The London Library Magazine / issue 19
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C ontents
Andrea Stuart examines the dark and fascinating story of sugar, from its slave-fuelled intensive production in Barbados, to the hope of an environmentally friendly future
5 FROM THE librarian 6 Contributors 8 BEHIND THE BOOK Sugar bowl, 1820–30, English, probably Bristol.
16 Artemis Cooper realised what an easy job she’d had writing the life of Elizabeth David, no longer alive when the biographer started work, once she started tackling her next subject, in the living form of Patrick Leigh Fermor. His reluctance to reveal details of his private life often led to some necessarily furtive action.
11 bibliotherapy Miranda France finds García Márquez’s eponymous hero in No One Talks to the Colonel an example to us all in how to cope with an impoverished old age
12 All that Sugar!
Elizabeth David. Courtesy of the Elizabeth David Archives.
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‘Celestial lard’, ‘angelic Adam’s apples’, ‘heaven’s marrow’: Andrea Stuart on the ‘sad and bad story’ of the world’s addiction to sugar
16 AMONG THE QUICK AND THE DEAD Artemis Cooper recounts the challenges she faced when writing the lives of Elizabeth David and Patrick Leigh Fermor
20 travels with my cousin
Graham Greene was determined to test himself by trekking through the uncharted, solid jungle of 1930s Liberia but, unable to face the journey alone, he took his cousin Barbara with him. Mark Baczoni compares their books on the experience.
Mark Baczoni on Graham Greene’s trek through Liberia with his cousin Barbara, and the two strikingly different narratives the fellow travellers produced
24 HIDDEN CORNERS Graham and Barbara Greene, 1935. Courtesy Daily Mail.
24 The Library’s early Italian collections were formed by Thomas Carlyle with the help of Giuseppe Mazzini, a nationalist who realised that even a dictionary could be a political weapon. Lucy Hughes-Hallett describes the highlights to be found, including works by Gabriele d’Annunzio and 33 shelves of Dante’s La Divina Commedia.
The Library’s Art, Biography and History shelfmarks yielded invaluable research material for Helen Rosslyn
After many hours spent researching in the Library’s Italian collections, Lucy HughesHallett tells the story of their revolutionary beginnings
29 A LIFE IN TWO LIBRARIES Paula Weideger describes the powerful effect of two New York libraries on her as a child and an emerging author
32 MEMBERS’ NEWS 38 EATING OUT
Illustration by Adolfo de Carolis, from Gabriele d’Annunzio’s Francesca da Rimini (1902).
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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3
