essays onBritain and America.

Selina Hastings JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1968

Selina Hastings has written biographies of NancyMitford, Evelyn Waugh (winner of the MarshBiography Prize) and Rosamond Lehmann. She isa reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph and theTimes Literary Supplement. Her life of SomersetMaugham is published this year.

Peter Parker JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1994

Peter Parker’s books include The Old Lie and biographies of J.R. Ackerley (1989) andChristopher Isherwood, and he writes for theDaily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. He workedas adviser to the producers and provided additionaldialogue for the film of My Dog Tulip.

Mary Kenny JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1992

Mary Kenny has been a journalist and writer, inboth London and Dublin, for more than fourdecades. Her most recent book is Crown andShamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland andthe British Monarchy (2009).

Jenny Uglow JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1998

Jenny Uglow is an editorial director of Chatto &Windus, part of Random House. Her booksinclude biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, WilliamHogarth and Thomas Bewick, and The Lunar Men,a study of eighteenth-century scientists andthinkers. A Gambling Man, her account of Charles IIand the first decade of the Restoration, will bepublished by Faber and Faber in October 2009.

© Robin Farquhar-Thomson

© 2009 by Jerry Bauer

© 2007 Kevin Davis

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What are you working on at the moment?Are you using any books from the LondonLibrary in your research, or have you forany of your earlier work?I’m working on a new novel just now,

which, as usual, makes me almost

hysterically dependent on the London

Library. Since my first book, The Missing

[1995], I’ve used the Library most

intensely whilst writing the final draft and

that’s because, as Dr Johnson more or

less said, it takes a giant amount of reading

to make a little literature. I’ve always

wanted to furnish my characters’ minds

not just with their experience but, in many

cases, with their experience of reading.

That means not just finding the books

they might have read but reading the

correct editions.

How frequently do you use the Library? Once a week and sometimes much more.

What is your typical working day, if youhave one? How do you organise yourbreaks? I always work on fiction in the morning.

For me the best hours are the two between

10 a.m. and noon, but I always start around

8 a.m. and finish that part of the day’s work

around 1 p.m. The afternoons I keep for

non-fiction, for essays and that kind of

thing. When you’re a full-time writer,

there’s always a lot of nice interrupty things

to deal with as well: festivals, interviews,

requests, radio and television things,

summer books, email. I try to keep all

that work for the afternoons and evenings,

but it’s not easy. I tend to come to the

Library in the afternoon to deal with a

query that cropped up in that morning’s

writing, or in anticipation of a problem

that will crop up the next day.

What distracts you from your work? The wish to have fun. I was the sort of

person at university who was a push-over

for the frequent coffee-seekers and fag-

smokers: I’m always ready to drop the

work and go out. But you get to the point

with every writing project where long,

frequent solitude is your only pal, the

only thing that will help you get the book

finished. I begin at that point to become

a kind of monk, eating less and talking

less, thinking every day about the book

and what I might be able to make it. It

requires patience and it creates a kind of

fever. During those periods I suppose

distractions lose some of their attraction,

but thankfully you get to the end of it

and see the point once again of coffee

and fags.

How do you use the Library? Do you studybooks there or take them home? What isyour routine when you visit the Library? I like finding a desk in the stacks if I can.

They’re always at a premium, especially

during this period of alterations to the

building, but I like to feel enclosed by the

books. I find it nice being in the Reading

Room but too distracting – see above – and

I like to be able to walk to the shelves and

pick out a book within seconds. I take the

ones home that I’m using a lot, or whose

presence reminds me of something I mean

to work on. For example I have all these

Boswell journals that I’ve had out for ages,

tokens of a novel I’ve been composing for

years in my head about his family but

have not actually got down to writing yet.

But the very presence of the books keeps

it alive, and I noticed the other day that I

had typed 250 pages of notes from them.

Do you have any favourite parts of theLibrary that you tend to go to? Biography and Fiction. Also Science.

The loveliest corner of the Library is in

Classics, but don’t tell anybody.

Do you generally use books on yourparticular subject from the Library, or do you explore other subject areas? Do you borrow books for pleasure aswell as research? All books are for pleasure, in my opinion,

but I know what you mean and the answer

OVER MYSHOULDERAndrew O’Hagan, whose most recent novel is Be Near Me, published by Faber & Faber in 2006,discusses how he uses the Library for his research

Like a good editor, agood library may holdthe secret of yourpotential as a writer

‘

’

© 2009 by Jerry Bauer

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is probably no – I don’t pick up random

books to just read that evening and

enjoy. My working life is a bit too

involved for that, and my private reading

is always in a state of backlog. I have six

novels by people I care about sitting on a

chair in my kitchen: I wanted to read

them before the summer, which could

only happen if I didn’t succumb to

starting The Man Without Qualities at

3 p.m. some rainy Thursday afternoon in

the London Library …

What do you think is special about theLibrary? What does it mean to you? It’s like an old friend, or something like

that. Like a good editor, a good library

may hold the secret of your potential as

a writer. London has special places and

some are better for you than others;

I count the London Library to be the

place that welcomes me more or less at

my best, and in a purely practical way

its existence has improved all the work

I’ve done.

Have you made friends or usefulcontacts through the Library? Not really. I’m a bit of a loner in my cardy.

I’m always so preoccupied when I go

there, and conscious of having to get things

done. I can scarcely imagine having, for

instance, a snog at the London Library.

That’s probably against the rules anyway,

isn’t it? I must ask Sir Tom Stoppard.

Has the London Library had anyparticular influence on your work?I hope it has made it better and I think it

must have done. I can be quite naturally

stupid, and the LL has made me less so.

All the essays in my collection The Atlantic

Ocean [2008] owe something to the LL – to

the job of learning things as opposed to just

finding them, which is what you can do on

the Internet. With my novels, too, the LL

has given me the opportunity to swim into

the minds of my characters. I expect that

to happen even more in the future, unless

I get distracted by surprise new leases of

life, such as Sir Tom giving me the nod.

Do you think there is a typical LondonLibrary person? Are you that person? You mean, a preternaturally repressed

individual in a frayed cardigan? (That

sounds more or less like me.) But in truth

I don’t think there is a typical member.

The British Library has a typical member:

he is 19 years old and studying for his

Finals, chats all day and likes Foucault. In

the LL the mix of ages is pretty astonishing:

I met a writer in the stacks the other day

whom I know is 91. Another writer, new to

the game, was spread over several tables in

the Reading Room. She’s 23.

Is there a Library neighbour you dread?Sleepers get me down a little bit. I mean,

everybody knows how tempting it is to

sink into one of the red armchairs with a

copy of the Harvard Review and have 120

winks, but I’m afraid the sight of it, in

others, fails to make one feel one is at the

throbbing centre of the universe. Still, it’s

quite charming, I suppose, and infinitely

nicer than being in the Big Brother House.

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READING LIST


BEHIND THE

Writer and journalist Selina Hastings, whose books includebiographies of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and

Rosamond Lehmann, chooses the titles she has found indispensable while researching her new book

My new book is on the life of Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), a long life that was unusually adventurous andvaried. Maugham trained first to be a doctor, then abandoned medicine and became phenomenally successfulas a novelist and playwright. He was a talented linguist, and in both world wars worked for British Intelligence.

The Sanitary Evolution of London byHenry Jephson (London 1907). T. London.Amongst much else, this book gives a factualand harrowing account of the conditions inwhich the poor lived in the Lambeth slumsin South London in the 1890s, an area thatbecame well known to Maugham duringhis five years at St Thomas’ Hospital.

The Limit by Ada Leverson (London1911). Fiction.Ada Leverson, loyal friend to Oscar Wilde,who called her the ‘Sphinx’, was verytaken with the young Maugham, and inthis novel left a revealing portrait of himas the fashionable playwright, HerefordVaughan: ‘He was rather secretive andmysterious …’

My Mission to Russia and OtherDiplomatic Memories by Sir GeorgeBuchanan (London 1923). Biog. Buchanan.The memoirs of Sir George Buchanan, whowas British ambassador in Petrograd whenMaugham arrived there in 1917, are writtenin an attractively dry tone. Buchanan gaveMaugham a frigid reception, displeasedthat this inexperienced amateur shouldhave been sent from London to interfere,as he saw it, in the complex negotiations hewas conducting with Alexander Kerenskyand the Provisional Government.

Beau Voyage: Life Aboard the LastGreat Ships by John Malcolm Brinnin(London 1982). S. Ships, 4to.This beautiful, lavishly illustrated book isa romantic eulogy to the days of crossingthe Atlantic on the great liners, to the

glorious, operatic opulence of the long-goneAquitania, Normandie and the firstCunarder ‘Queens’ .

Handbook to British Malaya, 1926by R.L. German (London 1926). T. MalayPeninsula &c.Some of Maugham’s best short storieswere inspired by his journeys through theFederated Malay States, and Capt. German’sHandbook gives a vivid impression of thelives of the expatriate British, their workand recreation, including the all-importantevenings at the club, where the plantersand their memsahibs came to relax over acouple of stengahs and a rubber of bridge.

Seven Ages: An Autobiography,1888–1927 by Basil Dean (London 1970).Biog. Dean.Basil Dean directed three of Maugham’splays, Rain, East of Suez and The ConstantWife. It puzzled him that the playwrightseemed so detached during rehearsals.‘Maugham lacked genuine enthusiasmfor the theatre,’ he concluded. ‘I think hefound the whole business tiresome andthe actors’ arguments rather petty.’

Syrie Maugham by Richard B. Fisher(London 1978). Mod., 4to.A leading interior decorator of the interwaryears, Maugham’s wife Syrie becamefamous for her all-white rooms, much indemand among the rich and fashionablein Britain and the US. The book includesa photo of the drawing room of Syrie’shouse in Le Touquet, scene of the finalbreakdown of the Maughams’ marriage.

Eddie Marsh: Sketches for a CompositeLiterary Portrait of Sir Edward Marsh byChristopher Hassall and Denis Mathews(London 1953). Biog. Marsh.

Once described as a cross between Puck andMme de Maintenon, the scholarly EddieMarsh was for 20 years private secretary toWinston Churchill. As a hobby he correctedstyle and grammar in the works of hiswriter friends, Maugham amongst them.The two men’s irreconcilable difference ofopinion over the use of the word ‘luncheon’is entertainingly recounted here.

Beware the British Serpent: The Roleof Writers in British Propaganda in theUnited States, 1939–1945 by Robert Calder(Montreal 2004). S. Propaganda.The British government’s extremely delicatetask of manoeuvring its most powerfulpotential ally into the war is fascinatinglydocumented by Prof. Calder. By the carefuldeployment of well-known writers, chiefamongst them Somerset Maugham, anundercover propaganda exercise ofremarkable effectiveness was carried out.

The Golden Riviera by RoderickCameron (London 1975). T. Riviera.Roderick Cameron’s mother, the notoriousLady Kenmare, owned La Fiorentina, oneof the most fabulous villas in the Southof France. Maugham was a neighbour,and Cameron provides a colourfulaccount of the exotic post-war society onthe Côte d’Azur and of the luxurioushospitality provided by Maugham at theVilla Mauresque.

BOOK

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Once, and not so long ago,John Boynton Priestley(1894–1984) stood, if notfor Englishness, then for apopular and lively version

of it. His Englishness was bluff, radical,democratic and sentimental. It wasEnglishness stripped of Empire, its backturned on aristocracy and the landedclasses. It was, like Priestley himself,quietly self-confident and sure it wasmarching with the grain of history.

Yet it turns out to have been very muchof its time. The self-consciously plain-spoken ‘common man’ proclaimed aprovincial Englishness that belonged notto the ages but only to the mid-twentiethcentury. The era of Priestley was the era ofthe triumph of the leftish grammar-schoolboy, often with northern vowels and a vile,hairy tweed jacket. A.J.P. Taylor, HaroldWilson, Cyril Joad and Richard Hoggartare other emblematic figures from aversion of Englishness that stretches, veryroughly, from the early 1930s to the early1970s. Chippy, clever, sentimental,impatient … such men form up in aphalanx hard to name but – well, youknow it when you read it. England hassince become more knowing,metropolitan, cynical and uncertain.

We can safely talk about Priestley’sEnglishness rather than his Britishness.

PRIESTLEYAND ENGLISHNESSAndrew Marr

Left John Boynton (‘J.B.’) Priestley, 1949, byJohn Gay. © National Portrait Gallery, London.Opposite, left English Journey (1934), 1994edition. © Great Northern Books Limited.Opposite, right Bright Day (1946), 1983 edition.© Great Northern Books Limited.

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From Bradford to the South Coast,Geoffrey Chaucer to Ealing films, he wasinterested in England – far less soScotland, Wales, Ireland or the officialframework of the UK state. His EnglishJourney (1934), a remarkable work ofreporting but also of insight, took forgranted a homogenous country inside theUK. That country has changed hugely, ofcourse. His provinces – the heavy-industrial white working-class North andMidlands, with their serious-mindedyoung clerks, lusting for education andculture – are dead.

Belonging so neatly to his time andplace, a natural broad-bottomed manwithout much inner darkness, he neithertravelled well, nor lasted as successfully asdid his sometime rivals like George Orwell,Graham Greene or even John Cowper Powys.Yet perhaps, a generation after his death,‘JB’ may be ready for a revival. I hope so,because his England needs to be celebrated.It was gentler but also more optimistic anddemocratic than ours.

But he wrote too much, didn’t he?Yes, yes. I have tried to count Priestley’spublished works and reckon on 139 booksin all. I may be a few out. They comprisenot only novels, including science fictionand thrillers alongside the social-realist andfantasy fictions, and collections of his plays,from An Inspector Calls (1946) to thewonderful ‘time’ plays such as Time andthe Conways of 1937 (performed this yearat London’s National Theatre), but alsoessays, literary criticism, popular histories,broadcasts, an opera libretto andbiographies. He was torrential and attimes seemingly ubiquitous, qualities thatensured him the undying dislike of otherwriters and, no doubt, many readers too.It’s a record so exhausting it makesAlexander McCall Smith look like a slacker.Yet the writing was only one part ofPriestley’s life, which included relentlesspublic and political position-taking, threemarriages, affairs, much broadcasting andfighting service in the Great War, which hewas very lucky to survive.

And he was a survivor: part of theawesome output is down to simplelongevity. Priestley lived for 90 years. Hebegan in smoky Victorian Bradford andended after Margaret Thatcher had wonher second general election victory. Theyear of his birth, 1894, saw Gladstonetoppled and Queen Victoria opening the

Manchester Ship Canal. The year of hisdeath, 1984, saw the arrival of the first Applecomputer and Madonna belting out Like aVirgin. He was first in print, in a Bradfordnewspaper, in 1913. From 1922 to 1976, hewas continuously publishing books.

Priestley was sensitive to the chargethat his productivity made him necessarilyshallow, ‘a bovine, hearty sort of ass’.Defensively, he often returned to theresponse that Charles Dickens churnedthem out as well. There was somethingnot just of early Dickens, but of the wholeEnglish picaresque tradition, Henry Fieldingand William Makepeace Thackeray, too,in his best work. Think of that earlyblockbuster, the rolling-road entertainmentmourning the end of Variety, The GoodCompanions (1929); or even the darkerAngel Pavement, his 1930 novel of clerksand the Depression, well worth rereadingright now. I can’t claim to have read mostof his novels – and who, these days, can? –but that pair, plus Bright Day (1946), therecently reissued post-war ‘Bruddersford’

novel of Edwardian life, are well made,sharp and consistently entertaining. Givensome space and time, my instinct is towant to read more of him, not less.

The Englishness of these books isclosely related to the direct reporting of the1934 English Journey, in which Priestleyshrewdly anatomised his country. Suchroad trips have been done so often sincethat the radical ambition of this one iseasily forgotten. Travelling by bus, tramand train, Priestley divided the countryinto three – the old rural England; thedeclining industrial North and Midlands;and the rising ‘third England’ of lightindustry, and Americanised mass culture,which he loathed. He described it as ‘theEngland of arterial and bypass roads, offilling stations … of giant cinemas anddance-halls and cafés, bungalows withtiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths,motor coaches, wireless … much of it issimply a trumpery imitation’ . Priestleyunderstood clearly that British industrialdecline meant a narrowing of the specific

The era of Priestley was the era ofthe triumph of the leftish grammar-school boy, often with northern vowelsand a vile, hairy tweed jacket

‘’



smells, tastes and humour of the country.He was right, and early, and thispessimistic bellowing should convinceany reader there was more to him thanwatery good humour. The story of The GoodCompanions is also, just below the set-piece humour, a nostalgic lament for theold entertainers being wiped out by cinemaand jazz – the end of dusty, medieval roadsthat had been tramped for centuries.

This side of Priestley bears comparisonwith George Orwell, a fellow ‘LittleEnglander’ in the best sense. Both weresuspicious of the material consolationsto which the lower orders were turning.However Priestley’s analysis is morerealistic than Orwell’s in The Road to

Wigan Pier (1937), for all the latter’sstatistical and polemical material. Heunderstood manufacturing and industrybetter than Orwell, and his account of thedifferent texture of English towns is muchsharper, too. If you really want a feel ofthe living England of the interwar years,I’d argue you get it more reliably fromPriestley. Orwell was of course a muchbetter writer. His prose is sharper and moreruthless – less ‘prosey’. He and Priestleywere similar in their hostility to that ‘thirdEngland’, which would become dominantby the 1950s. But Priestley had been broughtup around the stinks and the clammy airand was less disdainful than the Etonianclass-traveller.

Priestley has been pushed away asOrwell has been elevated, partly becausehe was the less good writer but also, I’dsuggest, because his politics were moreconsistent and thus less exciting. Orwell hasgone down as the ‘real’ social-conscienceleft-winger, the roller-in-ditches withtramps and Spanish anarchist militants,who properly understood Stalinism andgrasped the importance of the coming ColdWar. That’s absolutely right. But Priestley’schampioning of English socialist andliberal values before, during and afterthe Second World War was in generalless extreme than Orwell’s revolutionarylurches, and just as democratic in instinct.

His famous wartime broadcasts, whichmade him Churchill’s rival for the airwavesuntil he was taken off (he had 16 millionlisteners – imagine), were genuinely radical,as well as being funny, reassuring andsentimental. He was a member of the pro-planning, left-wing 1941 Committee andthen a founder of Common Wealth, thewartime Christian-left opposition party.Orwell, notoriously, denounced himsecretly as a crypto-Communist in his 1949list, and would no doubt have felt vindicatedby Priestley’s role in founding CND in 1958.Yet Priestley was also a believer in localism,and in proportional representation, andin many ways an instinctive liberal. Heunderstood less about the world of thedictators than did Orwell, but he was betterrooted in English radicalism – a natural non-conformist, not an intellectual last-ditcher.

Yet it was his middle-brow image, thatdeadly prolixity, rather than his politics,that really trashed his reputation. Orwell’s

He could have more strictly rationed histalent, avoided the sneers, and prudentlykept away from politics. Rather gloriously,however, for his kind of Englishman, suchbehaviour was unthinkable

‘

’

National Theatre production of Time and the Conways, 2009. © Manuel Harlan.


PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESS


review of Patrick Hamilton’s novel TwentyThousand Streets Under the Sky (1935)gives a compelling picture of what he reallythought of Priestley. Hamilton, said Orwell,was working under Priestley’s influenceand therefore assumed real life meantlower-middle-class life in a large townand, ‘if you can pack into your novel, say,fifty-three descriptions of tea in a LyonsCorner House, you have done the trick.The result is … a huge well-meaningbook, as shapeless and inert as a clot offrog-spawn. ’ Graham Greene thoughtsomething similar about Priestley. Andwhat of Virginia Woolf, writing muchearlier, in 1930? ‘At the age of 50 Priestleywill be saying “Why don’t the highbrowsadmire me? It isn’t true that I write onlyfor money. ” He will be enormously rich;but there will be that thorn in his shoe – orso I hope. Yet I have not read & I daresayshall never read, a book by Priestley. ’ Andshe called him a ‘tradesman of letters’.

I’ve quoted Orwell and Woolf becausethey are maliciously irresistible. Yet solong afterwards, their vast and astonishingcontempt reeks more of class condescensionthan anything else. Here’s a northernprofessional writer, a common little lower-class fellow, earning his living by his pen,and with the impertinence to poke hisnose into literary and political life. And sonaturally Priestley, who could be sharpand rude enough himself, seems only themore attractive.

The crucial point was that he was awriter who felt duty bound to plunge into

public affairs. In many ways, the man hemost resembles, in width of output, insocial origins, longevity and in his role asa political gadfly, is H.G. Wells. Like Wells,he almost vanished from view; but Wellshas bobbed back again, and Priestleywill, too. If you intervene again and againin public life, in a long life, you are boundto get things wrong, and to make enemies.If you write so much, it is bound to includea lot of dross: Priestley’s reputation is agood warning against the perils ofprolixity. But today, when novelists andplaywrights are so limited in their claimsto speak for, and about, a whole people,and when they take so few risks in anykind of national debate, Priestley’s

courage deserves to be celebrated. In an age of political seriousness, he

always paid attention. In an age when thesentence, the book and the newspaper stillreigned supreme over images, he kept alarge swathe of the reading public laughingand thinking. He was the last greatEnglish man of letters. He could havemore strictly rationed his talent, avoidedthe sneers, and prudently kept away frompolitics. Rather gloriously, however, forhis kind of Englishman, such behaviourwas unthinkable. Once, undoubtedly, hewas too much everywhere. Now he’s notanywhere enough.

Priestley with Lesley Howard during a BBC Empire Service broadcast. © BBC.

Inspired by J.B. Priestley’s 1949 Delight, a collection of essays about the littlethings in life that gave the writer pleasure, Waterstone’s has called upon some oftoday’s best-known names to write about their own sources of delight. The resultis Modern Delight, a charming, touching, witty and wise collection that willdelight anyone who reads it.

With contributions from many of our own London Library luminaries, includingTom Stoppard, Tim Rice, Sebastian Faulks, Lynne Truss, David Starkey and MichaelPalin, Modern Delight reminds us of life’s simpler pleasures, from cycling downhill to agood gin and tonic.

Modern Delight was launched on 10 September, alongside a reissue ofPriestley’s original Delight. Both books are available through all Waterstone’s storesand online, priced at £9.99 each, and all profits from the sales of the books will goto the London Library and Dyslexia Action.

Do consider treating yourself or a friend to some delightful writing – an idealChristmas gift – with the added benefit of supporting the Library.

A Delightful Project for the Library



Walt Disney was very clear on the ingredientsof his success: ‘I don’t just make movies forchildren. I make them for the child in everyadult. ’ Half a century later, DreamWorks’CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg tipped that notionon its head, declaring that ‘I don’t just makemovies for adults. I make them for theadult in every child’ . This rather facetiousresponse to Disney’s great mission statementcontains a singular truth: feature animationis no longer just about children. It hasbecome big business, on the front line ofthe film industry’s increasingly frantic huntfor what it likes to call ‘four-quadrantmovies’ – films that all sections of thefilm-going audience will want to see.

The figures speak for themselves: 17 of the top hundred grossing films of alltime are animated films made in the last20 years. The Shrek franchise alone hasgenerated more than $2 billion, withanother film on the way. Not thatanimation hasn’t been profitable before:in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfsbecame the highest grossing film of its time.But is today’s headlong rush towardstechnical and commercial advancementdestroying a beloved art form?

Walt might indeed be rolling in hisgrave – or perhaps fridge – at the notion ofa motion picture ‘franchise’ (Snow Whiteand Seven More Dwarfs?) but he wasalways an astute businessman. The ongoingtension between artistic excellence and

commercial success has been hardwiredinto Disney’s history ever since its founderwalked out on a deal with Universal Studiosbecause they took the rights to his character,the unfortunately named Oswald theLucky Rabbit. (In a symbolic gesture, theDisney company recently bought backthe rights to Oswald, which had becomea sort of animated Elgin marbles.)

And despite the romantic notion thatlovely hand-drawn ‘2D’ has been driveninto extinction by the robotic ‘CGI’(computer-generated imagery), the art ofanimation has always been affected bythe science. The success of Snow Whitecan be attributed in part to the inventionof the multiplane camera, a device thatallowed animators to create a morelayered, three-dimensional look. In thelate 1950s, the development of xerographymeant that animators’ drawings nolonger had to be hand traced on to a cel.This had an enormous visual impact, ascan be seen on the first film to use it,101 Dalmatians (1961). And by the 1990s,so-called ‘traditional’ animation wasalready using CGI to create special effectslike the ‘deep-canvas’ style of animationused in Tarzan (1999). Each innovationinevitably affects the look and feel ofanimated film, and in so doing leaves aset of traditionalists behind.

It’s when technology becomes a lazyreplacement for good storytelling that

THE MOUSE THAT

ROAREDHOW FEATURE ANIMATION BECAME BIG BUSINESS

Mark Burton gives his personal view

animation runs into trouble. Disney itselfhas suffered several periods of creativetorpor, not least after the deaths of Walt andRoy Disney in 1966 and 1971 respectively.By the 1970s, the ‘Mouse House’ , as Disneywas affectionately known (‘Mouschwitz’was the non-affectionate version) seemedmore concerned with real estate thanfilm-making. Many believed the goldenage of animation was over but, like MarkTwain, news of its death had been greatlyexaggerated. A new ‘Team Disney’ wasbrought in, headed up by Michael Eisnerand a young workaholic executive calledJeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg’s mantrawas: ‘If you don’t come to work onSaturday – don’t bother coming in onSunday. ’ Over the next decade a newgolden age emerged, featuring a series ofhit movies like The Little Mermaid (1989),Aladdin (1992) and, of course, The LionKing (1994). Disney’s resurgence was sosuccessful that the 1990s were dubbedthe ‘Disney Decade’ .

Yet the idea that two mammoth egoslike Eisner and Katzenberg could fulfiltheir ambitions in the same company wasa contradiction in terms – much like thegiant dwarfs attached to the Disneybuilding in Burbank. The two men fell outand ended up in the courts, Eisner allegedlydeclaring to anyone who would listen,‘I think I hate the little midget’ . Myth hasit that Katzenberg got his own back by

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basing Shrek villain Lord Farquaad onEisner, but at least he was magnanimousin victory. ‘Show me a good loser, ’ helater remarked, ‘and I’ll show you a loser’ .By then Katzenberg had headhunted thecream of Disney talent and formedDreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielbergand music magnate David Geffen (henceSKG). Interestingly for psychologists, thefirst animated film at DreamWorks wasThe Prince of Egypt (1998), the story of aJewish prophet who leads his people offto a new life away from oppression.

But as Katzenberg parted the 134Freeway and led his people across fromBurbank to Glendale, the beginnings ofan even more profound revolution weretaking place across the state. Let’s scrollback again to the late 1970s. TwentiethCentury Fox were going through a roughpatch, and their CEO Dennis Stanfill wasdesperate to shut down production on asmall film that was eating up money onspecial effects, a film he was sure was adud, a film called ‘Star Wars’ – confirmingWilliam Goldman’s rueful summing-upof Hollywood expertise: ‘no-one knowsanything. ’ The troublesome special effectsin question were ‘motioncontrol cameras’ ,devices that used computers to automatethe movement of tracking shots. The resultswere amazing, and the idea that new-fangled‘computers’ could be used in film-makingwas established. George Lucas saw thefuture and in 1984 set up a division ofLucasfilms to look into computerised

Disney recently bought back fromUniversal the rights to Oswald theLucky Rabbit, which had become asort of animated Elgin marbles

‘’

special effects. He brought in a younganimator from Disney called John Lasseter.

Mac guru Steve Jobs took on thedivision, which became known as Pixar.We’ll fast forward through nine years oftechnical problems and financial failureto 1995, when the first ever animated filmshot entirely on a computer – Toy Story –took the entertainment world by storm.Pixar had arrived, and has never left.Despite the visual impact CGI had on itsaudience, it was Lasseter’s skill at tellinggreat stories that ensured Pixar’s success.Lasseter always maintained that therewas no such thing as a bad idea – only anundeveloped one. He formed his own‘Creative Brains Trust’ of directors, storyartists and writers, and encouraged hisfilm-makers to collaborate. Pixar didn’tjust create great stories for kids – they hada knack for tapping into the primalconcerns of modern parents too: empty-nest syndrome (Toy Story); our stiflingoverprotectiveness (Finding Nemo, 2003);

even our fear of touching children incase we’re accused of being monsters(Monsters, Inc., 2001).

Pixar carried the torch for animationwhen, once again, other studios seemedto lose their way. After a series of flops,Disney threw in the towel on traditionalanimation and even sold off its traditionalanimation equipment, no doubt leading toa flurry of bids on eBay. Warner Brotherspacked in animation altogether,disheartened by the failure of the hugelyunderrated Iron Giant (1999). DreamWorks,too, came close to bankruptcy.

My own adventures in animation datefrom around this time, when I began workingat the DreamWorks campus in Glendale.Back then the studio was still under thespell of 1990s Disney, and many projectsstuck to the old house-style. Certain clichéstended to pop up, like the wise old king/tribal-elder character, usually voiced by aHollywood grandee like Morgan Freeman.This character often had a rebellious and

Still from the Wallace and GromitTV short, A Matter of Loaf andDeath (2008), created by Nick Park.© Aardman Animations Limited2008.



feisty daughter. He was always holding uphis hand – or paw – and saying ‘Enough!’in a voice full of gravitas. The daughter/princess/ Inca priestess was in lovewith a young heroic hothead, who wasaccompanied by a ‘comic-relief’ charactersporting an arbitrary New York accent andsaying things like, ‘it’s showtime!’ Thestories were sub-Kipling in nature andfeatured animals with meaningless nameslike Rena, Maya, Taro or Takume – neverTed, Sharon or Gary, as if animals only givethemselves names like the pupils of a Swissfinishing school. Dialogue was a mixtureof faux Shakespeare and Native American:

‘Takuma – you talk like the wind!Too much bluster, and always changingdirection.’

‘But Father …’ ‘Enough!’After a succession of box-office failures,

DreamWorks Animation had an existentialcrisis so severe that they organised a specialretreat for key personnel, a period of

reflection in that well-known spiritualmecca Palm Springs. What was goingwrong with their films? They came backhaving decided that their films lacked‘heart’ – presumably the runner wasdispatched to the film store in Glendale tobuy a bulk order of ‘heart’ , which was tobe tipped into all their films at the earliestopportunity. This is the problem withanimation – it can’t be forced. Or rather itcan, but it shows. John Lasseter believesthat passion comes from allowing film-makers to make films they believe in, thatthey themselves would want to watch.‘Guess what? The rest of the world wants towatch those films too. ’ Every Pixar releasehas been number one at the box office.

DreamWorks did eventually find itsidentity. When I was on the campus,every animator you bumped into at thefree ice-cream machine would bend yourear about a dead-end project they wereworking on called ‘Shrek’. The projectlimped along in the doldrums for manyyears, but then something clicked. It founda new, refreshingly irreverent tone. Shrekwas quite literally a monster hit, andsuddenly there was a new house-style.CGI wasn’t just a new format; it was a newway of thinking. Animation films neededto be smart, sophisticated, contemporary,aimed not only at grown-ups as well aschildren, but at grown-ups who didn’teven have children. As writers working inthe medium, we never ‘wrote down’ to aperceived young audience. We worked onstories that entertained us.

Shrek was the breakthrough film forDreamWorks. Alongside a succession ofPixar smashes, animation was back on top.A fledgling studio called Blue Sky had abreak-out hit with Ice Age (2002). Suddenlythere was a new gold rush going on. EvenPhil Knight, the Nike tycoon, set up a CGI

studio, as if expertise at making trainerswas the perfect foundation for a career inanimation (in fact, their first picture,Coraline, 2009, has been well received).

But as with all gold rushes, not everyonefinds the gold. Technological advanceshave, if anything, served only to make theprocess more expensive, more long-windedand more fraught with risk. The averagefull-length Hollywood animation takesfour to five years to complete, is extremelylabour-intensive, and rarely costs lessthan $150 million – or the equivalent of$1.7 million per minute of animation. Mosttime-consuming of all, before even a singleframe of animation can be started, is themysterious process known as ‘development’ .Animation studios have an insatiableappetite for new material. Developmentteams scour the known universe, buyingup publishing rights or ‘properties’ ,reading comic books, pillaging old stories,newspaper articles, whatever it takes. Buta large proportion of these supernovafilms just have to be dreamt up out ofthin air in a creative ‘big-bang’ moment.

So it is that, a few times a year,DreamWorks organises what it calls a‘round table’ , an in-house tribal gatheringof creative brains. A few days after beinginvited to one of these meetings, a packageturns up on your desk with various randomitems like pictures of marmosets, thesynopsis from a Japanese Samurai film,and a DVD of the film Stage Coach. Thecurrency of animation films is the bigidea – the one-liner, the ‘high concept’ ,a film that can be expressed in a sentence.For this reason, round tables often used tofeature a sort of animation parlour gamethat involved grafting together a classicfilm, a breed of animal and an exoticlocation. Before you scoff – remember,there’s no such thing as a bad idea – someof these chimeras have been extremelysuccessful: ‘The Magnificent Seven withinsects, set in a termite heap’ (A Bug’s Life);‘The Great Escape with chickens set in theNorth of England’ (Chicken Run); ‘Hamletwith lions, set in Africa’ (The Lion King), toname but a few. Some are less successful.‘The Guns of Navarone, with elephants’sadly didn’t make it. (Wannabe animationwriters take note: animals are currentlyout of fashion in feature animation.) As formy own role in these round tables, anyideas I had were generally lost to posteritythanks to my mumbling English accent.

Round tables at DreamWorksfeatured a sort of animation parlourgame that involved grafting togethera classic film, a breed of animal andan exotic location

‘

’

A multi-plane camera, which revolutionised‘traditional’ animation when it was

introduced in the 1930s.


THE MOUSE THAT ROARED


According to the meeting transcriptions thatwere circulated afterwards, my contributionscould usually be summarised thus:‘Mark Burton: “What if there was a huge(indecipherable) after which the marmosetssuddenly (indecipherable) could be hilarious!”’

Yet out of a ragbag of half-bakednotions, film-title swapping and awkwardsilences, an idea would suddenly takeflight, giving birth to an animated motionpicture that could make hundreds ofmillions of dollars.

One thing animation does not do isstand still. Just as CGI shook up theanimation industry in the late 1990s, standby for another big shake-up: 3D. Yes, awhole new dimension is being added toyour films. This year’s Monsters Vs. Aliensis one of the first feature animations to haveactually been shot in 3D – ‘authored in the3D format’, to use the parlance – andfrom now on all DreamWorks’ films willfollow. In a few years’ time, anyone withsmall children or grandchildren can expectthe suggestion of a trip to a traditionalCGI film to be greeted with groans ofdisappointment. The future is coming, andonce again a set of traditionalists will beleft behind as technology takes animationto yet another brave new world.

So is there a future for the old formats?Certainly, the old-style ‘ink-and-paint’technique still survives in the brilliantlyidiosyncratic films of Japanese directorHayao Miyazaki, who became the posterboy for traditional methods when hedeclared in 2008 that ‘hand drawing onpaper is the fundamental of animation’.

Nearer to home, although Aardmanhave CGI films in the pipeline, theircelebrated ‘Claymation’ looks set tocontinue, thumbprints and all, under theauspices of Nick Park. In a medium that isnotoriously labour-intensive, stop-frameanimation is one of the most intensivemethods of all, the nearest thing animationhas to heavy industry. Everything you seein an Aardman film actually exists, notonly the puppets, which are about teninches tall and a combination of plastic,foam latex and Aardman’s own ‘aardmix’plasticine, with armatures that can bemoved in precise ways (the eyes are movedwith pins), but also the amazingly detailedsets and props. Multiple teams ofanimators (there were more than 20 filmunits on Curse of the Were-Rabbit, 2005)sweat away for long hours in the studio,coming up for pie and chips at lunchtime, and heading back to the factory

floor in the afternoon with the hope that,if they put in enough overtime, theymight just complete a five-second shot ofWallace lifting his arm by the end of theweek. But all the hard work pays off: thesheer visceral quality of this form ofanimation is hard to beat.

Meanwhile, the apprentice tookover the sorcerer recently when Pixartook control of Disney’s ailing animationdivision. John Lasseter’s first act was toexcise what he called ‘corporate-executiveculture’. He has retooled Disney as a‘film-maker led studio’ and – revealingly –the company has gone back to its roots.This year they are releasing a traditional2D animation feature called The Princessand the Frog. If this film is a success,2D animation may yet survive inHollywood.

At the height of his power, Walt Disneyfamously warned the world of animation –and perhaps himself: ‘Never forget it all began with a mouse. ’ However it allbegan, it is certainly not about to end. The genre will continue to regenerateitself with Dr Who-like regularity. Onething won’t change: for all the princes andprincesses in the magic kingdom, it iscontent that will always be king.

In a suburban house in Philadelphia, aworld away from the CGI factories ofHollywood, Paul and Sandra Fierlingercontinue the tradition of 2D animation.They may work on computers, butevery one of the 60,000 or so individualdrawings that went into their forth-coming feature-length adaptation ofJ.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956)was drawn and coloured by hand. It isperhaps appropriate that Ackerley’sobsessive and highly literary account ofhis relationship with an Alsatian bitchhas been brought to the screen in thislabour-intensive and beautifullycrafted way. Although, as the creditsproclaim, ‘No paper was used for theanimation of this film’, the look of themovie is deliberately painterly, withpencil-lines and brush strokes clearlyvisible. It is no coincidence that PaulFierlinger began his career in his native

Czechoslovakia, which has a longtradition of experimental animatedfilm-making. While My Dog Tulip isfar more sophisticated than thoseblack-and-white animated shorts thatwere always shown before the mainforeign-language features at the late

lamented Academy Cinema on OxfordStreet, it shares their graphic wit andinventiveness. No committees, no‘development’, no pandering to thechild in us all: just two people creatingan animated film for grown-ups.

Peter Parker

MY DOG TULIP

© 2009 by Paul & Sandra Fierlinger



HIDDEN CORNERS

AN IRISH

TANGLEveryone’s London Library isdifferent, since, quite evidently,all readers have different circumstances, tastes anddesires. The circumstances of my

life are a little complicated geographically.I am resident in a far corner of Kent – theseaside town of Deal, between Canterburyand Dover – which is nearer to Francethan to London. As a journalist and writer,much of my work is in Ireland, and Irelandis the focus of my historical interest. Myfamily circumstances make it awkward tobe in Ireland as much as I would like tobe, but I do need to have access to a widenumber of Irish books, and books on Irishsubjects, and I need them, usually, forseveral months at a time.

Time and time again, the LondonLibrary has yielded, from its long andcrowded bookshelves, just that Irish bookI have needed and been looking for. I’vebeen astonished by how wide the choiceis, and how far the reach, of the Librarystock on subjects Irish and Anglo-Irish. Of course there are all the standard historical texts, but it is often the quirkyones that I relish most: for example, T.P. O’Connor’s Memoirs of an OldParliamentarian, published in 1929,which recounts his days first as a destitutejournalist in the Fleet Street of the 1850s(explaining that journos drank a lot atthe Cheshire Cheese pub because they

couldn’t afford to eat), and then the glorydays as an Irish Nationalist Party MPunder Charles Stewart Parnell. The book isthere, along with T.P.’s study of Gladstone’sparliament of the 1880s, Gladstone’s Houseof Commons.

Another enjoyable find was Sir HenryRobinson’s Memories: Wise and Otherwise(1923), recalling his jaunt around Connachtin 1903 with Edward VII and QueenAlexandra, in which the king, popular withthe Irish for his love of the turf, and hisrelaxed attitude to Catholicism, was greetedin a small Co. Galway village with a banner:‘Welcome to King Edward – Friend of OurPope. ’ Another great read is Terence deVere White’s beguiling biography of KevinO’Higgins (1948), with his extraordinarydescription of the Irish Free State’s mostoutstanding minister dying at the hand ofan assassin with consummate grace – hisjob was done, he said, his time had come.De Vere White flourished as a writer inthe age of the general intelligent reader,rather than the academic specialist.

It is so satisfying to happen upon amemorable book, such as León Ó Broin’sstudy of the British Liberal politicianAugustine Birrell (1850–1933), The ChiefSecretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland(1969). Ó Broin writes illuminatinglyabout the bookish Mr Birrell, who wasblamed by the government in London for‘allowing’ the 1916 Irish rebellion. But the

Mary Kenny

Above Detail of 19th-century Irish cottage.Opposite, left to right R.B. McDowell's books

Grattan: A Life (2001); Land and Learning:Two Irish Clubs (1993); McDowell on

McDowell: A Memoir (2008).© Lilliput Press.

E

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anguished Birrell was at the time watchinghis wife dying slowly from a brain tumour(the doctors pulled out all her teeth – in apre-anaesthetic era – in the daft belief thatit would relieve pressure on the brain).

I am in Dublin once a month, andusually work in the National Library there,but I am so grateful to have found suchexcellent sources, in the London Library,as Eunan O’Halpin’s meticulous study ofthe British administration in Ireland, TheDecline of the Union: British Governmentin Ireland, 1892–1920 (1987) and DeirdreMcMahon’s unsurpassed 1984 study,Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-IrishRelations in the 1930s.

There are several terrific books byR.B. McDowell, a historian with a minorcult-following; his work has most recentlybeen published by a small and fastidiouspublisher in Dublin, Lilliput Press.McDowell is a venerable professor fromTrinity College Dublin, now in his nineties

and still with us, whose own memorystretches back to the days when the oldSouthern Unionists held sway in thegroves of Irish academe, and who hascharted their poignant decline and decaywith such grace and elegance, notably inhis Crisis and Decline: the Fate of theSouthern Unionists (1997). There is alsohis Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs(1993), an idiosyncratic study of great oldDublin clubs, the Kildare Street and theDublin University Club, once repositoriesof what Dubliners called ‘relics of aulddaycency’ and now passed into history.McDowell’s valuable study of the IrishConvention of 1917 (The Irish Convention1917–18) is no end of a lesson in history:here was a doomed talking-shop, wherewell-intentioned men believed that ifLiberals just came together to negotiatesensibly, then the ‘Irish question’ wouldbe resolved. They would go to any lengths,said the various parties, to help a stable

democracy come to Ireland – except, ofcourse, allow a woman to act as chairman!(The historian Alice Stopford Green,1847–1929, had offered her candidacy).

For many writers and researchers,there is the need for standard texts on theirsubject, but also for the more eccentricand unusual literature, too. I am verypartial to forgotten memoirs of old Irishand Anglo-Irish squires and squireens,with their droll little vignettes aboutpig-sticking in India in the 1870s andhard-riding hunting in Ireland thereafter,such as Lord Castletown’s Ego, publishedin 1923. Barney Castletown spoke Irishand sometimes got himself up in ‘Celtic’dress – a kind of kilt rig-out – but likemany of the old Southern Unionists hewas a disappointed man at the end of hislife. In a similar category is ChristopherLynch-Robinson’s The Last of the IrishR.M.s, published in 1951. All these booksnestle in the biography section: such joywhen your eye falls upon such out-of-the-way volumes that you thought you wouldnever encounter. It is comforting to thinkthat, although so much of most lives isforgotten, those who have committedtheir memoirs to print are still there, ondeposit, in the London Library, awaitingtheir date with destiny – the reader whorediscovers them!

My most recent focus of research hasbeen the relationship between the British

I am very partial to forgotten memoirs of old Irish and Anglo-Irishsquires and squireens, with their drollvignettes about hard-hat riding

‘’



monarchy and Ireland (from the reign ofQueen Victoria). I did much of the primary-source research at the Royal Archives atWindsor Castle, but for the hinterland ofall that was occurring between Irelandand England from 1837 until the presentday, nearly all my source material is to befound at the London Library (with somesupplementary backup from the NationalLibrary of Ireland, Dublin, and the RoyalDublin Society library). Those who havetaken the trouble to stock the LondonLibrary with its complement of books onIreland and the Irish have taken a widearc, and – an important point with Irishhistory and culture – have been sure toinclude every point of view. There arevoluminous stocks on the Fenians, onHome Rule (a rich deposit of nineteenth-century material both for and against it),on Irish Republicanism, Irish moderatenationalism, Ulster Unionism, Irish politicsof every shade, and Irish religious historyof every shade too.

Then there are so many valuable bookson Irish history and antiquity, going backto the fifth century. There are sagas andancient texts, the Annals of Connacht (from1224 to 1544) and of course all of the elegiactitles by William Edward Hartpole Lecky(1838–1903) on Ireland’s eighteenth century. There are books on land war andeconomic war; theatre and poetry, andeven a small amount of literature in theIrish language itself; and any amount of biography. The selection includes, naturally,novels and literature from the key Irishwriters: everything you could want onW.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and thecomplete works of the Irish novelist KateO’Brien (1897–1974), who was oncetremendously popular (remember how,in the 1945 film Brief Encounter, the CeliaJohnson character is just popping intoBoots’ library to get the latest Kate O’Brien).I can see why the London Library has hadto expand: it rarely discards books fromits collection, and that is hugely important.

The beauty of a library is not just gettingaccess to the great and important texts,but keeping them.

There have been so many books onIrish themes from the Library’s collectionthat have been helpful and illuminatingto me over the past few years, but I willfinish with three in particular. Perhaps themost authoritative book I have consultedin my own field of interest is James H.Murphy’s matchless study of nationalismand monarchy in Ireland during the reign ofQueen Victoria, Abject Loyalty: Nationalismand Monarchy in Ireland during the Reignof Queen Victoria (2001). Dr Murphy is anacademic at the University of Chicago,but his study was published by CorkUniversity Press, and it is an extraordinarilythorough text, written with great clarity.

I have great affection for two morepersonal works, nestling among theshelves of ‘History: Ireland’. One is ShaneLeslie’s The Irish Tangle for EnglishReaders (1946). Leslie was a cousin ofWinston Churchill (their mothers weresisters), but on his father’s side, he waspart of the well-regarded Leslie family ofCo. Monaghan, who sold all their carriagesto feed the poor during the Irish famine of1845–9. Leslie became a Catholic and an

advocate for Ireland to those Englishmenand women who found the countrybewildering. The other is G.K. Chesterton’sChristendom in Ireland, a benign andcharming account of the great WorldEucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932and published in the immediate aftermath,when the leading Catholic ecclesiasticsfrom all over the world congregated inDublin. Chesterton has such a gentle eyefor paradoxical Irish humour: he recountssitting next to a woman on a Dublintram who is wondering if the fine weatherwill break during the great celebration.‘Well, if it rains now, ’ she remarks of theAlmighty, ‘He’ll have brought it onHimself!’ All, and so much more, at theLondon Library for those exiles of Erinneeding to water their roots.

The Library rarely discards

books from its collection, and

that is hugely important

‘’

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) in his maturity.

This autumn, the London Library is investing in the 9-volumeDictionary of Irish Biography, edited by James McGuire andpublished in November by Cambridge University Press. It is thefirst comprehensive and authoritative biographical referencework for Ireland, and has been compiled under the auspices ofthe Royal Irish Academy. It will be available online via theLibrary website, and covers 9,700 lives with biographies rangingfrom 200 to 15,000 words, compiled by 700 expert advisers andcontributors. Subjects include writers, artists, scientists, lawyers, actors, musicians,sporting figures, politicians, criminals and saints; and twentieth-century literary figures include Molly Keane, Francis Stuart, Brendan Behan, Sam Hanna Bell, KateO’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Denis Devlin and Brian O’Nolan. We expect it to be avaluable addition to the Library’s Irish collection.

Dictionary of Irish Biography





SIMON CALLOW IN DISCUSSION WITH ERICA WAGNERThe Times Literary Editor Erica Wagner talked to writer, actor and director Simon Callow atan informal evening in the Library’s Reading Room recently about his life and writing

Erica Wagner: Simon Callow is a man of many talents: an actor, of

course, but most significantly, here at the London Library, a writer.

He’s written biographies of Orson Welles and Charles Laughton,

about his friendship with the theatrical agent Peggy Ramsay in

Love is Where it Falls, and Being an Actor and Shooting the Actor,

about his experience in the acting profession.

Simon Callow: Thank you, Erica. I’m here to talk about books in

my life, and, I suppose, about myself as a writer. That’s all I ever

wanted to be – a writer – long before I wanted to be an actor.

I’d like to start where it starts for all of us, which is reading.

It came to me oddly, and a little later than it does to many people.

My mother was a school secretary in an educational establishment

in Goring-on-Thames. She went there when I was five years old

and left when I was seven years old, and part of her salary at this

place was my education. It was a curious establishment called

Elmcroft School, run by a man rejoicing in the almost Dickensian

name (for a schoolmaster) of Roland Birch. It was mostly a regular

local school for kids from the area, but it was a boarding school

as well, and there were children there from diplomatic families,

mostly South American. During the summer, Spanish students

came to brush up their English before going on to Oxford or

Cambridge. Roland was very passionate about Spain and the

Spanish language, which is indeed what he got his degree in at

Oxford before the war. He was also very passionate about

Generalissimo Franco. I understand that he’d actually gone to

Spain to fight on Franco’s side, which was a slightly unusual

choice in 1937. His mother was an elderly cockney woman,

generous in form and hirsute of chin, an extraordinarily loving

and kind woman. It was on Mrs Birch’s lap that I learned to read,

and I remember it vividly – I was six or something like that. It didn’t

come to me easily – there were those big picture books with words

you had to tick and so on. I remember sitting with her in a sort of

meadow on a summer’s day, when she said, ‘Well that’s it – you

can read, you clever boy’. So I ran to tell my mother, who said:

‘You now have a key with which to open the treasures of the

world. ’ And I thought, that’s good, and from then on I started to

read voraciously, insatiably, every book I could lay my hands on.

Of course I wasn’t reading Wittgenstein; I was reading whatever

children’s books I was given. There were, in my day, rather

wonderful things like the Schoolboys’ Paper, I think it was called.

It was a very serious publication – a proper newspaper for lads.

And every year I used to get given a Schoolboys’ Pocketbook,

which was a book of facts, mostly proving that Britain was the

biggest and the best in every possible way, and the centre of the

civilised world. And I cherished that greatly.

One of the things Mrs Birch had given me was an appetite for

the theatre. She let me listen with her every week to the play on

the radio. The first play I ever saw – I choose my words advisedly

– was on the radio, sitting on her lap. It was Macbeth. It filled my

mind with images that I have sought for the rest of my life to try

to reproduce on stage myself, a kind of dream-like idea of what

Macbeth was – I hardly understood a word of it, I’m sure, but I got

the atmosphere of the play tremendously well. That stayed with

me, so when I eventually came to the age when I could start to

read Shakespeare, I plunged in and did a lot of reading the stuff

out loud without, again, for the most part, having the slightest

idea what it was about. But it moved me deeply and I wept

copiously, mostly moved by my own brilliant acting-out of the

characters, so reading the text of a play has never been an obstacle

for me. For many actors, odd to relate, reading a play is quite

hard work. For me it was the easiest thing on earth – I could see

them the moment I read them, I got the characters and could

imagine the set and so on.

One of the few authors my mother was enthusiastic about

was George Bernard Shaw, so I read all of Shaw’s plays before

I was 12 or 13. I’d read them with their prefaces, and all his

political writings as well, so I was not at all badly stocked mentally

from a literary point of view, though books were never discussed

or thought of during my childhood, and I cannot recall anybody

in my family ever buying a book. And somehow, somewhere

along the way in the midst of all this, I conceived the idea that I

wanted to write. So I started to make notes, the way we probably

all do, to write diaries and to describe my inner life to myself and

so on, obviously without any thought to it being read by anybody

else; in fact, with the deep hope that nobody else would read it.

I should also explain that I lived in Africa for three years from

the age of nine, in what is now Zambia and was then Northern

Rhodesia. I was kind of horrified, to be candid, by Africa: the heat

overwhelmed me completely and I was too young and too fat to

be able to enjoy it. I was sent P.G. Wodehouse books from England

to cheer me up, to remind me of the old country. I think reading

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him was my first perception of

the idea of style in writing.

There was a kind of perfection

on the page – it had a music

that was so exquisite and

endlessly funny, and I thought –

yes, that’s right, what I really

should be is a comic writer.

I wrote little things for

myself but never showed them

to anybody. I also developed a

passion for writing letters to the

papers. In fact it was because

of a letter I wrote many years

later that I became an actor.

This letter was to Laurence

Olivier. Having seen his work

at the National Theatre, I wrote

him three closely typed

foolscap pages explaining to

him why the National Theatre

was so good. He was very kind

and wrote back to me inviting

me to go and work there in the

box office, which I did. That

set me on my professional path.

But I was writing all the

time. I sold my precious

collection of LPs so I could buy

an electric typewriter. It was an Olympus, and I was tremendously

proud of it, and started writing at great length. When I left school I

was certain of only one thing in my life – that I was going to be a

fine writer. I was also certain that I did not want to go to university,

which seemed to me a place where you sat around and analysed

and did anything but actually lived, which was the thing that I

was rather keen to start doing. I also needed to get some money,

and I went back to a place that had a huge influence on my life, a

bookshop in South Kensington called Oppenheim and Co. It had

three divisions, but the one that I knew about and was interested

in was the second-hand bookshop. It was absolutely everything

that you could dream of in a second-hand bookshop, like

something out of Balzac or indeed Dickens. It was just made of

books and it smelled of books, and it had a basement that was

incredibly damp and so that wonderful smell that comes off damp

books was present all the time. It was run by a curious individual

called John Moss who was small, very quietly spoken, with a skimpy

beard and an especially big walrus moustache. I went into John

one day and told him I was looking for a job, and he said, ‘Well

come and work for Oppenheim’s’. I thought this was fantastic, I

could work here in this shop, and so he said come and meet Oppy.

Oppy, the boss, was a tiny little Glaswegian of, I think, Lithuanian

extraction, with pebble glasses and a big cigar. He gave me a job

in the wholesale division, which was basically Mills & Boon, and

I used to have to carry huge

piles of Mills & Boons from one

shelf to another. It was of course

very demoralising, but there

were other books apart from

Mills & Boon, and that was

when I first got my lust for

new books, because I got a

massive discount; I think the

first new hardback I ever

bought was Quentin Crisp’s

The Naked Civil Servant. It was

extraordinarily thrilling to have

that on the shelf. But working

there cured me of the romance

of bookselling. As for writing,

I was very conscious of a thing

that hit me every time I tried

to write – namely, that I had

absolutely nothing of interest

to say, even though I was

getting quite skilful at saying

that nothing.

From Oppenheim’s I went

to the National Theatre,

where I worked in the box

office and for the first time

met actors, and suddenly saw

that it might be possible to be

an actor. There was no drama at my school, so I didn’t know

whether I could act or not, but I’d always been a bit of a show-off.

I felt that at the age of 19 I was too old to go to drama school,

and so I thought I should go to university but only in order to act,

and so I did just that, very, very badly. I went to Queens University

in Belfast, which was wonderful in its way, but I left after nine

months to learn about acting, which I did at a remarkable drama

school called the Drama Centre, where I had a gruelling but

wonderful training, and was very lucky – I started working

immediately and worked pretty well round the clock as an actor

from 1973 when I left drama school until about 1982, when I

deliberately took some time out to go to Santa Fe in New Mexico

with a small group from the National Theatre to do some

teaching and directing.

I had by now already started to write the odd piece for the

London Evening Standard. I’m not sure how that came about –

I think some publicity person had said they could get the Standard

to commission me to write something. I got published quite

often in the paper, and got rather good at writing obituaries of

actors, a melancholy job, but in some ways a rather focusing

one: you have a short space of time in which to say quite a lot

about someone.

Then everything started to happen at once. I formed an

intense friendship with one of the most remarkable women in

Simon Callow in the role of Pozzo in the production by the Theatre RoyalHaymarket, London, of Waiting for Godot, directed by Sean Mathias, 2009. © Sasha Gusov.



the British theatre, the play agent Peggy Ramsay, and when she

discovered that I wanted to write she was all encouragement.

But not indulgence: Peggy’s writers used to tremble when they

had a new play. You’d bump into one of them, and say ‘How’s

the new play going?’, and they’d say, ‘Oh, it’s finished, it’s

finished.’ You’d say, ‘Have you shown it to Peggy?’ ‘Not yet. I

haven’t quite got around to showing it to Peggy – I will … ’

It was like going to the headmaster or something. Eventually they

would give her their play and she would denounce it, unerringly

analysing what was wrong with it, how far it fell short of its

potential, how completely it betrayed its author, and so on, and

then they’d write it again, and it would be much improved. So it

was with great trepidation that I handed her my first piece of

writing, which was about J.P. Donleavy. She took off her spectacles,

with one hand on the arm of the chair and her face to the page,

and said, ‘Did you mean it to be so boring?’ It was all the adverbs

that she objected to. Then she seized on a phrase I had written:

‘Donleavy is a bit of a Ming vase. ’ ‘Have you ever seen a Ming vase?’

she said. ‘No, I’m not sure I have. ’ ‘They’re very sturdy, you know. ’

Which was the exact opposite of what I had wanted to say. From

then on Peggy became this kind of tremendous eye on my writing.

By now I’d done things like Amadeus at the National Theatre

and was getting to be quite well known, and I was asked to talk

to the English Society at Goldsmiths College. I knew exactly what

they wanted – a bit of gossip. They wanted to know what it’s like

acting with Paul Scofield, and what it’s like snogging Felicity

Kendal on stage night after night, things like that. But I had a

much more ambitious purpose – to describe what the theatre is

like from an actor’s point of view. So I sat in the boardroom of

the National Theatre for weeks, writing furiously on the back of

old scripts, and then I staggered off to Goldsmiths College and

started reading this immensely long anatomy of the theatre.

Quite baffling it must have been, and I only got about a tenth of

the way through when my hour was up and I scuttled off to light

applause. But I saw that in the audience was Peggy. I hadn’t invited

her but she was sitting there, disguised as Peggy Ramsay – she

wore a strange, diaphanous kind of veil that she thought rendered

her incognito, but everyone knew it was her. The following day she

said, ‘Quite interesting, dear, and what about the rest of it?’ So I

said, ‘Well, read it’, and gave it to her, and then I went to Santa Fe

to do this teaching and directing. She told me she’d sent it to Nick

Hern, who was then head of drama publication at Methuen and

therefore the most powerful theatre publisher in the land. He said

he liked it but that it was the wrong length: it was too short to be

a book, but rather too long to be an article. Perhaps, he said, I’d

like to get together with a number of other actors of my generation

and create a kind of compendium of theatre writing, or perhaps

I’d like to write a book of my own. And I said I’ll write a book of my

own, thank you very much, and that’s how I landed the contract

for my first book Being an Actor. And I suddenly realised I had

found my subject, at last, and that now I did have something to

say. I wrote the book in three weeks. I handed it to Peggy, and

she was very critical of certain aspects of it, but I knew that she

was wrong and that I’d written it exactly the way I wanted to

write it. She said, ‘Well, Nick will never take it in this state,’ but

he did: he took it without demur. This is obviously not a story

against Peggy; it’s just a story of what happens when you finally

find your own voice or subject. The first thing you learn is how

to relate to your audience, and so in a way it’s an actor’s process.

After that the floodgates were open. I’ve never attempted

fiction – I haven’t quite the courage to do that yet, although it’s

sort of brewing in me – but I’ve written 11 books since then, and

probably the happiest time of my life is when I’m writing. There’s

no satisfaction in my experience to compare with it, getting

closer and closer to what it is you want to say and entering – in

my case: I’ve written quite a lot of biography – into the minds

and the lives of other people. My definition of acting has

always been that the job is to think the thoughts of other people

– to actually think them – and in a sense biography is in the

same territory.

For me libraries have always been cherished places, and just

down the road from my grandmother’s house in Streatham was

the Tate Library. There are several Tate Libraries around London

– the sugar magnate had endowed them – there’s one in Brixton

and there are others, and that library was a heavenly place to

me. I visited it again a while ago: it’s tiny. I had no conception of

that at the time; it seemed to be on such an epic scale, with a

great big green dome. But I felt a profound sense of satisfaction

in this library – it was friendly and generous, and a sacred place

in a way. It was also a very secret place and one that I don’t think

anybody could fully know; no single member of the library could

possibly explore all its riches in their lifetime. For me a library is

glorious and inexhaustible, and I am greatly honoured to have

been asked to speak in this room in the London Library to you

this evening.

Simon Callow. Copyright © 2007 Kevin Davis,Imagecounterpoint.com





The Restoration is one of

those periods where myth

and fact are hard to

separate. On 29 May 1660,

350 years ago next year,

Charles II returned to

London after his years of

exile. It was considered, by

most people, a glorious

return. He had landed at

Dover three days before

and his progress to the capital was extraordinary: Lady Fanshawe,

who had been in exile with the royalist court, said that the crowds

lined the road all the way from Dover to London as if it was one

great long street. He stayed two days in Canterbury and a further

night at Rochester so that he would arrive in London on 29 May,

his thirtieth birthday. When he came to the south side of London

Bridge, he removed his hat and rode bare-headed over the bridge

into the city. It was an act of theatre. Charles II was a great

performer and his return was superbly staged. He rode through

the city slowly, and the crowds gathered so that at some points

the procession amounted to about 20,000 people. John Evelyn, a

committed royalist, wrote in his diary: ‘I stood in the Strand, &

beheld it & blessed God, and all this without one drop of bloud,

& by that very army, which rebell’d against him: but it was the

Lord’s doing, et mirabile in oculis nostris: for such a Restauration

was never seene in the mention of any history, antient or modern,

since the return of the Babylonian Captivity, nor so joyfull a day,

& so bright, ever seene in this nation’ (The Diary of John Evelyn,

London 1955). Some members of the crowd, however, simply

spat and swore. There was a clash from the very start.

The subject of this piece is not the achievements of Charles II’s

reign, but the impact of the contemporary public images of the

Restoration. I have always been drawn to this period because of

its vivacity and tension, but what spurred me to write was an

experience in our own times, the scenes that surrounded the

changes of regime in Eastern Europe in 1989, the crowds in the

THE RESTORATION: TRIUMPH OR FAILURE?

ANNUAL LECTURE 10.06.09JENNY UGLOW

streets, the candlelit demonstrations, the belief that life would

change for the better. The year 1660 seemed the only comparable

moment in British history. In February this year, we saw a nation

demoralised, crying for change, a young hero whom many never

thought could take power, the capital thronged with jubilant,

weeping, laughing crowds. The sense of a sea of hope was

extremely moving. I draw no analogies, other than the spectacle

of that moment. But in all cases, the vital question is, can the new

leaders succeed? Can they defeat the ghosts of the past, and the

entrenched vested interests, or the powerful groups who want to

capitalise from the present flux?

Charles II’s procession through the City of London ended at

the Palace of Whitehall. In a painting attributed to Isaac Fuller

(and sometimes to Dirck Stoop), the scaffolding upon which

Charles will enter the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall deliberately

echoes the scaffolding outside the same building in the famous

print of the execution of Charles I. Charles II is presented as a

sort of reincarnation. Such rhetoric is often applied to him. Evelyn

wrote, in To His Sacred Majesty, A Panegyric on his Coronation

(1661): ‘No sooner did that blessed martyr expire [than] our

redidive Phoenix appear’d; rising from those sacred Ashes,

Testator and Heir; father and yet Son; Another, and yet the Same.’

Charles I had died in January, famously wearing two shirts

so that he would not shiver and appear afraid. He is the dying

winter king. His son Charles II returns in May, the time of blossom.

He is youthful and virile – even his well-known womanising

appears a good omen at this point – and will make this country

peaceful and fecund. Charles’s physical image assumed great

importance. People who had not seen him riding in the great

procession had to read about him, and to judge him by the prints

and portraits that were distributed. One propagandist book,

Eikon Basilike, or the true pourtraiture of Charles II, by Canon

David Lloyd (1660), bore the same title as the book that had

sanctified his father after his death. Charles is, the writer explains,

‘so exactly formed’ that ‘from the crown of his head to the soule

of his foot the most curious eye could not discern an error or a

spot’. He is a fairy-tale prince and, despite the rumours, a sober

028-031annuallecture.qxd 10/9/09 12:16 pm Page 28


king, matured by suffering: ‘Until

he was near twenty years of

age, his face was very lovely

but of late he is grown

leaner with care and age;

the dark and night

complexion of his face,

and the twin stars of his

quick and sharp eyes

sparkling in that night;

he is most beautiful when

he speakes, his black

shining locks normally

curled with great rings …

his motions easie and

graceful, and plainly majestick.’

John Dryden had already

offered Charles a useful image in his

poem Astraea Redux (1660), welcoming Charles to these shores.

The shift to a royal propagandist was a problem for the poet, who

had written heroic stanzas to Oliver Cromwell, and his brilliant

solution was to present the time since Cromwell’s death in 1658

as a period of chaos and of night, over which a sun has now risen.

Astraea is the daughter of Zeus and Themis, the goddess of justice.

She lives on earth with the other gods during the golden age and,

when mankind proves evil and the gods abandon earth, she is the

last to leave, settling among the stars as the constellation Virgo.

Dryden’s reference implies that with Charles’s restoration the

golden age will dawn again. To reinforce this, a painting of Astraea

Returns to Earth by John Michael Wright (c.1660) decorated the

ceiling of Charles’s state bed-chamber.

It is hard to imagine Charles taking this altogether seriously.

His manner was wry, tongue in cheek, sceptical. And the king had

to work with stern practicalities. From the start, Charles and his

advisers, chiefly Edward Hyde, later Earl of Clarendon, aimed at a

delicate balance, setting up what has become known in political

terms as a team of rivals, making their intention of unifying the

nation instantly visible. The promises Charles had made in the

Declaration of Breda a month before his return had included a

full pardon to all who appealed to the king within 40 days,

only excepting those who had signed his father’s death warrant.

Secondly, he guaranteed ‘liberty to tender consciences’, unless

differences of religion threatened the national peace. Thirdly came

payment of arrears of army pay. Finally, and very cleverly, he

suggested that all questions regarding the complicated property

deals since 1649 should be resolved by the new Parliament, thus

ducking a dangerous issue. Charles genuinely wished to heal the

divisions, but the balance of affiliations in his new administration

was so noticeable that it aroused deep resentment in many

royalists who had followed him back from exile.

Ceremonies were key devices for enforcing the power and

mystery of the crown. Just before the Restoration, Charles’s old

tutor Henry Cavendish, later Duke of Newcastle, sent Charles a

long letter of advice. ‘Ceremony is nothing in itself, yet it doth

everything’, he wrote, ‘for what is a King more than a subject,

except for ceremony and order? When that fails him, he’s ruined.

The cloth of estates, the distance people are with you, great officers,

drums, heralds, drums, trumpeters, marshall’s men making

room and crying, “now the King comes”. Even the wisest, though

he knew it and was accustomed to it, shall shake off his wisdom

and shake for fear of it. You cannot put upon you too much King

(Thomas P. Slaughter, ed., Newcastle’s Advice to Charles II,

London 1984).’

In the role of the Healing King, Charles made ostentatious use

of public spectacle. One example was his immediate, large-scale

resumption of the ceremony of touching for the King’s Evil.

Thousands flocked to him in these first months. As Charles

literally touched his subjects, he was seen as being ‘in touch’ with

them, in terms of understanding their needs, while retaining the

magical, semi-divine power that traditionally surrounded the

monarch. To take the idea of the ‘People’s Prince’ still further,

Charles made potent use of a different legend, which he set in

Below The Cavalcade through theCity on the eve of the Coronation, 22 April 1662, 1662, by Dirck Stoop.Bridgeman Art Library, London/Museum of London.

Opposite Charles II, c.1662, by Sir PeterLely. Bridgeman Art Library, London/National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.Above Astraea Returns to Earth, c.1660,by John Michael Wright. BridgemanArt Library, London/ NottinghamCastle Museum.



motion even before he landed, on

the boat carrying him back from

exile. On the voyage he told the tale

of his escape after the Battle of

Worcester in 1651, when he

travelled around the south of

England for six weeks disguised as a

servant, welcomed by innkeepers

before he found a boat to take him

to France. It was as if he realised

that this stirring yarn could prove

useful, making him appear both

intensely human and special, saved

by Providence from his pursuers.

Afterwards, Samuel Pepys

recorded how he and a few others

sat in the cabin all night and talked

about the King’s travels: ‘as how he

was fain to eat a piece of bread and

cheese out of a poor boy’s pocket;

how, at a Catholique house, he was

fain to lie in the priest’s hole a good

while’. The humanity that the tale

revealed cloaked Charles as he

landed, at least in the view of Pepys,

who followed him ashore in a small

boat, which also carried a royal

footman and ‘a dog that the King loved (which shit in the boat,

which made us laugh and me think that a King and all that

belong to him are but just as others are)’ (25 May 1660, from The

Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. R. Latham and W. Matthews, vol.1,

London 1970). Charles would repeat the story of the escape from

Worcester to the end of his life. It immediately became the stuff

of prints and paintings including an extraordinary set of huge

canvases by Isaac Fuller, apparently designed to hang like

tapestries around a dining room or salon.

At the same time, he appealed to the nobles by re-establishing

the ceremonies of the Garter Knights, and no expense was spared

for the ceremony 18 months later, marking his coronation on

23 April 1662, St George’s Day. On the eve of the ceremony, he

also used spectacle to embrace those people who were vital for

the practical success of his project; the merchants and money

men. Many leading merchants were Puritans, Presbyterians and

former supporters of Cromwell. To woo them (although the City

actually footed the bill) Charles staged a ‘cavalcade’ through the

City, reviving a ceremony from Tudor times. Great triumphal

arches were erected and all the different livery companies

addressed the King, including the East India Company, which

took the opportunity to stress the importance of international

trade. In Dirck Stoop’s painting of the procession, Charles rides

in the centre wearing his plumed hat, while James, Duke of

York, riding before him, and General Monck following behind,

as Marshal of the Horse, are both bare-headed. He could now

assume a certain power, keeping

his hat on, even in the city.

Countering the image of the

healing king, the other persona that

Charles needed to promote, to

satisfy his royalist followers, was

that of the avenger. It was a difficult

juggling act, since he had to balance

the need to achieve peace against

his perceived duty to avenge the

wrongs against the crown,

particularly the death of his father.

In his speeches he urged Parliament

to pass the Act of Indemnity and

Oblivion as quickly as possible.

This roused intense resentment

among some royalists, who joked

about it being the ‘Act of Indemnity

to his Friends and Oblivion to his

Enemies’. To appease them, while

he fought against his Parliament’s

desire to widen the list of exceptions

to the act, he encouraged the

speedy trial and execution of the

principal regicides. This too was an act of theatre, staged for the

crowds and broadcast in the popular prints and in newsletters.

The trials were held in October 1660, followed immediately by

the grisly hangings, drawing and quartering. To committed

royalists, this was a just act. ‘I saw not their execution,’ wrote

John Evelyn in his Diary, ‘but met their quarters, mangld & cutt &

reaking as they were brought from the Gallows in baskets on the

hurdle: o miraculous Providence of God.’

The atmosphere of righteous vengeance was, however,

undermined by the moving speeches of the men about to die.

‘Where is thy Good Old Cause now?’ someone shouted at

Colonel Harrison. ‘Here in my heart,’ he replied, ‘and I shall

carry it with me to the great beyond’. Within a few days,

sympathy began to swing to the people who were being executed.

The executions were stopped. This was not, I think, an act of

clemency, but of practical politics, as Charles’s sudden changes

of position so often were.

A tremendous amount of overlapping imagery, rhetoric and

symbolism thus accompanied the royal return, powerfully and

rapidly embedded in the national consciousness. But Charles

also took a riskier route. From the start, he undercut the mystical,

sober royal image, by indulging the licence of his court. Yet

perhaps this too was a deliberate ploy. The startling manners of

his followers allowed Charles to declare, implicitly, ‘I am not a

reincarnation of my father. This is a new court. I have been in

Europe, I have seen what is happening, I know the new ideas,

The Touching for the King's Evil, 1662, byWenceslaus Hollar.


ANNUAL LECTURE


I know the new styles. I am going to take Britain forward. And

what’s more, I’m going to do it informally, without the grandiose

manners of the previous court.’ He was careful to employ

magnificence where appropriate, but he also let his courtiers

duel, gamble and flaunt the Paris fashions. His new patent

theatres, with their shocking women actresses, were a venue for

propaganda and a bridge between the court and the town, a site

of constant gossip. News of court doings spread throughout the

country through the official journals, newspapers and unofficial

newsletters. In London itself, he lived in public. Crowds watched

him playing tennis at Whitehall. They watched him dining,

walking, skating and sailing his new yachts from Holland.

Eventually such novelty would work against him: the licence

of the court was too scandalous, too Francophile, too papist.

But the new style was a way of insisting that although the aim

was to restore the monarchy, the waters had not closed over

the last 28 years since the start of the Civil Wars. Times and ideas

had moved on, and it was more important to look forward than

to look back. One example of the new mood was Charles’s

patronage of the Royal Society. In the frontispiece to Thomas

Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667), a rather quizzical bust

of Charles, as founder, stands on a plinth, with the President,

Viscount Brouncker, on one side, and Francis Bacon on the

other. Like several of his leading courtiers, who had studied in

Leiden and Paris during the exile, Charles was personally

interested in the new ideas, in astronomy, clocks and pendulums,

and in chemical experiments. And in its underlying ethos, the

society echoed his own hopes for the country. Robert Boyle’s

New Experiments Physico-mechanical was published in 1660,

the year of the Restoration. Boyle, like Charles, was also keen to

form a team of rivals, including people with different ideas,

winning round opponents rather than alienating them.

‘Quarrelsome and injurious words must be abjured,’ Boyle wrote,

‘and courtesy is vital … for if I civilly endeavour to reason a man

out of his opinions, I make myself but one work to do, namely, to

convince his understanding; but, if in a bitter or exasperating way

I oppose his errors, I increase the difficulties I would surmount,

and have as well his affections against me as his judgment.’

This is the kind of model that Charles had hoped to apply

to the difficult questions his government had to solve, particularly

the vexed question of religious differences. In this field, Charles

failed. Constant, if exaggerated, fears of uprisings, combined

with his hopelessly weak financial position that made him

reliant on the good will of Parliament, forced him to accede to

the repressive laws against Dissenters that became known as the

Clarendon Code.

The first Restoration decade was also blighted by the plague,

the Fire of London, and war against the Dutch, while the later

years of Charles II’s reign, until his death in 1685, were

overshadowed by Protestant desires to exclude his Catholic

brother James from the succession. Charles’s dynastic loyalties

turned him into a monarch struggling with his parliament rather

than working with it. In 1688 James II would leave England, and

the Protestant William and Mary would take the throne.

In many respects, Charles’s hopes for the Restoration were

unfulfilled. Curiously, his lasting legacy stemmed from his casual

interests – the Royal Society, the theatre, racing, sailing, the

parks – the very idea of leisure, and public style. But one major

achievement was his reinstallation of the theatre of royalty and its

central symbol, the crown. I was struck, when watching Ian Hislop’s

televised history of the Poet Laureateship, by Ted Hughes’s

comment, ‘it seems to me that the crown is the sort of symbol

of the unity of the tribe, or rather the spiritual unity of the tribe.

When that is outmoded the Laureateship is outmoded.’ But, he

added, ‘it seems to me that that is a permanent value’. This value,

of course, depends on what ‘tribe’ one belongs to and what kind of

unity one hopes for. Some of us may feel that some incumbents

of the throne have been more like Hughes’s terrifying old pike,

swimming in the pool that is ‘as deep as England’. But in one

respect the poet was right. The merry monarch, the man with the

plumed hat, did not triumph, but the crown itself has endured.

This is an abridged version of the lecture, held at the Royal

Geographical Society.

Below The Fire of London from Ludgate, c.1667, Anon. Bridgeman Art Library,London/ Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Mellon Collection.



MEMBERS’ NEWSUNDERSTANDINGTHE LIBRARY’S FINANCES

BE: What are the costs associated with the day-to-day runningof the Library? I L : Well, in the year to 31 March 2009 our core operating costsamounted to £3,121,744, with staff costs (salaries, NationalInsurance, pension contributions and so on) accounting fortwo-thirds of that sum. After all, service is at the heart of whatwe do, and that mainly means people. It may be more helpfulto divide the total costs into 8 segments relating to the actualwork of the Library.

With the exception of Reader Services where the cost liesentirely in the staff who help members directly (whether presentin person or contacting us from home or work), each of thesesegments represents a mix of staff costs and direct expenditure.For anyone interested, the breakdown between them is shownin full in note 5 to the financial statements in the Annual Report.

Buildings and Facilities covers all the costs of utilities, rates,insurance, cleaning, janitorial supplies, postage, general stationery,and essential maintenance and repairs, with staff working in

shifts to provide full support services and security for over 68hours each week.

Cataloguing is another labour-intensive task and most of thecost lies in the team of staff who are transferring titles fromthe older printed catalogue to the online catalogue and thoseadding the details of all new acquisitions. Between them theyadded over 50,000 volumes to the online catalogue this year,including significant numbers in French, German, Italian,Russian and Spanish as well as English.

In Acquisitions, 64% of the spending is directly on librarymaterials, from books and pamphlets to periodicals (over 800)and electronic resources. The actual value of our new publicationsis much higher than the figures suggest, thanks to the booksthat are presented to us and to generous discounts from anumber of publishers.

The task of binding and preserving the Library’s hardworkingcollections falls to the Preservation and Stack Managementdepartment, which is also responsible for ensuring that booksare returned promptly to the shelves and that good order ismaintained there.

While the cost of electronic resources is covered by theAcquisitions budget, the infrastructure cost lies in the IT segment.This includes the equipment and specialist software necessary torun our online catalogue and book issue system, the accountingsystem and membership database, website, email and internetaccess, and the basic office software we rely on today – all runand maintained by just two staff.

Membership appears as a separate segment for the firsttime this year following the transfer of responsibility forstaffing Reception from the Building and Facilities departmentto the Membership Office, which itself formerly came underthe heading Finance and Administration. Membership costs nowalso include the marketing of the Library and the costs of ourcommunications with members (helpfully offset in part byadvertising revenue from the Library magazine). In previous years,marketing and communication costs were largely charged toFundraising. Finance and Administration now covers the financeand accounting staff, audit and other professional fees,recruitment, training and governance costs, as well as the salariesof the Librarian and Deputy Librarian who don’t entirely fitanywhere else.

2009 Core expenditure (Total £3,121,744)Membership£271,9089%

Buildings andFacilities £639,05021%

ReaderServices£487,66016%

Acquisitions£417,17613%

Binding, Preservationand StackManagement£295,2759%

InformationTechnology£192,0786%

Finance andAdministration£451,63114%

Cataloguing andRetrospective Conversion£366,96612%

OUR NEW CHAIRMAN, BILL EMMOTT, EXPLORES SOME KEYFINANCIAL INFORMATION WITH THE LIBRARIAN, INEZ LYNN

032-037.Members News Final.qxd 10/9/09 11:56 am Page 32

2009 Core Funding Sources (Total income £3,077,242)

2008 Core Funding Sources (Total income £2,659,373)

Deficit fundedfrom reserves£44,5021%

Revenue donations and legacies £265,7629%

Revenuedonationsand legacies £474,722217%

Investment income£296,0779%

Membership income£2,515,40381%

Membership income£1,853,09866%

Investment income£331,55312%

Deficit funded fromreserves£134,7261%

BE: What about fundraising costs?I L : At present fundraising costs are met from the DevelopmentAppeal Fund rather than from core operating income, since thebuilding development project is the main purpose for which weraise money.

BE: That’s all very clear, but I see that while core expenditurewas £3,121,744, core income was only £3,077,242. How worriedshould the new Chairman be?... I L : Any deficit is a worry, but the gap has at least narrowed. I think it’s worth looking at where our core income comes from,and how that has changed.

As you can see above, there has been a significant improvementin the last year, with total core income up £417,869 (15.7%) onthe previous year despite a lower contribution from investmentincome, and donations and legacies in absolute and percentageterms. The contribution of membership income rose from 66%to 81% as a direct result of the exceptional fee rise implementedin 2008. The benefit of that rise was a much-reduced deficit forthe year. This can only be good news because a deficit in anyyear means reducing the Library’s reserves.

This year, as you say in your Chairman’s letter on page 5,the trustees have decided that the fee should not be raised, ashad previously been envisaged, in recognition of the fact thatmembers have had to endure highly disruptive building worksand that the recession is putting pressure on all of us. Nevertheless,the Library is going to have to work hard to sustain the recentimprovement in its finances. This can only be achieved by acombination of strict cost-control and of increases in fee incomethat match the Library’s specific inflation rate. Fee income can beincreased in two ways: by attracting a lot of new members; or byraising the fees; or, most likely, some combination of the two.

BE: What do you mean by the Library’s inflation rate?I L : As I said at the start, some 66% of the Library’s costs are

related to salaries, and salaries in all sectors tend to rise slightlyfaster than background inflation rates. This, coupled with highongoing price rises in some other areas of the Library’s expenditure(notably on periodicals where annual inflation has been runningat over 9% for many years) and the constant demand frommembers for additional and enhanced services, means that theLibrary’s costs always grow somewhat in excess of the usualexternal indicators such as Retail Price Index or Consumer PricesIndex. We must therefore balance the cost to members with theneed to ensure that the Library continues to survive. Of course,for those members who would struggle to afford the fullmembership fee we are able to offer Carlyle Membership,which offers exactly the same benefits but at a fee reduced bybetween 30% and 60% according to need. Some 4.4% ofmembers now benefit from this scheme.

BE: How is the building work funded?I L : No part of our core income is used for the building developmentproject. At the outset the purchase of the building to form

Trusts, Foundations and Gifts over £1 million

The LondonLibrary

2007 Members’Appeal andIndividual Giftsunder £1million

Contributions to the Development Fundas at July 2009



T.S. Eliot House was made possible by the Library contributing£5 million from its own reserves. All of the work since then hasbeen paid for as a result of fundraising for the DevelopmentAppeal Fund, which as of July had brought in £19,463,710.

BE: As a member since 1998, I already know how muchmembers treasure the Library for all sorts of different reasons.Is there anything members can do to help us?I L : Remaining in membership and encouraging others to join is areally important way to support us. Members are often surprisedto learn that we have quite a high turnover of members fromyear to year. Many people join because they are working on aspecific project and when that is over they may drop out ofmembership for a few years and perhaps return later. In any oneyear, then, we may need to find as many as 900 new membersjust to stay at the same overall membership level. But there are allsorts of different ways of helping and we have put a list in theAnnual Report this year which we hope will spark off a few ideas.

BE: What of the longer-term funding of the Library? What’s the plan?I L : Although we must of course remain flexible, the trusteeshave established a number of underlying principles for the currentand future funding of the Library:

FUNDING PRINCIPLESOur long-term objective is to build membership numbersto the point (c.9,000 members) where the Library’s core running costs can be covered by fee income alone.This will allow other income and donations to be invested to fund future service improvements and to respond to threats and opportunities that may arise. We expect, however, that it will take some years to reach that point.

We are committed to continuing tight control of expenditure budgets, seeking the best value for money and treating member services as a top priority.

Future fees will be set so as to keep our income in line with necessary increases in core costs. Two-thirds of these costs relate to salaries and therefore tend to rise faster than general inflation.

We will continue to seek charitable donations in support of the Library’s aims from members and other benefactors in order to help fund major capital improvements and generate ongoing revenue income.


MEMBERS’ NEWS




DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND

Double Elephant FolioMrs T S EliotThe Monument Trust

Atlas FolioThe Foyle FoundationThe Foundation for Sport and the Arts

Elephant FolioThe Eranda FoundationLady GettyThe Horace W Goldsmith FoundationThe Oppenheimer Family (in memory

of Harry Oppenheimer)The Wolfson Foundation

FolioThe Blavatnik Family FoundationPeter JamiesonThe Rothschild FoundationKarsten Schubert

QuartoDr Penelope McCarthyClive Richards OBE DL

OctavoThe Hon Mrs J C T Astor (in memory

of Michael Astor)Nicholas and Judith GoodisonRosemary JamesThe Michael Marks Charitable TrustThe Runciman Charitable TrustSir Tom Stoppard OM CBE

DuodecimoDavid and Lucy Abel SmithStephen BensonSir Jeremiah Colman Gift TrustHer Grace the Dowager Duchess

of DevonshireLord and Lady EgremontAlan Gregory CBEMrs Janet HamiltonAnthony HobsonDr Penelope HorlickThe J P Jacobs Charitable TrustJaney KingLionel LeventhalGita MehtaJohn MorganSir Jeremy and Lady MorseThe Viscount NorwichMrs Isabel RaphaelReuben FoundationMartin and Margaret RileyMark StoreySir Roy StrongAntonia TillThe Zachs-Adam Family Fund

SextodecimoThe Marquess of AngleseyJennifer AntillDavid AukinProfessor Sir Alan BownessSebastian BrockDr Anita Brookner CBEMargaret BuxtonChristie'sGerard ClarkeRichard and Ann ColeTrevor Coldrey

The O J Colman Charitable TrustHelen CorlettGraeme CottamFriends of Croydon LibrariesCurtis Charitable TrustBarbara CurtoysSir Geoffrey De Bellaigue GCVOJane FalloonPeter FirthJames FisherJudith FlandersGiles FlintRichard FreemanMichael GainsboroughMelanie GibsonDr Eva GilliesThe Worshipful Company of GrocersMartin HaddonGodfrey HodgsonSir Alistair Horne CBEAshley HuishTerence Jagger CBEAlan KeatThe Rt Hon The Lord Justice LongmoreMiss F M LoughnaneLord Lyell of Markyate PC QCJohn MadellMarsh Christian TrustJohn Massey StewartHenry McKenzie-Johnston CBKevin MurphyDavid Nash-BrownMike Nichols and Diane SawyerPaicolex TrustLady PartridgeStephen PlaisterW G Plomer EsqSonia PrenticeClive Priestley CBRobert RenakJanet RenniePeter RowlandSir John SaintyKeith SissonsThe Lady Soames DBECaroline De SouzaDr Gerassimos SpathisChristopher SwinsonJerry WhiteAnn WilliamsAnthony J T WilliamsReverend Anthony WinterSir Peregrine Worsthorne

BOOK FUND

CanonLuke Johnson

CiceroKarsten Schubert

Great PrimerSir Tom Stoppard OM CBEMark Storey

NonpareilMadeline,Countess of BessboroughRichard GreerJane GregoryGeorge LoudonAlison Walker in memory of

Claudio Lo BruttoYuen Wei-Chew

GENERAL DONATIONS

Professor Miriam AllottAnnabelle BartonMartin BeaverDerek BlackThe Blavatnik Family FoundationPaul BunnageMary BurgoynePaul ByrneSimon CallowElizabeth Cassie in memory of

Peter MillerRichard DarganRonald EdwardsSusan GilmerThe Gladys Krieble Delmas FoundationPamela GrahamRichard GreerPatrick HerenRichard HowardProfessor Ioan and Mrs Rosemary JamesThe Hon Sir Mark Lennox-BoydRosalind LevinRobert MacLeodDr Louis MarksThe Mercers’ Charitable FoundationThe late Peter MillerGeoffrey NicholsonPhilip PercivalThe Philanthropic SocietyDavid RedfernDr Robert ReekieSheila RhodesProfessor Henry RoseveareLily SafraLady Sainsbury of TurvilleOliver Schneider-SikorskySchroder Charity TrustDavid SherlockA SokolovRobert TainshElwin TaylorDr William Van Der KlootPatrick White

DONATIONS IN MEMORY OF SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON

The trustees are grateful for donationsreceived from the following in memoryof the Library’s Vice-President, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who died on16 March 2009:

David GelberSir Max and Lady HastingsDame Jennifer JenkinsThe Dowager Marchioness of

NormanbyGill and Charles PerrinThe Lady Soames DBESotheby’s

They are grateful, too, to those whohave made donations to theInternational Friends of The LondonLibrary in support of The LondonLibrary, and to those who have continued covenants or made arrangements for Gift Aid donationsto the Library.

Thank you to all those members whohave supported the Library through theuse of the Everyclick search engine andthe donations of survey participationfees from Ipsos Mori.

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTSThe trustees are most grateful to all the donors listed below, who have made contributions in the year ended 31 March 2009 either for specific purposes or towards the general running costs of the Library:

LEGACIES

The Library received pecuniary legacies from the following deceasedmembers and friends to whom thetrustees are most grateful:

Elsie R DorranceSophie FlowerAngela LambertRevd G B E Riddell

The literary estates of John Cornforth,Sir Philip Montefiore Magnus-Allcroftand Ian Parsons have provided incomefrom royalties.

DONATIONS OF BOOKS

Thanks are also due to various government and official bodies, learnedsocieties, institutions and firms, andother libraries and publishers whohave given their publications, and tothe many donors of books and otheritems listed below:

Jeremy AdlerAkademie der Wissenschaften und

der Literatur, GöttingenAkademie der Wissenschaften und

der Literatur, MainzThe late Dr David AldridgeAnn AllestreeProfessor Michael AlpertAmici Thomae MoriLinda AndersonThe Angela Thirkell SocietyThe Anglo-Hellenic LeagueThe Anthony Powell SocietyAntiquarian Booksellers AssociationAntique Collectors' ClubArchivio di Stato di PratoThe Art FundArts Council EnglandNeal AschersonAnthony AstburyHelena AttleeProfessor Ivan Avakumovic AzamPeter Bagwell PurefoyRosemary BaileyStella BakerDavid Baldwin in memory of

Alan SmithBernd BallmannBarbados Museum and Historical

SocietyNicolas BarkerTamima Bayhom-DaouAlan BellHazel BellYasha BeresinerBernard Quaritch LtdDr Thomas BewleyHilary Beyer in memory of

Ralph BeyerLady Rachel BillingtonLord BinghamJulia BlackburnD BlakeRebecca BlighPatrick BonarJohn BookerMark BostridgeDr Simon BradleyRuth BrandonThe British LibraryEleanor Bron


MEMBERS’ NEWS


Richard BronkRoderick Brown The Browning SocietyBrian Buckley Katherine BucknellColin Budd The Burney SocietyJohn BuryThe Byron SocietyRoberto CalassoCambridge University LibraryDr Lionel CarterCassleton Elliott & Co LtdDr Hugh CecilSir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Bt The Chartered Institute of LinguistsChris Beetles LtdRupert Christiansen Christ Church LibraryChristie'sThe Churches Conservation TrustCivic Archive of BozenProfessor Christopher ClayAndrew Clayton-PayneJohn Cloake in memory of

Margaret Morris CloakeGerry ColdhamDiana ColdicottAdeline CollierDr Roger CollinsJohn Colvin Dr Alistair CookeProfessor Maria CorciuloRoger Crowley The Worshipful Company of CutlersDr Richard Davenport-HinesBarbara DaviesDavid Llewellyn Davies in memory of

Jeffery RossiterAnna de Chassiron in memory of

Deane de ChassironAnne de CourcyLeanda De LisleDerbyshire Archaeological & Natural

History SocietyProfessor Isabel De MadariagaRodolph de SalisCatherine DonnerDownside AbbeyDr Alexander Drace-FrancisThe University of DublinSally and David DuganJulian Duplain Dr Brent ElliottEmbassy of Finland, LondonBill EmmottEnglish HeritageEuropa Nostra UKJulian EvansCarolyn EzekielDavid Faber Faber & FaberThe Fabian SocietyMichael FardellPeter Fawcett Ferriday EnterprisesPeter Firth Winston FletcherFolio SocietyProfessor Michael Foot CBEThe Foreign & Commonwealth OfficeRosemary FostDr Paul FoxPeter FraenkelFelix and Dick FrancisThe Francis Brett Young SocietyFriends of Canterbury CathedralFriends of the Dymock PoetsAlan FysonBamber GascoigneDr Michele GillEd GlinertJon R GodsallLivia Gollancz

Robert Gomme CBDr Ronald GrayJonathon GreenGrosvenor GalleryGraham GuestRobert GwynneProfessor Alastair HamiltonSir Richard Hanbury-TenisonDr Kris HardinSir Max HastingsJohn HavardMark HichensPamela HillProfessor Jocelyn HillgarthDouglas HillsMichael HobkirkPeter HoltMeredith HooperMaureen Hornsey in memory of

Alan HornseyDr J T HughesCarl HuterDonald InsallIstituto Italiano di CulturaPeter JamiesonProfessor Anne JanowitzKate JenkinsThe Jewish MuseumJohn Buchan SocietyDavid JonesDenis JonesThe Joseph Conrad Society (UK)Michael KatakisJonathan KeatesKeats Shelley Association of AmericaKeats Shelley Memorial AssociationDenis KeelingDr Margaret KekewichDouglas KempSusanna Kemp in memory of

Mrs Doreen KempMary KennyThe Kipling SocietyKongelige Danske Videnskabernes

SelskabMrs Ann Laughton in memory

of Guy NicholsonDr Gordon LawrenceDr Jennie LebelJohn LeeLeo Baeck Institute LondonJason LeverThe Library of CongressFergus LinnaneSir Michael Llewellyn-SmithGweslan LloydThe Lobanov-Rostovsky FamilyThe Lodge of Antiquity, No 2London Review of BooksDr R T Longstaffe-GowanInez LynnMacmillanJohn ManMarc Fitch FundJennifer MargraveAnthony MartinPamela MaryfieldThe Massachusetts ReviewChristopher MastersDavid McAlpineKinn McIntoshIan McIntyreDavid McKieGiles MiltonDr John MonksAndrew MoodyProfessor Maureen MoranKeith MorganRichard Morris OBESimon MorrisLady Belinda MorseVladimir MitrokhinHarry MountPeter Mountfield

Mummery + SchnelleMuseo Nacional del Teatro, SpainCharlotte NassimThe National GalleryThe National TrustNevill Keating McIlroy GalleryNew StatesmanRobert NoelAlex Noel-TodSebastian NokesJeremiah NolanNotes and Queries for Somerset

and DorsetRobert OgdenOnline OriginalsProfessor Eric OrmsbyHugh O'ShaughnessyThe Oscar Wilde SocietyÖsterreichische Akademie der

WissenschaftenBarbara OvstedalCount Stephen PalffyPeter ParkerDr Erminia PassannantiThe Paul Mellon Centre for Studies

inBritish ArtAnthony PayneMaurice PeartonPenguin Group UKPhaeton PressAndrew PhillipsChristopher PhippsDr Jan PiggottThe Pilgrim TrustChristopher PotterCecilia PowellClaire PowellRobert PowellElizabeth PowisThe Powys SocietyAndrew PrescottPrestel Publishing LtdJulia PrestonPeter PrewPrinz Albert GesellschaftProQuest Information & Learning

LimitedAndrew PulverPushkin PressJohn PymVera QuinRandom HouseDr Tessa Ransford OBEIsabel RaphaelJoan ReidMajor-General Peter ReidKenneth RiceBronwen RileyAndrew RobertsJohn RobinsAndrew RobinsonLord Rodger of Earlsferry, PCSusan RonaldAndrew RoseGrace RoseRoyal Academy of ArtsRoyal Agricultural Society of EnglandThe Royal Anthropological InstituteThe Royal Artillery InstitutionRoyal Collection Enterprises LtdRoyal Horticultural SocietyThe Royal SocietyRoyal Society of LiteratureClaudia RubensteinThe Rupert Brooke SocietySan Marco PressJem SandfordSandilands PressDr Ann SaundersCommander Michael Saunders WatsonClive SavilleReverend Oliver ScallanKarsten SchubertThe late Mary Scott

Lord and Lady ScottShaker Media GmbHAnn ShearerJohn SheppardDavid SherlockSiegfried Sassoon FellowshipMartin SixsmithHugh SmallPoppy SmithSociety of Antiquaries of LondonSociety of AuthorsSociety for Psychical ResearchThe Society of Women Writers and

JournalistsSotheby'sDr Frances SpaldingMargaret SparksMartin SpellmanLilian SpencerAlison SprostonTom StaceyLouise SteinStephen Ongpin & Guy Peppiatt,

Fine ArtTimothy StevensFrancine StockMark StoreyLord and Lady StrabolgiGeoffrey StrachanJonathan SumptionVirginia SurteesSussex University LibraryLydia SysonTate GalleryElwin TaylorNeville Teller MBEV M ThomasThomas Lovell Beddoes SocietyLord ThomasJ K Robert ThornePeter ThoroldAnn ThwaiteProfessor Lisa TicknerThomas TimminsCount Nikolai TolstoyPatience TomlinsonTower Hamlets Library ServiceThe Trollope SocietyTurkish Consulate GeneralDr Barry TurnerDr Ralph TurveyUniversity of the Arts LondonPeter UrbachDr William Van der KlootVirago Press / Little Brown BooksMichael VoggenauerChristopher WalkerLesley WardleProfessor Marina WarnerJeremy WarrenWilfred WebberJane WeeksSara WheelerProfessor Sir Christopher White CVOThe Wilkie Collins SocietyChristopher WilkinsThe William Shipley Group for RSA

HistoryAlyson WilsonAndrew WilsonDr Michael WilsonRupert WinchesterSimon WinchesterDonald WintersgillStephen WoodGeorge WoodcockLucy WoodingJoanna WoodsMrs Charles WrightsmanAndrea WulfThe late Elizabeth WyndhamDr Julian WynneYale University LibraryPenny Young



THIS SEASON’S LITERARY EVENTS EMMA HUGHES

OCTOBER

Photographer Sandra Lousada’s exhibitionPublic Faces Private Places at London’sNational Theatre (7 September– 18October, nationaltheatre.org.uk)captures her insider’s view of figures fromthe worlds of literature, the arts, theatreand film including Laurence Olivier, JoanPlowright, Vanessa Redgrave,* Julie Christie,Joanna Lumley and David Hockney. Also onat the National’s Lyttelton Theatre is ThePower of Yes by David Hare,* a no-holds-barred account of the events that led tothe financial crisis (opening 6 October).

At the annual Graham GreeneInternational Festival (1–4 October,grahamgreenefestival.org) inBerkhamsted, Hertfordshire, you’ll be ableto listen to Jeremy Lewis* shedding lighton Graham Greene’s siblings and firstcousins, and Rod Mengham discussing Greenein the 1930s. An exciting new feature thisyear is the one-day writing workshopscheduled to take place on the Saturday,at which the Graham Greene BirthplaceTrust Creative Writing Awards will belaunched.

Highlights at the Henley Literary Festival(1–5 October, henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk)include a theatrical tribute to the late SirJohn Mortimer, a riverside reading byHugo Williams and Lionel Shriver’s takeon the birth of a bestseller.

From just 9 events in 1949 to 440 in 2009,the Cheltenham Literature Festival(9–18 October, cheltenhamfestivals.com)has a spectacular 60th anniversary programme, including events with JohnCooper Clark, Audrey Niffenegger, TracyChevalier, Hilary Mantel, Justine Picardie,Grayson Perry and Michael Palin.* TheLondon Library is delighted to be hosting anevent for the festival, with Selina Hastings*talking about her new biography ofSomerset Maugham on Friday 9 October

at 7 p.m. Younger readers can visit theCheltenham Book It! Festival. TheWellcome Trust will also be sponsoring aseries of lectures examining the relationshipbetween literature and medicine.

In the character of Maigret, GeorgesSimenon created one of the immortals.On 13 October die-hard fans John Grayand John Banville will be launching theNew York Review of Books’ editions ofSimenon reprints at the London ReviewBookshop (lrbshop.co.uk) alongsideEdwin Frank, the NYRB’s Classics Editor.

Margaret Atwood willbe headlining theManchester LiteratureFestival (15–25 October,manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk) with adynamic fusion ofmusic and spokenword, to launch her new novel The Yearof the Flood, which tells the story ofGod’s Gardeners – a religion devoted tothe preservation of all species. During thefestival, the Rainy City will also be playinghost to Martin Amis, Ruth Padel, Will Selfand Eoin Colfer, who’ll be reading fromAnd Another Thing, his 30th anniversarysequel to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’sGuide to the Galaxy.

Leading lights of academia, includingGrey Gowrie,* Derek Walcott andChristopher Ricks, will be coming togetherin October for the first British AcademyLiterature Week (19–22 October,britac.ac.uk/events/2009/literature-week).The programme combines three of theacademy’s established literary lectureswith panel discussions and ‘in conversation’events, and will also feature readings byacclaimed actors in a special Poetry Hour,organised by Josephine Hart. All the eventsare free and are available on a strictlyfirst-come, first-served basis.

All writers affect (and are affected by) theplaces in which they live and work. Thinkof Joyce and Dublin, or Zadie Smith andcontemporary London. For further proof,spend an afternoon looking around theWordsworth Trust’s latest exhibition,Romantic Poets, Romantic Places (25October 2009–14 June 2010,wordsworth.org.uk). Drawing on diaries,letters and manuscripts, the exhibitionaims to examine the impact that naturehas on art, as well as the ways in whichassociation with poets such asWordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Burnschanges the feel of a place forever.

NOVEMBERCalling all Russophiles! The Russian FilmFestival (30 October–8 November,academia-rossica.org, tel. 0871 220 6000)is coming to town. The Apollo Cinema at 19 Regent Street will be premiering 15 award-winning feature films, documentaries and animations, and eachshowing will be followed by a Q&A sessionwith the director and actors. Quote theLondon Library Magazine when bookingtickets to get a 20% discount.

Now in its eighth year, the Swansea-basedDylan Thomas Festival (23 October–10November, dylanthomas.com) keepsgoing from strength to strength. This timeround the theme is the Second WorldWar. Confirmed speakers include Louis deBernierès, Peter Porter, John Fuller and2005 Arts Council of Wales Book of theYear winner Owen Sheers. Poetry Revieweditor Fiona Sampson will also be runninga workshop designed to help aspiringpoets into print.

The Aldeburgh Poetry Festival (6–8November, aldeburghpoetryfestival.org)turns 21 this year, and the best contemporary poets from America, India,Italy, Russia, all over the UK and Ireland willbe there to celebrate. With a huge range of

039_Diary Sept 7th FinalFinal 10/9/09 12:02 pm Page 38


lively workshops, close readings of well-known poems and revealing ‘blind’ criticismsessions, you’ll be continually surprised bywhat’s on offer at this seaside gem.

The likes of Jane Gardam,* Penelope Lively,Libby Purves, John Julius Norwich* andDiana Quick* will also be enjoying thebracing Suffolk sea air at Ways withWords, the Southwold Literature Festival(12–16 November, wayswithwords.co.uk).Why not join them?

* Current Library member

RECENT LITERARY AWARDSCongratulations to the Library memberswho were nominated for or have wonliterary awards since May 2009

Sabina ffrench Blake, Henry Tonks, winnerof the Society of Authors 2009 Authors’Modulation Award.Michael Holroyd, A Strange EventfulHistory, winner of the 2009 SheridanMorley Prize. Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, shortlisted for 2009Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize forAdult books.Andrew Taylor, winner of the 2009Crime Writers’ Association CartierDiamond Dagger, for sustained excellencein crime writing.

The magazine would welcome anyinformation from members who havewon or been nominated for prizes, tobe included in future issues.Please send details to:[email protected]

©Word Box by Peter Everard Smith at the AldeburghPoetry Festival.

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