autumn 2009 Issue 5

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MAGAZINE AUTUMN 2009 / ISSUE 5

£3.50

ANIMATION

Mark 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

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J.B. Priestley stood for a type of Englishness that was plain-spoken and provincial, and very much of its time. Andrew Marr argues that his work is in need of reappraisal

CONTENTS 5 EDITORIAL LETTER 6 CONTRIBUTORS 8 OVER MY SHOULDER Andrew O’Hagan describes his working day and how he uses the Library for research

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Mark Burton examines the state of animation, and considers whether the rush towards technical advancement is destroying the beloved art form that began with Walt Disney

11 READING LIST Selina Hastings selects the books that have helped her with her new biography of Somerset Maugham

12 PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESS Andrew Marr on J.B. Priestley and his particular brand of mid-twentieth-century Englishness

16 THE MOUSE THAT ROARED Mark Burton gives an insider’s view of the feature-animation industry

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From Irish political history to the great and obscure Irish novels and plays, the Library has a wealth of books on the subject for exiles of Erin to water their roots, argues Mary Kenny

20 HIDDEN CORNERS Mary Kenny on the Library’s varied and growing Irish collection

24 SIMON CALLOW The writer and actor in conversation with Erica Wagner

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

32 MEMBERS’ NEWS

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38 DIARY 39 RESTAURANT LISTINGS

The writer, actor and director Simon Callow talks to Erica Wagner about his life-long wish to be a writer, and how his literary career took shape

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EDITORIAL LETTER

FROM THE CHAIRMAN 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 – just this once, she stressed – to introduce myself as the new Chairman of the Library’s trustees. That too is a delight, not least because I spent 26 years working at the Economist, just around the corner in St James’s Street, and have been a member since 1998, so the Library already feels like home. I look forward to meeting members in person 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 Faber will 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 shared between the Library and Dyslexia Action. One of the essayists, Andrew Marr, has written for this issue a delightful article on J.B. Priestley and Englishness. Perhaps such a piece is best written by a Scot.

Cover Image Still from the Wallace and Gromit TV short, A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008), created

by Nick Park. © Aardman Animations Limited 2008.

It is also a delight to bring you two pieces of good news. The first is that, in recognition of the disruption caused by the building works this year and of the pressures of the recession, the trustees decided 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 need more members, or fee rises, or both. Any encouragement you can give to your friends and acquaintances 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 extend the current works to bring forward the refurbishment of the issue hall and to add further reading space, in order to bring Phase 2 to an end next June. Celebrations will certainly be in order.

Bill Emmott Chairman

Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 28 September 2009 © 2009 The London Library.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library. All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Art Direction Cat Cartwright Design Joyce Mason Production Jessica Cash Researcher Emma Hughes

Editorial Committee David Breuer Miranda Lewis Harry Mount Peter Parker Christopher Phipps Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Development Office, The London Library Lottie Cole 020 7766 4716 Aimee Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

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CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Burton

Andrew Marr

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2002

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

Simon Callow

© 2007 Kevin Davis

Andrew O’Hagan JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1980

Simon Callow has recently played the part of Pozzo in Waiting for Godot at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. He has written 12 books, including Being an Actor, Shooting the Actor and Love is Where It Falls, as well as biographies of Oscar Wilde, Charles Laughton and Orson Welles.

He was appointed CBE in 1999.

Selina Hastings

© 2009 by Jerry Bauer

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JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1994

Peter Parker’s books include The Old Lie and biographies of J.R. Ackerley (1989) and Christopher Isherwood, and he writes for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. He worked as adviser to the producers and provided additional dialogue for the film of My Dog Tulip.

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1968

Jenny Uglow

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1992

Mary Kenny has been a journalist and writer, in both London and Dublin, for more than four decades. Her most recent book is Crown and Shamrock: Love and Hate between Ireland and the British Monarchy (2009).

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1997

Andrew O'Hagan has written three novels, Our Fathers, Personality and Be Near Me. His work has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His most recent book is The Atlantic Ocean: Essays on Britain and America.

Peter Parker

Selina Hastings has written biographies of Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh (winner of the Marsh Biography Prize) and Rosamond Lehmann. She is a reviewer for the Sunday Telegraph and the Times Literary Supplement. Her life of Somerset Maugham is published this year.

Mary Kenny

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2002

The journalist and political commentator Andrew Marr currently hosts the BBC One programme The Andrew Marr Show, and Start the Week on BBC Radio Four. His book Andrew Marr's History of Modern Britain was published in 2007.

© Robin Farquhar-Thomson

JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1998

Jenny Uglow is an editorial director of Chatto & Windus, part of Random House. Her books include biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth and Thomas Bewick, and The Lunar Men, a study of eighteenth-century scientists and thinkers. A Gambling Man, her account of Charles II and the first decade of the Restoration, will be published by Faber and Faber in October 2009.

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OVER MY SHOULDER Andrew 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

What are you working on at the moment?

Are you using any books from the London Library in your research, or have you for any 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 you have one? How do you organise your breaks?

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, 8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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© 2009 by Jerry Bauer

Like a good editor, a good library may hold the secret of your potential as a writer

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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 fagsmokers: 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 study books there or take them home? What is your 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 the Library 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 your particular subject from the Library, or do you explore other subject areas?

Do you borrow books for pleasure as well as research?

All books are for pleasure, in my opinion, but I know what you mean and the answer

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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 the Library? 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.

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Do you think there is a typical London Library 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.

Have you made friends or useful contacts 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 any particular 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.

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READING LIST

BEHIND THE

BOOK Writer and journalist Selina Hastings, whose books include biographies 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 and varied. Maugham trained first to be a doctor, then abandoned medicine and became phenomenally successful as a novelist and playwright. He was a talented linguist, and in both world wars worked for British Intelligence.

The Sanitary Evolution of London by Henry Jephson (London 1907). T. London.

Amongst much else, this book gives a factual and harrowing account of the conditions in which the poor lived in the Lambeth slums in South London in the 1890s, an area that became well known to Maugham during his five years at St Thomas’ Hospital.

The Limit by Ada Leverson (London 1911). Fiction.

Ada Leverson, loyal friend to Oscar Wilde, who called her the ‘Sphinx’, was very taken with the young Maugham, and in this novel left a revealing portrait of him as the fashionable playwright, Hereford Vaughan: ‘He was rather secretive and mysterious …’

My Mission to Russia and Other Diplomatic Memories by Sir George Buchanan (London 1923). Biog. Buchanan.

The memoirs of Sir George Buchanan, who was British ambassador in Petrograd when Maugham arrived there in 1917, are written in an attractively dry tone. Buchanan gave Maugham a frigid reception, displeased that this inexperienced amateur should have been sent from London to interfere, as he saw it, in the complex negotiations he was conducting with Alexander Kerensky and the Provisional Government.

Beau Voyage: Life Aboard the Last Great Ships by John Malcolm Brinnin (London 1982). S. Ships, 4to.

This beautiful, lavishly illustrated book is a romantic eulogy to the days of crossing the Atlantic on the great liners, to the

glorious, operatic opulence of the long-gone Aquitania, Normandie and the first Cunarder ‘Queens’ .

Handbook to British Malaya, 1926

by R.L. German (London 1926). T. Malay Peninsula &c.

Some of Maugham’s best short stories were inspired by his journeys through the Federated Malay States, and Capt. German’s Handbook gives a vivid impression of the lives of the expatriate British, their work and recreation, including the all-important evenings at the club, where the planters and their memsahibs came to relax over a couple 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’s plays, Rain, East of Suez and The Constant Wife. It puzzled him that the playwright seemed so detached during rehearsals.

‘Maugham lacked genuine enthusiasm for the theatre,’ he concluded. ‘I think he found the whole business tiresome and the actors’ arguments rather petty.’

Syrie Maugham by Richard B. Fisher (London 1978). Mod., 4to.

A leading interior decorator of the interwar years, Maugham’s wife Syrie became famous for her all-white rooms, much in demand among the rich and fashionable in Britain and the US. The book includes a photo of the drawing room of Syrie’s house in Le Touquet, scene of the final breakdown of the Maughams’ marriage.

Eddie Marsh: Sketches for a Composite Literary Portrait of Sir Edward Marsh by Christopher Hassall and Denis Mathews (London 1953). Biog. Marsh.

Once described as a cross between Puck and Mme de Maintenon, the scholarly Eddie Marsh was for 20 years private secretary to Winston Churchill. As a hobby he corrected style and grammar in the works of his writer friends, Maugham amongst them.

The two men’s irreconcilable difference of opinion over the use of the word ‘luncheon’ is entertainingly recounted here.

Beware the British Serpent: The Role of Writers in British Propaganda in the United States, 1939–1945 by Robert Calder (Montreal 2004). S. Propaganda.

The British government’s extremely delicate task of manoeuvring its most powerful potential ally into the war is fascinatingly documented by Prof. Calder. By the careful deployment of well-known writers, chief amongst them Somerset Maugham, an undercover propaganda exercise of remarkable effectiveness was carried out.

The Golden Riviera by Roderick Cameron (London 1975). T. Riviera.

Roderick Cameron’s mother, the notorious Lady Kenmare, owned La Fiorentina, one of the most fabulous villas in the South of France. Maugham was a neighbour, and Cameron provides a colourful account of the exotic post-war society on the Côte d’Azur and of the luxurious hospitality provided by Maugham at the Villa Mauresque.

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PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESS Andrew Marr

O

nce, and not so long ago, John Boynton Priestley (1894–1984) stood, if not for Englishness, then for a popular and lively version of it. His Englishness was bluff, radical, democratic and sentimental. It was Englishness stripped of Empire, its back turned on aristocracy and the landed classes. It was, like Priestley himself, quietly self-confident and sure it was marching with the grain of history.

Yet it turns out to have been very much of its time. The self-consciously plainspoken ‘common man’ proclaimed a provincial Englishness that belonged not to the ages but only to the mid-twentieth century. The era of Priestley was the era of the triumph of the leftish grammar-school boy, often with northern vowels and a vile, hairy tweed jacket. A.J.P. Taylor, Harold Wilson, Cyril Joad and Richard Hoggart are other emblematic figures from a version of Englishness that stretches, very roughly, from the early 1930s to the early 1970s. Chippy, clever, sentimental, impatient … such men form up in a phalanx hard to name but – well, you know it when you read it. England has since become more knowing, metropolitan, cynical and uncertain.

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

Left John Boynton (‘J.B.’) Priestley, 1949, by John Gay. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

Opposite, left English Journey (1934), 1994 edition. © 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 was interested in England – far less so Scotland, Wales, Ireland or the official framework of the UK state. His English Journey (1934), a remarkable work of reporting but also of insight, took for granted a homogenous country inside the UK. That country has changed hugely, of course. His provinces – the heavyindustrial white working-class North and Midlands, with their serious-minded young clerks, lusting for education and culture – are dead.

Belonging so neatly to his time and place, a natural broad-bottomed man without much inner darkness, he neither travelled well, nor lasted as successfully as did 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 and democratic than ours.

But he wrote too much, didn’t he?

Yes, yes. I have tried to count Priestley’s published works and reckon on 139 books in all. I may be a few out. They comprise not only novels, including science fiction and thrillers alongside the social-realist and fantasy fictions, and collections of his plays, from An Inspector Calls (1946) to the wonderful ‘time’ plays such as Time and the Conways of 1937 (performed this year at London’s National Theatre), but also essays, literary criticism, popular histories, broadcasts, an opera libretto and biographies. He was torrential and at times seemingly ubiquitous, qualities that ensured him the undying dislike of other writers and, no doubt, many readers too.

It’s a record so exhausting it makes Alexander McCall Smith look like a slacker.

Yet the writing was only one part of Priestley’s life, which included relentless public and political position-taking, three marriages, affairs, much broadcasting and fighting service in the Great War, which he was very lucky to survive.

And he was a survivor: part of the awesome output is down to simple longevity. Priestley lived for 90 years. He began in smoky Victorian Bradford and ended after Margaret Thatcher had won her second general election victory. The year of his birth, 1894, saw Gladstone toppled and Queen Victoria opening the

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Manchester Ship Canal. The year of his death, 1984, saw the arrival of the first Apple computer and Madonna belting out Like a Virgin. He was first in print, in a Bradford newspaper, in 1913. From 1922 to 1976, he was continuously publishing books.

Priestley was sensitive to the charge that his productivity made him necessarily shallow, ‘a bovine, hearty sort of ass’.

Defensively, he often returned to the response that Charles Dickens churned them out as well. There was something not just of early Dickens, but of the whole English picaresque tradition, Henry Fielding and William Makepeace Thackeray, too, in his best work. Think of that early blockbuster, the rolling-road entertainment mourning the end of Variety, The Good Companions (1929); or even the darker Angel Pavement, his 1930 novel of clerks and the Depression, well worth rereading right now. I can’t claim to have read most of his novels – and who, these days, can? – but that pair, plus Bright Day (1946), the recently reissued post-war ‘Bruddersford’

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

The Englishness of these books is closely related to the direct reporting of the 1934 English Journey, in which Priestley shrewdly anatomised his country. Such road trips have been done so often since that the radical ambition of this one is easily forgotten. Travelling by bus, tram and train, Priestley divided the country into three – the old rural England; the declining industrial North and Midlands; and the rising ‘third England’ of light industry, and Americanised mass culture, which he loathed. He described it as ‘the England of arterial and bypass roads, of filling stations … of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés, bungalows with tiny garages, cocktail bars, Woolworths, motor coaches, wireless … much of it is simply a trumpery imitation’ . Priestley understood clearly that British industrial decline meant a narrowing of the specific

‘

The era of Priestley was the era of the triumph of the leftish grammarschool boy, often with northern vowels and a vile, hairy tweed jacket

’

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He could have more strictly rationed his talent, avoided the sneers, and prudently kept away from politics. Rather gloriously, however, for his kind of Englishman, such behaviour was unthinkable

smells, tastes and humour of the country.

He was right, and early, and this pessimistic bellowing should convince any reader there was more to him than watery good humour. The story of The Good Companions is also, just below the setpiece humour, a nostalgic lament for the old entertainers being wiped out by cinema and jazz – the end of dusty, medieval roads that had been tramped for centuries.

This side of Priestley bears comparison with George Orwell, a fellow ‘Little Englander’ in the best sense. Both were suspicious of the material consolations to which the lower orders were turning.

However Priestley’s analysis is more realistic than Orwell’s in The Road to

’

Wigan Pier (1937), for all the latter’s statistical and polemical material. He understood manufacturing and industry better than Orwell, and his account of the different texture of English towns is much sharper, too. If you really want a feel of the living England of the interwar years, I’d argue you get it more reliably from Priestley. Orwell was of course a much better writer. His prose is sharper and more ruthless – less ‘prosey’. He and Priestley were similar in their hostility to that ‘third England’, which would become dominant by the 1950s. But Priestley had been brought up around the stinks and the clammy air and was less disdainful than the Etonian class-traveller.

Priestley has been pushed away as Orwell has been elevated, partly because he was the less good writer but also, I’d suggest, because his politics were more consistent and thus less exciting. Orwell has gone down as the ‘real’ social-conscience left-winger, the roller-in-ditches with tramps and Spanish anarchist militants, who properly understood Stalinism and grasped the importance of the coming Cold War. That’s absolutely right. But Priestley’s championing of English socialist and liberal values before, during and after the Second World War was in general less extreme than Orwell’s revolutionary lurches, and just as democratic in instinct.

His famous wartime broadcasts, which made him Churchill’s rival for the airwaves until he was taken off (he had 16 million listeners – imagine), were genuinely radical, as well as being funny, reassuring and sentimental. He was a member of the proplanning, left-wing 1941 Committee and then a founder of Common Wealth, the wartime Christian-left opposition party.

Orwell, notoriously, denounced him secretly as a crypto-Communist in his 1949 list, and would no doubt have felt vindicated

by Priestley’s role in founding CND in 1958.

Yet Priestley was also a believer in localism, and in proportional representation, and in many ways an instinctive liberal. He understood less about the world of the dictators than did Orwell, but he was better rooted in English radicalism – a natural nonconformist, not an intellectual last-ditcher.

Yet it was his middle-brow image, that deadly prolixity, rather than his politics, that really trashed his reputation. Orwell’s National Theatre production of Time and the Conways, 2009. © Manuel Harlan.

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PRIESTLEY AND ENGLISHNESS

A Delightful Project for the Library Inspired by J.B. Priestley’s 1949 Delight, a collection of essays about the little things in life that gave the writer pleasure, Waterstone’s has called upon some of today’s best-known names to write about their own sources of delight. The result is Modern Delight, a charming, touching, witty and wise collection that will delight anyone who reads it.

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

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

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

review of Patrick Hamilton’s novel Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (1935) gives a compelling picture of what he really thought of Priestley. Hamilton, said Orwell, was working under Priestley’s influence and therefore assumed real life meant lower-middle-class life in a large town and, ‘if you can pack into your novel, say, fifty-three descriptions of tea in a Lyons Corner House, you have done the trick.

The result is … a huge well-meaning book, as shapeless and inert as a clot of frog-spawn. ’ Graham Greene thought something similar about Priestley. And what of Virginia Woolf, writing much earlier, in 1930? ‘At the age of 50 Priestley will be saying “Why don’t the highbrows admire me? It isn’t true that I write only for money. ” He will be enormously rich; but there will be that thorn in his shoe – or so I hope. Yet I have not read & I daresay shall never read, a book by Priestley. ’ And she called him a ‘tradesman of letters’.

I’ve quoted Orwell and Woolf because they are maliciously irresistible. Yet so long afterwards, their vast and astonishing contempt reeks more of class condescension than anything else. Here’s a northern professional writer, a common little lowerclass fellow, earning his living by his pen, and with the impertinence to poke his nose into literary and political life. And so naturally Priestley, who could be sharp and rude enough himself, seems only the more attractive.

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

public affairs. In many ways, the man he most resembles, in width of output, in social origins, longevity and in his role as a political gadfly, is H.G. Wells. Like Wells, he almost vanished from view; but Wells has bobbed back again, and Priestley will, too. If you intervene again and again in public life, in a long life, you are bound to get things wrong, and to make enemies.

If you write so much, it is bound to include a lot of dross: Priestley’s reputation is a good warning against the perils of prolixity. But today, when novelists and playwrights are so limited in their claims to speak for, and about, a whole people, and when they take so few risks in any kind of national debate, Priestley’s

courage deserves to be celebrated.

In an age of political seriousness, he always paid attention. In an age when the sentence, the book and the newspaper still reigned supreme over images, he kept a large swathe of the reading public laughing and thinking. He was the last great English man of letters. He could have more strictly rationed his talent, avoided the sneers, and prudently kept away from politics. Rather gloriously, however, for his kind of Englishman, such behaviour was unthinkable. Once, undoubtedly, he was too much everywhere. Now he’s not anywhere enough.

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

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THE MOUSE THAT

ROARED HOW FEATURE ANIMATION BECAME BIG BUSINESS Mark Burton gives his personal view Walt Disney was very clear on the ingredients of his success: ‘I don’t just make movies for children. I make them for the child in every adult. ’ Half a century later, DreamWorks’ CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg tipped that notion on its head, declaring that ‘I don’t just make movies for adults. I make them for the adult in every child’ . This rather facetious response to Disney’s great mission statement contains a singular truth: feature animation is no longer just about children. It has become big business, on the front line of the film industry’s increasingly frantic hunt for what it likes to call ‘four-quadrant movies’ – films that all sections of the film-going audience will want to see.

The figures speak for themselves: 17 of the top hundred grossing films of all time are animated films made in the last 20 years. The Shrek franchise alone has generated more than $2 billion, with another film on the way. Not that animation hasn’t been profitable before: in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs became the highest grossing film of its time.

But is today’s headlong rush towards technical and commercial advancement destroying a beloved art form?

Walt might indeed be rolling in his grave – or perhaps fridge – at the notion of a motion picture ‘franchise’ (Snow White and Seven More Dwarfs?) but he was always an astute businessman. The ongoing tension between artistic excellence and 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

commercial success has been hardwired into Disney’s history ever since its founder walked out on a deal with Universal Studios because they took the rights to his character, the unfortunately named Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. (In a symbolic gesture, the Disney company recently bought back the rights to Oswald, which had become a sort of animated Elgin marbles.)

And despite the romantic notion that lovely hand-drawn ‘2D’ has been driven into extinction by the robotic ‘CGI’ (computer-generated imagery), the art of animation has always been affected by the science. The success of Snow White can be attributed in part to the invention of the multiplane camera, a device that allowed animators to create a more layered, three-dimensional look. In the late 1950s, the development of xerography meant that animators’ drawings no longer had to be hand traced on to a cel.

This had an enormous visual impact, as can be seen on the first film to use it, 101 Dalmatians (1961). And by the 1990s, so-called ‘traditional’ animation was already using CGI to create special effects like the ‘deep-canvas’ style of animation used in Tarzan (1999). Each innovation inevitably affects the look and feel of animated film, and in so doing leaves a set of traditionalists behind.

It’s when technology becomes a lazy replacement for good storytelling that

animation runs into trouble. Disney itself has suffered several periods of creative torpor, not least after the deaths of Walt and Roy Disney in 1966 and 1971 respectively.

By the 1970s, the ‘Mouse House’ , as Disney was affectionately known (‘Mouschwitz’ was the non-affectionate version) seemed more concerned with real estate than film-making. Many believed the golden age of animation was over but, like Mark Twain, news of its death had been greatly exaggerated. A new ‘Team Disney’ was brought in, headed up by Michael Eisner and a young workaholic executive called Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg’s mantra was: ‘If you don’t come to work on Saturday – don’t bother coming in on Sunday. ’ Over the next decade a new golden age emerged, featuring a series of hit movies like The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992) and, of course, The Lion King (1994). Disney’s resurgence was so successful that the 1990s were dubbed the ‘Disney Decade’ .

Yet the idea that two mammoth egos like Eisner and Katzenberg could fulfil their ambitions in the same company was a contradiction in terms – much like the giant dwarfs attached to the Disney building in Burbank. The two men fell out and ended up in the courts, Eisner allegedly declaring to anyone who would listen, ‘I think I hate the little midget’ . Myth has it that Katzenberg got his own back by

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Still from the Wallace and Gromit TV short, A Matter of Loaf and Death (2008), created by Nick Park. © Aardman Animations Limited 2008.

basing Shrek villain Lord Farquaad on Eisner, but at least he was magnanimous in victory. ‘Show me a good loser, ’ he later remarked, ‘and I’ll show you a loser’ .

By then Katzenberg had headhunted the cream of Disney talent and formed DreamWorks SKG with Steven Spielberg and music magnate David Geffen (hence SKG). Interestingly for psychologists, the first animated film at DreamWorks was The Prince of Egypt (1998), the story of a Jewish prophet who leads his people off to a new life away from oppression.

But as Katzenberg parted the 134 Freeway and led his people across from Burbank to Glendale, the beginnings of an even more profound revolution were taking place across the state. Let’s scroll back again to the late 1970s. Twentieth Century Fox were going through a rough patch, and their CEO Dennis Stanfill was desperate to shut down production on a small film that was eating up money on special effects, a film he was sure was a dud, a film called ‘Star Wars’ – confirming William Goldman’s rueful summing-up of Hollywood expertise: ‘no-one knows anything.’ The troublesome special effects in question were ‘motioncontrol cameras’ , devices that used computers to automate the movement of tracking shots. The results were amazing, and the idea that new-fangled ‘computers’ could be used in film-making was established. George Lucas saw the future and in 1984 set up a division of Lucasfilms to look into computerised

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

Mac guru Steve Jobs took on the division, which became known as Pixar.

We’ll fast forward through nine years of technical problems and financial failure to 1995, when the first ever animated film shot 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 its audience, it was Lasseter’s skill at telling great stories that ensured Pixar’s success.

Lasseter always maintained that there was no such thing as a bad idea – only an undeveloped one. He formed his own ‘Creative Brains Trust’ of directors, story artists and writers, and encouraged his film-makers to collaborate. Pixar didn’t just create great stories for kids – they had a knack for tapping into the primal concerns of modern parents too: emptynest syndrome (Toy Story); our stifling overprotectiveness (Finding Nemo, 2003);

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

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

My own adventures in animation date from around this time, when I began working at the DreamWorks campus in Glendale.

Back then the studio was still under the spell of 1990s Disney, and many projects stuck to the old house-style. Certain clichés tended to pop up, like the wise old king/ tribal-elder character, usually voiced by a Hollywood grandee like Morgan Freeman.

This character often had a rebellious and

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Disney recently bought back from Universal the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which had become a sort of animated Elgin marbles

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A multi-plane camera, which revolutionised ‘traditional’ animation when it was introduced in the 1930s.

feisty daughter. He was always holding up his hand – or paw – and saying ‘Enough!’ in a voice full of gravitas. The daughter/ princess/ Inca priestess was in love with a young heroic hothead, who was accompanied by a ‘comic-relief’ character sporting an arbitrary New York accent and saying things like, ‘it’s showtime!’ The stories were sub-Kipling in nature and featured animals with meaningless names like Rena, Maya, Taro or Takume – never Ted, Sharon or Gary, as if animals only give themselves names like the pupils of a Swiss finishing school. Dialogue was a mixture of faux Shakespeare and Native American: ‘Takuma – you talk like the wind!

Too much bluster, and always changing direction.’

‘But Father …’

‘Enough!’

After a succession of box-office failures, DreamWorks Animation had an existential crisis so severe that they organised a special retreat for key personnel, a period of

reflection in that well-known spiritual mecca Palm Springs. What was going wrong with their films? They came back having decided that their films lacked ‘heart’ – presumably the runner was dispatched to the film store in Glendale to buy a bulk order of ‘heart’ , which was to be tipped into all their films at the earliest opportunity. This is the problem with animation – it can’t be forced. Or rather it can, but it shows. John Lasseter believes that passion comes from allowing filmmakers to make films they believe in, that they themselves would want to watch.

‘Guess what? The rest of the world wants to watch those films too. ’ Every Pixar release has been number one at the box office.

DreamWorks did eventually find its identity. When I was on the campus, every animator you bumped into at the free ice-cream machine would bend your ear about a dead-end project they were working on called ‘Shrek’. The project limped along in the doldrums for many years, but then something clicked. It found a new, refreshingly irreverent tone. Shrek was quite literally a monster hit, and suddenly there was a new house-style.

CGI wasn’t just a new format; it was a new way of thinking. Animation films needed to be smart, sophisticated, contemporary, aimed not only at grown-ups as well as children, but at grown-ups who didn’t even have children. As writers working in the medium, we never ‘wrote down’ to a perceived young audience. We worked on stories that entertained us.

Shrek was the breakthrough film for DreamWorks. Alongside a succession of Pixar smashes, animation was back on top.

A fledgling studio called Blue Sky had a break-out hit with Ice Age (2002). Suddenly there was a new gold rush going on. Even Phil Knight, the Nike tycoon, set up a CGI

‘

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

But as with all gold rushes, not everyone finds the gold. Technological advances have, if anything, served only to make the process more expensive, more long-winded and more fraught with risk. The average full-length Hollywood animation takes four to five years to complete, is extremely labour-intensive, and rarely costs less than $150 million – or the equivalent of $1.7 million per minute of animation. Most time-consuming of all, before even a single frame of animation can be started, is the mysterious process known as ‘development’ .

Animation studios have an insatiable appetite for new material. Development teams scour the known universe, buying up publishing rights or ‘properties’ , reading comic books, pillaging old stories, newspaper articles, whatever it takes. But a large proportion of these supernova films just have to be dreamt up out of thin 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 gathering of creative brains. A few days after being invited to one of these meetings, a package turns up on your desk with various random items like pictures of marmosets, the synopsis from a Japanese Samurai film, and a DVD of the film Stage Coach. The currency of animation films is the big idea – the one-liner, the ‘high concept’ , a film that can be expressed in a sentence.

For this reason, round tables often used to feature a sort of animation parlour game that involved grafting together a classic film, a breed of animal and an exotic location. Before you scoff – remember, there’s no such thing as a bad idea – some of these chimeras have been extremely successful: ‘The Magnificent Seven with insects, set in a termite heap’ (A Bug’s Life); ‘The Great Escape with chickens set in the North of England’ (Chicken Run); ‘Hamlet with lions, set in Africa’ (The Lion King), to name but a few. Some are less successful.

‘The Guns of Navarone, with elephants’ sadly didn’t make it. (Wannabe animation writers take note: animals are currently out of fashion in feature animation.) As for my own role in these round tables, any ideas I had were generally lost to posterity thanks to my mumbling English accent.

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THE MOUSE THAT ROARED

MY DOG TULIP In a suburban house in Philadelphia, a world away from the CGI factories of Hollywood, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger continue the tradition of 2D animation.

They may work on computers, but every one of the 60,000 or so individual drawings that went into their forthcoming feature-length adaptation of J.R. Ackerley’s My Dog Tulip (1956) was drawn and coloured by hand. It is perhaps appropriate that Ackerley’s obsessive and highly literary account of his relationship with an Alsatian bitch has been brought to the screen in this labour-intensive and beautifully crafted way. Although, as the credits proclaim, ‘No paper was used for the animation of this film’, the look of the movie is deliberately painterly, with pencil-lines and brush strokes clearly visible. It is no coincidence that Paul Fierlinger began his career in his native

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

Yet out of a ragbag of half-baked notions, film-title swapping and awkward silences, an idea would suddenly take flight, giving birth to an animated motion picture that could make hundreds of millions of dollars.

One thing animation does not do is stand still. Just as CGI shook up the animation industry in the late 1990s, stand by for another big shake-up: 3D. Yes, a whole new dimension is being added to your films. This year’s Monsters Vs. Aliens is one of the first feature animations to have actually been shot in 3D – ‘authored in the 3D format’, to use the parlance – and from now on all DreamWorks’ films will follow. In a few years’ time, anyone with small children or grandchildren can expect the suggestion of a trip to a traditional CGI film to be greeted with groans of disappointment. The future is coming, and once again a set of traditionalists will be left behind as technology takes animation to yet another brave new world.

© 2009 by Paul & Sandra Fierlinger

Czechoslovakia, which has a long tradition of experimental animated film-making. While My Dog Tulip is far more sophisticated than those black-and-white animated shorts that were always shown before the main foreign-language features at the late

So is there a future for the old formats?

Certainly, the old-style ‘ink-and-paint’ technique still survives in the brilliantly idiosyncratic films of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki, who became the poster boy for traditional methods when he declared in 2008 that ‘hand drawing on paper is the fundamental of animation’.

Nearer to home, although Aardman have CGI films in the pipeline, their celebrated ‘Claymation’ looks set to continue, thumbprints and all, under the auspices of Nick Park. In a medium that is notoriously labour-intensive, stop-frame animation is one of the most intensive methods of all, the nearest thing animation has to heavy industry. Everything you see in an Aardman film actually exists, not only the puppets, which are about ten inches tall and a combination of plastic, foam latex and Aardman’s own ‘aardmix’ plasticine, with armatures that can be moved in precise ways (the eyes are moved with pins), but also the amazingly detailed sets and props. Multiple teams of animators (there were more than 20 film units on Curse of the Were-Rabbit, 2005) sweat away for long hours in the studio, coming up for pie and chips at lunch time, and heading back to the factory

lamented Academy Cinema on Oxford Street, it shares their graphic wit and inventiveness. No committees, no ‘development’, no pandering to the child in us all: just two people creating an animated film for grown-ups.

Peter Parker

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

Meanwhile, the apprentice took over the sorcerer recently when Pixar took control of Disney’s ailing animation division. John Lasseter’s first act was to excise what he called ‘corporate-executive culture’. 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 traditional 2D animation feature called The Princess and the Frog. If this film is a success, 2D animation may yet survive in Hollywood.

At the height of his power, Walt Disney famously warned the world of animation – and perhaps himself: ‘Never forget it all began with a mouse. ’ However it all began, it is certainly not about to end.

The genre will continue to regenerate itself with Dr Who-like regularity. One thing won’t change: for all the princes and princesses in the magic kingdom, it is content that will always be king.

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HIDDEN CORNERS

AN IRISH

TANGLE Mary Kenny

E 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.

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veryone’s London Library is different, since, quite evidently, all readers have different circumstances, tastes and desires. The circumstances of my life are a little complicated geographically.

I am resident in a far corner of Kent – the seaside town of Deal, between Canterbury and Dover – which is nearer to France than to London. As a journalist and writer, much of my work is in Ireland, and Ireland is the focus of my historical interest. My family circumstances make it awkward to be in Ireland as much as I would like to be, but I do need to have access to a wide number of Irish books, and books on Irish subjects, and I need them, usually, for several months at a time.

Time and time again, the London Library has yielded, from its long and crowded bookshelves, just that Irish book I have needed and been looking for. I’ve been astonished by how wide the choice is, and how far the reach, of the Library stock on subjects Irish and Anglo-Irish.

Of course there are all the standard historical texts, but it is often the quirky ones that I relish most: for example, T.P. O’Connor’s Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian, published in 1929, which recounts his days first as a destitute journalist in the Fleet Street of the 1850s (explaining that journos drank a lot at the Cheshire Cheese pub because they

couldn’t afford to eat), and then the glory days as an Irish Nationalist Party MP under Charles Stewart Parnell. The book is there, along with T.P.’s study of Gladstone’s parliament of the 1880s, Gladstone’s House of Commons.

Another enjoyable find was Sir Henry Robinson’s Memories: Wise and Otherwise (1923), recalling his jaunt around Connacht in 1903 with Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, in which the king, popular with the Irish for his love of the turf, and his relaxed attitude to Catholicism, was greeted in a small Co. Galway village with a banner: ‘Welcome to King Edward – Friend of Our Pope. ’ Another great read is Terence de Vere White’s beguiling biography of Kevin O’Higgins (1948), with his extraordinary description of the Irish Free State’s most outstanding minister dying at the hand of an assassin with consummate grace – his job was done, he said, his time had come.

De Vere White flourished as a writer in the age of the general intelligent reader, rather than the academic specialist.

It is so satisfying to happen upon a memorable book, such as León Ó Broin’s study of the British Liberal politician Augustine Birrell (1850–1933), The Chief Secretary: Augustine Birrell in Ireland (1969). Ó Broin writes illuminatingly about the bookish Mr Birrell, who was blamed by the government in London for ‘allowing’ the 1916 Irish rebellion. But the

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

I am in Dublin once a month, and usually work in the National Library there, but I am so grateful to have found such excellent sources, in the London Library, as Eunan O’Halpin’s meticulous study of the British administration in Ireland, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland, 1892–1920 (1987) and Deirdre McMahon’s unsurpassed 1984 study, Republicans and Imperialists: Anglo-Irish Relations in the 1930s.

There are several terrific books by R.B. McDowell, a historian with a minor cult-following; his work has most recently been published by a small and fastidious publisher in Dublin, Lilliput Press.

McDowell is a venerable professor from Trinity College Dublin, now in his nineties

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and still with us, whose own memory stretches back to the days when the old Southern Unionists held sway in the groves of Irish academe, and who has charted their poignant decline and decay with such grace and elegance, notably in his Crisis and Decline: the Fate of the Southern Unionists (1997). There is also his Land and Learning: Two Irish Clubs (1993), an idiosyncratic study of great old Dublin clubs, the Kildare Street and the Dublin University Club, once repositories of what Dubliners called ‘relics of auld daycency’ and now passed into history.

McDowell’s valuable study of the Irish Convention of 1917 (The Irish Convention 1917–18) is no end of a lesson in history: here was a doomed talking-shop, where well-intentioned men believed that if Liberals just came together to negotiate sensibly, then the ‘Irish question’ would be resolved. They would go to any lengths, said the various parties, to help a stable

‘

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

’

democracy come to Ireland – except, of course, 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 their subject, but also for the more eccentric and unusual literature, too. I am very partial to forgotten memoirs of old Irish and Anglo-Irish squires and squireens, with their droll little vignettes about pig-sticking in India in the 1870s and hard-riding hunting in Ireland thereafter, such as Lord Castletown’s Ego, published in 1923. Barney Castletown spoke Irish and sometimes got himself up in ‘Celtic’ dress – a kind of kilt rig-out – but like many of the old Southern Unionists he was a disappointed man at the end of his life. In a similar category is Christopher Lynch-Robinson’s The Last of the Irish R.M.s, published in 1951. All these books nestle in the biography section: such joy when your eye falls upon such out-of-theway volumes that you thought you would never encounter. It is comforting to think that, although so much of most lives is forgotten, those who have committed their memoirs to print are still there, on deposit, in the London Library, awaiting their date with destiny – the reader who rediscovers them!

My most recent focus of research has been the relationship between the British THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

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The Library rarely discards books from its collection, and that is hugely important

monarchy and Ireland (from the reign of Queen Victoria). I did much of the primarysource research at the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle, but for the hinterland of all that was occurring between Ireland and England from 1837 until the present day, nearly all my source material is to be found at the London Library (with some supplementary backup from the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, and the Royal Dublin Society library). Those who have taken the trouble to stock the London Library with its complement of books on Ireland and the Irish have taken a wide arc, and – an important point with Irish history and culture – have been sure to include every point of view. There are voluminous stocks on the Fenians, on Home Rule (a rich deposit of nineteenthcentury material both for and against it), on Irish Republicanism, Irish moderate nationalism, Ulster Unionism, Irish politics of every shade, and Irish religious history of every shade too.

Then there are so many valuable books on Irish history and antiquity, going back to the fifth century. There are sagas and ancient texts, the Annals of Connacht (from 1224 to 1544) and of course all of the elegiac titles by William Edward Hartpole Lecky (1838–1903) on Ireland’s eighteenth century. There are books on land war and economic war; theatre and poetry, and even a small amount of literature in the Irish language itself; and any amount of biography. The selection includes, naturally, novels and literature from the key Irish writers: everything you could want on W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, and the complete works of the Irish novelist Kate O’Brien (1897–1974), who was once tremendously popular (remember how, in the 1945 film Brief Encounter, the Celia Johnson character is just popping into Boots’ library to get the latest Kate O’Brien).

I can see why the London Library has had to expand: it rarely discards books from its collection, and that is hugely important.

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

There have been so many books on Irish themes from the Library’s collection that have been helpful and illuminating to me over the past few years, but I will finish with three in particular. Perhaps the most authoritative book I have consulted in my own field of interest is James H. Murphy’s matchless study of nationalism and monarchy in Ireland during the reign of Queen Victoria, Abject Loyalty: Nationalism and Monarchy in Ireland during the Reign of Queen Victoria (2001). Dr Murphy is an academic at the University of Chicago, but his study was published by Cork University Press, and it is an extraordinarily thorough text, written with great clarity.

I have great affection for two more personal works, nestling among the shelves of ‘History: Ireland’. One is Shane Leslie’s The Irish Tangle for English Readers (1946). Leslie was a cousin of Winston Churchill (their mothers were sisters), but on his father’s side, he was part of the well-regarded Leslie family of Co. Monaghan, who sold all their carriages to feed the poor during the Irish famine of 1845–9. Leslie became a Catholic and an

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

advocate for Ireland to those Englishmen and women who found the country bewildering. The other is G.K. Chesterton’s Christendom in Ireland, a benign and charming account of the great World Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932 and published in the immediate aftermath, when the leading Catholic ecclesiastics from all over the world congregated in Dublin. Chesterton has such a gentle eye for paradoxical Irish humour: he recounts sitting next to a woman on a Dublin tram who is wondering if the fine weather will break during the great celebration.

‘Well, if it rains now, ’ she remarks of the Almighty, ‘He’ll have brought it on Himself!’ All, and so much more, at the London Library for those exiles of Erin needing to water their roots.

Dictionary of Irish Biography This autumn, the London Library is investing in the 9-volume Dictionary of Irish Biography, edited by James McGuire and published in November by Cambridge University Press. It is the first comprehensive and authoritative biographical reference work for Ireland, and has been compiled under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy. It will be available online via the Library website, and covers 9,700 lives with biographies ranging from 200 to 15,000 words, compiled by 700 expert advisers and contributors. 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, Kate O’Brien, Patrick Kavanagh, Denis Devlin and Brian O’Nolan. We expect it to be a valuable addition to the Library’s Irish collection.

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SIMON CALLOW IN DISCUSSION WITH ERICA WAGNER The Times Literary Editor Erica Wagner talked to writer, actor and director Simon Callow at an 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.

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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 I used to have to carry huge the idea of style in writing. piles of Mills & Boons from one There was a kind of perfection shelf to another. It was of course on the page – it had a music very demoralising, but there that was so exquisite and were other books apart from endlessly funny, and I thought – Mills & Boon, and that was yes, that’s right, what I really when I first got my lust for should be is a comic writer. new books, because I got a I wrote little things for massive discount; I think the myself but never showed them first new hardback I ever to anybody. I also developed a bought was Quentin Crisp’s passion for writing letters to the The Naked Civil Servant. It was papers. In fact it was because extraordinarily thrilling to have of a letter I wrote many years that on the shelf. But working later that I became an actor. there cured me of the romance This letter was to Laurence of bookselling. As for writing, Olivier. Having seen his work I was very conscious of a thing that hit me every time I tried at the National Theatre, I wrote to write – namely, that I had him three closely typed absolutely nothing of interest foolscap pages explaining to to say, even though I was him why the National Theatre getting quite skilful at saying was so good. He was very kind that nothing. and wrote back to me inviting From Oppenheim’s I went me to go and work there in the to the National Theatre, box office, which I did. That where I worked in the box set me on my professional path. office and for the first time But I was writing all the Simon Callow in the role of Pozzo in the production by the Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, of Waiting for Godot, directed by Sean Mathias, 2009. met actors, and suddenly saw time. I sold my precious © Sasha Gusov. that it might be possible to be collection of LPs so I could buy an actor. There was no drama at my school, so I didn’t know an electric typewriter. It was an Olympus, and I was tremendously whether I could act or not, but I’d always been a bit of a show-off. proud of it, and started writing at great length. When I left school I I felt that at the age of 19 I was too old to go to drama school, was certain of only one thing in my life – that I was going to be a and so I thought I should go to university but only in order to act, fine writer. I was also certain that I did not want to go to university, and so I did just that, very, very badly. I went to Queens University which seemed to me a place where you sat around and analysed in Belfast, which was wonderful in its way, but I left after nine and did anything but actually lived, which was the thing that I months to learn about acting, which I did at a remarkable drama was rather keen to start doing. I also needed to get some money, school called the Drama Centre, where I had a gruelling but and I went back to a place that had a huge influence on my life, a wonderful training, and was very lucky – I started working bookshop in South Kensington called Oppenheim and Co. It had immediately and worked pretty well round the clock as an actor three divisions, but the one that I knew about and was interested from 1973 when I left drama school until about 1982, when I in was the second-hand bookshop. It was absolutely everything deliberately took some time out to go to Santa Fe in New Mexico that you could dream of in a second-hand bookshop, like with a small group from the National Theatre to do some something out of Balzac or indeed Dickens. It was just made of teaching and directing. books and it smelled of books, and it had a basement that was I had by now already started to write the odd piece for the incredibly damp and so that wonderful smell that comes off damp books was present all the time. It was run by a curious individual London Evening Standard. I’m not sure how that came about – I think some publicity person had said they could get the Standard called John Moss who was small, very quietly spoken, with a skimpy to commission me to write something. I got published quite beard and an especially big walrus moustache. I went into John often in the paper, and got rather good at writing obituaries of one day and told him I was looking for a job, and he said, ‘Well actors, a melancholy job, but in some ways a rather focusing 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. one: you have a short space of time in which to say quite a lot about someone.

Oppy, the boss, was a tiny little Glaswegian of, I think, Lithuanian Then everything started to happen at once. I formed an extraction, with pebble glasses and a big cigar. He gave me a job intense friendship with one of the most remarkable women in in the wholesale division, which was basically Mills & Boon, and THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

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

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.

26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

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THE RESTORATION: TRIUMPH OR FAILURE? ANNUAL LECTURE 10.06.09 JENNY UGLOW

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 28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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

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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 Opposite Charles II, c.1662, by Sir Peter Lely. Bridgeman Art Library, London/ National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.

Above Astraea Returns to Earth, c.1660,

by John Michael Wright. Bridgeman Art Library, London/ Nottingham Castle Museum.

Below The Cavalcade through the City on the eve of the Coronation, 22 April 1662, 1662, by Dirck Stoop.

Bridgeman Art Library, London/ Museum of London.

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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 30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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

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,

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

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.

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MEMBERS’ NEWS UNDERSTANDING THE LIBRARY’S FINANCES OUR NEW CHAIRMAN, BILL EMMOTT, EXPLORES SOME KEY FINANCIAL INFORMATION WITH THE LIBRARIAN, INEZ LYNN BE: What are the costs associated with the day-to-day running of the Library?

I L : Well, in the year to 31 March 2009 our core operating costs amounted to £3,121,744, with staff costs (salaries, National Insurance, pension contributions and so on) accounting for two-thirds of that sum. After all, service is at the heart of what we do, and that mainly means people. It may be more helpful to divide the total costs into 8 segments relating to the actual work of the Library.

2009 Core expenditure (Total £3,121,744) Membership £271,908 9%

Buildings and Facilities £639,050 21%

Finance and Administration £451,631 14%

Information Technology £192,078 6%

Reader Services £487,660 16%

Binding, Preservation and Stack Management £295,275 9% Acquisitions £417,176 13%

Cataloguing and Retrospective Conversion £366,966 12%

With the exception of Reader Services where the cost lies entirely in the staff who help members directly (whether present in person or contacting us from home or work), each of these segments represents a mix of staff costs and direct expenditure.

For anyone interested, the breakdown between them is shown in 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 32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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

Cataloguing is another labour-intensive task and most of the cost lies in the team of staff who are transferring titles from the older printed catalogue to the online catalogue and those adding the details of all new acquisitions. Between them they added 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 library materials, from books and pamphlets to periodicals (over 800) and electronic resources. The actual value of our new publications is much higher than the figures suggest, thanks to the books that are presented to us and to generous discounts from a number of publishers.

The task of binding and preserving the Library’s hardworking collections falls to the Preservation and Stack Management department, which is also responsible for ensuring that books are returned promptly to the shelves and that good order is maintained there.

While the cost of electronic resources is covered by the Acquisitions budget, the infrastructure cost lies in the IT segment.

This includes the equipment and specialist software necessary to run our online catalogue and book issue system, the accounting system and membership database, website, email and internet access, and the basic office software we rely on today – all run and maintained by just two staff.

Membership appears as a separate segment for the first time this year following the transfer of responsibility for staffing Reception from the Building and Facilities department to the Membership Office, which itself formerly came under the heading Finance and Administration. Membership costs now also include the marketing of the Library and the costs of our communications with members (helpfully offset in part by advertising revenue from the Library magazine). In previous years, marketing and communication costs were largely charged to Fundraising. Finance and Administration now covers the finance and accounting staff, audit and other professional fees, recruitment, training and governance costs, as well as the salaries of the Librarian and Deputy Librarian who don’t entirely fit anywhere else.

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

Investment income £296,077 9%

2008 Core Funding Sources (Total income £2,659,373) Deficit funded from reserves £134,726 1%

Deficit funded from reserves £44,502 1% Investment income £331,553 12%

Revenue donations and legacies £265,762 9%

Revenue donations and legacies £474,7222 17%

Membership income £1,853,098 66%

Membership income £2,515,403 81%

BE: What about fundraising costs?

I L : At present fundraising costs are met from the Development Appeal Fund rather than from core operating income, since the building development project is the main purpose for which we raise money.

BE: That’s all very clear, but I see that while core expenditure was £3,121,744, core income was only £3,077,242. How worried should 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 improvement in the last year, with total core income up £417,869 (15.7%) on the previous year despite a lower contribution from investment income, and donations and legacies in absolute and percentage terms. The contribution of membership income rose from 66% to 81% as a direct result of the exceptional fee rise implemented in 2008. The benefit of that rise was a much-reduced deficit for the year. This can only be good news because a deficit in any year 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, as had previously been envisaged, in recognition of the fact that members have had to endure highly disruptive building works and that the recession is putting pressure on all of us. Nevertheless, the Library is going to have to work hard to sustain the recent improvement in its finances. This can only be achieved by a combination of strict cost-control and of increases in fee income that match the Library’s specific inflation rate. Fee income can be increased in two ways: by attracting a lot of new members; or by raising 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 slightly faster than background inflation rates. This, coupled with high ongoing price rises in some other areas of the Library’s expenditure (notably on periodicals where annual inflation has been running at over 9% for many years) and the constant demand from members for additional and enhanced services, means that the Library’s costs always grow somewhat in excess of the usual external indicators such as Retail Price Index or Consumer Prices Index. We must therefore balance the cost to members with the need to ensure that the Library continues to survive. Of course, for those members who would struggle to afford the full membership fee we are able to offer Carlyle Membership, which offers exactly the same benefits but at a fee reduced by between 30% and 60% according to need. Some 4.4% of members 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 development project. At the outset the purchase of the building to form

Contributions to the Development Fund as at July 2009 Trusts, Foundations and Gifts over £1 million

The London Library

2007 Members’ Appeal and Individual Gifts under £1million

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

BE: As a member since 1998, I already know how much members 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 a really important way to support us. Members are often surprised to learn that we have quite a high turnover of members from year to year. Many people join because they are working on a specific project and when that is over they may drop out of membership for a few years and perhaps return later. In any one year, then, we may need to find as many as 900 new members just to stay at the same overall membership level. But there are all sorts of different ways of helping and we have put a list in the Annual 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 trustees have established a number of underlying principles for the current and future funding of the Library:

34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

FUNDING PRINCIPLES Our long-term objective is to build membership numbers to 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.

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MEMBERS’ NEWS

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DONATIONS AND BEQUESTS The 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: GENERAL DONATIONS

LEGACIES

The O J Colman Charitable Trust Helen Corlett Graeme Cottam Friends of Croydon Libraries Curtis Charitable Trust Barbara Curtoys Sir Geoffrey De Bellaigue GCVO Jane Falloon Peter Firth James Fisher Judith Flanders Giles Flint Richard Freeman Michael Gainsborough Melanie Gibson Dr Eva Gillies The Worshipful Company of Grocers Martin Haddon Godfrey Hodgson Sir Alistair Horne CBE Ashley Huish Terence Jagger CBE Alan Keat The Rt Hon The Lord Justice Longmore Miss F M Loughnane Lord Lyell of Markyate PC QC John Madell Marsh Christian Trust John Massey Stewart Henry McKenzie-Johnston CB Kevin Murphy David Nash-Brown Mike Nichols and Diane Sawyer Paicolex Trust Lady Partridge Stephen Plaister W G Plomer Esq Sonia Prentice Clive Priestley CB Robert Renak Janet Rennie Peter Rowland Sir John Sainty Keith Sissons The Lady Soames DBE Caroline De Souza Dr Gerassimos Spathis Christopher Swinson Jerry White Ann Williams Anthony J T Williams Reverend Anthony Winter Sir Peregrine Worsthorne

Professor Miriam Allott Annabelle Barton Martin Beaver Derek Black The Blavatnik Family Foundation Paul Bunnage Mary Burgoyne Paul Byrne Simon Callow Elizabeth Cassie in memory of Peter Miller Richard Dargan Ronald Edwards Susan Gilmer The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation Pamela Graham Richard Greer Patrick Heren Richard Howard Professor Ioan and Mrs Rosemary James The Hon Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd Rosalind Levin Robert MacLeod Dr Louis Marks The Mercers’ Charitable Foundation The late Peter Miller Geoffrey Nicholson Philip Percival The Philanthropic Society David Redfern Dr Robert Reekie Sheila Rhodes Professor Henry Roseveare Lily Safra Lady Sainsbury of Turville Oliver Schneider-Sikorsky Schroder Charity Trust David Sherlock A Sokolov Robert Tainsh Elwin Taylor Dr William Van Der Kloot Patrick White

The Library received pecuniary legacies from the following deceased members and friends to whom the trustees are most grateful:

BOOK FUND

David Gelber Sir Max and Lady Hastings Dame Jennifer Jenkins The Dowager Marchioness of Normanby Gill and Charles Perrin The Lady Soames DBE Sotheby’s

DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND Double Elephant Folio Mrs T S Eliot The Monument Trust

Atlas Folio The Foyle Foundation The Foundation for Sport and the Arts

Elephant Folio The Eranda Foundation Lady Getty The Horace W Goldsmith Foundation The Oppenheimer Family (in memory of Harry Oppenheimer) The Wolfson Foundation

Folio The Blavatnik Family Foundation Peter Jamieson The Rothschild Foundation Karsten Schubert

Quarto Dr Penelope McCarthy Clive Richards OBE DL

Octavo The Hon Mrs J C T Astor (in memory of Michael Astor) Nicholas and Judith Goodison Rosemary James The Michael Marks Charitable Trust The Runciman Charitable Trust Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE

Duodecimo David and Lucy Abel Smith Stephen Benson Sir Jeremiah Colman Gift Trust Her Grace the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire Lord and Lady Egremont Alan Gregory CBE Mrs Janet Hamilton Anthony Hobson Dr Penelope Horlick The J P Jacobs Charitable Trust Janey King Lionel Leventhal Gita Mehta John Morgan Sir Jeremy and Lady Morse The Viscount Norwich Mrs Isabel Raphael Reuben Foundation Martin and Margaret Riley Mark Storey Sir Roy Strong Antonia Till The Zachs-Adam Family Fund

Sextodecimo The Marquess of Anglesey Jennifer Antill David Aukin Professor Sir Alan Bowness Sebastian Brock Dr Anita Brookner CBE Margaret Buxton Christie's Gerard Clarke Richard and Ann Cole Trevor Coldrey

Canon Luke Johnson

Cicero Karsten Schubert

Great Primer Sir Tom Stoppard OM CBE Mark Storey

Nonpareil Madeline, Countess of Bessborough Richard Greer Jane Gregory George Loudon Alison Walker in memory of Claudio Lo Brutto Yuen Wei-Chew

36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

DONATIONS IN MEMORY OF SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON The trustees are grateful for donations received from the following in memory of the Library’s Vice-President, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who died on 16 March 2009:

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

Thank you to all those members who have supported the Library through the use of the Everyclick search engine and the donations of survey participation fees from Ipsos Mori.

Elsie R Dorrance Sophie Flower Angela Lambert Revd G B E Riddell The literary estates of John Cornforth, Sir Philip Montefiore Magnus-Allcroft and Ian Parsons have provided income from royalties.

DONATIONS OF BOOKS Thanks are also due to various government and official bodies, learned societies, institutions and firms, and other libraries and publishers who have given their publications, and to the many donors of books and other items listed below: Jeremy Adler Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Göttingen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz The late Dr David Aldridge Ann Allestree Professor Michael Alpert Amici Thomae Mori Linda Anderson The Angela Thirkell Society The Anglo-Hellenic League The Anthony Powell Society Antiquarian Booksellers Association Antique Collectors' Club Archivio di Stato di Prato The Art Fund Arts Council England Neal Ascherson Anthony Astbury Helena Attlee Professor Ivan Avakumovic Azam Peter Bagwell Purefoy Rosemary Bailey Stella Baker David Baldwin in memory of Alan Smith Bernd Ballmann Barbados Museum and Historical Society Nicolas Barker Tamima Bayhom-Daou Alan Bell Hazel Bell Yasha Beresiner Bernard Quaritch Ltd Dr Thomas Bewley Hilary Beyer in memory of Ralph Beyer Lady Rachel Billington Lord Bingham Julia Blackburn D Blake Rebecca Bligh Patrick Bonar John Booker Mark Bostridge Dr Simon Bradley Ruth Brandon The British Library Eleanor Bron

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MEMBERS’ NEWS

Richard Bronk Roderick Brown The Browning Society Brian Buckley Katherine Bucknell Colin Budd The Burney Society John Bury The Byron Society Roberto Calasso Cambridge University Library Dr Lionel Carter Cassleton Elliott & Co Ltd Dr Hugh Cecil Sir Charles Chadwyck-Healey, Bt The Chartered Institute of Linguists Chris Beetles Ltd Rupert Christiansen Christ Church Library Christie's The Churches Conservation Trust Civic Archive of Bozen Professor Christopher Clay Andrew Clayton-Payne John Cloake in memory of Margaret Morris Cloake Gerry Coldham Diana Coldicott Adeline Collier Dr Roger Collins John Colvin Dr Alistair Cooke Professor Maria Corciulo Roger Crowley The Worshipful Company of Cutlers Dr Richard Davenport-Hines Barbara Davies David Llewellyn Davies in memory of Jeffery Rossiter Anna de Chassiron in memory of Deane de Chassiron Anne de Courcy Leanda De Lisle Derbyshire Archaeological & Natural History Society Professor Isabel De Madariaga Rodolph de Salis Catherine Donner Downside Abbey Dr Alexander Drace-Francis The University of Dublin Sally and David Dugan Julian Duplain Dr Brent Elliott Embassy of Finland, London Bill Emmott English Heritage Europa Nostra UK Julian Evans Carolyn Ezekiel David Faber Faber & Faber The Fabian Society Michael Fardell Peter Fawcett Ferriday Enterprises Peter Firth Winston Fletcher Folio Society Professor Michael Foot CBE The Foreign & Commonwealth Office Rosemary Fost Dr Paul Fox Peter Fraenkel Felix and Dick Francis The Francis Brett Young Society Friends of Canterbury Cathedral Friends of the Dymock Poets Alan Fyson Bamber Gascoigne Dr Michele Gill Ed Glinert Jon R Godsall Livia Gollancz

Robert Gomme CB Dr Ronald Gray Jonathon Green Grosvenor Gallery Graham Guest Robert Gwynne Professor Alastair Hamilton Sir Richard Hanbury-Tenison Dr Kris Hardin Sir Max Hastings John Havard Mark Hichens Pamela Hill Professor Jocelyn Hillgarth Douglas Hills Michael Hobkirk Peter Holt Meredith Hooper Maureen Hornsey in memory of Alan Hornsey Dr J T Hughes Carl Huter Donald Insall Istituto Italiano di Cultura Peter Jamieson Professor Anne Janowitz Kate Jenkins The Jewish Museum John Buchan Society David Jones Denis Jones The Joseph Conrad Society (UK) Michael Katakis Jonathan Keates Keats Shelley Association of America Keats Shelley Memorial Association Denis Keeling Dr Margaret Kekewich Douglas Kemp Susanna Kemp in memory of Mrs Doreen Kemp Mary Kenny The Kipling Society Kongelige Danske Videnskabernes Selskab Mrs Ann Laughton in memory of Guy Nicholson Dr Gordon Lawrence Dr Jennie Lebel John Lee Leo Baeck Institute London Jason Lever The Library of Congress Fergus Linnane Sir Michael Llewellyn-Smith Gweslan Lloyd The Lobanov-Rostovsky Family The Lodge of Antiquity, No 2 London Review of Books Dr R T Longstaffe-Gowan Inez Lynn Macmillan John Man Marc Fitch Fund Jennifer Margrave Anthony Martin Pamela Maryfield The Massachusetts Review Christopher Masters David McAlpine Kinn McIntosh Ian McIntyre David McKie Giles Milton Dr John Monks Andrew Moody Professor Maureen Moran Keith Morgan Richard Morris OBE Simon Morris Lady Belinda Morse Vladimir Mitrokhin Harry Mount Peter Mountfield

Mummery + Schnelle Museo Nacional del Teatro, Spain Charlotte Nassim The National Gallery The National Trust Nevill Keating McIlroy Gallery New Statesman Robert Noel Alex Noel-Tod Sebastian Nokes Jeremiah Nolan Notes and Queries for Somerset and Dorset Robert Ogden Online Originals Professor Eric Ormsby Hugh O'Shaughnessy The Oscar Wilde Society Ă–sterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften Barbara Ovstedal Count Stephen Palffy Peter Parker Dr Erminia Passannanti The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies inBritish Art Anthony Payne Maurice Pearton Penguin Group UK Phaeton Press Andrew Phillips Christopher Phipps Dr Jan Piggott The Pilgrim Trust Christopher Potter Cecilia Powell Claire Powell Robert Powell Elizabeth Powis The Powys Society Andrew Prescott Prestel Publishing Ltd Julia Preston Peter Prew Prinz Albert Gesellschaft ProQuest Information & Learning Limited Andrew Pulver Pushkin Press John Pym Vera Quin Random House Dr Tessa Ransford OBE Isabel Raphael Joan Reid Major-General Peter Reid Kenneth Rice Bronwen Riley Andrew Roberts John Robins Andrew Robinson Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, PC Susan Ronald Andrew Rose Grace Rose Royal Academy of Arts Royal Agricultural Society of England The Royal Anthropological Institute The Royal Artillery Institution Royal Collection Enterprises Ltd Royal Horticultural Society The Royal Society Royal Society of Literature Claudia Rubenstein The Rupert Brooke Society San Marco Press Jem Sandford Sandilands Press Dr Ann Saunders Commander Michael Saunders Watson Clive Saville Reverend Oliver Scallan Karsten Schubert The late Mary Scott

Lord and Lady Scott Shaker Media GmbH Ann Shearer John Sheppard David Sherlock Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Martin Sixsmith Hugh Small Poppy Smith Society of Antiquaries of London Society of Authors Society for Psychical Research The Society of Women Writers and Journalists Sotheby's Dr Frances Spalding Margaret Sparks Martin Spellman Lilian Spencer Alison Sproston Tom Stacey Louise Stein Stephen Ongpin & Guy Peppiatt, Fine Art Timothy Stevens Francine Stock Mark Storey Lord and Lady Strabolgi Geoffrey Strachan Jonathan Sumption Virginia Surtees Sussex University Library Lydia Syson Tate Gallery Elwin Taylor Neville Teller MBE V M Thomas Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society Lord Thomas J K Robert Thorne Peter Thorold Ann Thwaite Professor Lisa Tickner Thomas Timmins Count Nikolai Tolstoy Patience Tomlinson Tower Hamlets Library Service The Trollope Society Turkish Consulate General Dr Barry Turner Dr Ralph Turvey University of the Arts London Peter Urbach Dr William Van der Kloot Virago Press / Little Brown Books Michael Voggenauer Christopher Walker Lesley Wardle Professor Marina Warner Jeremy Warren Wilfred Webber Jane Weeks Sara Wheeler Professor Sir Christopher White CVO The Wilkie Collins Society Christopher Wilkins The William Shipley Group for RSA History Alyson Wilson Andrew Wilson Dr Michael Wilson Rupert Winchester Simon Winchester Donald Wintersgill Stephen Wood George Woodcock Lucy Wooding Joanna Woods Mrs Charles Wrightsman Andrea Wulf The late Elizabeth Wyndham Dr Julian Wynne Yale University Library Penny Young

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 37

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THIS SEASON’S LITERARY EVENTS OCTOBER Photographer Sandra Lousada’s exhibition Public Faces Private Places at London’s National Theatre (7 September– 18 October, nationaltheatre.org.uk) captures her insider’s view of figures from the worlds of literature, the arts, theatre and film including Laurence Olivier, Joan Plowright, Vanessa Redgrave,* Julie Christie, Joanna Lumley and David Hockney. Also on at the National’s Lyttelton Theatre is The Power of Yes by David Hare,* a no-holdsbarred account of the events that led to the financial crisis (opening 6 October).

At the annual Graham Greene International Festival (1–4 October, grahamgreenefestival.org) in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, you’ll be able to listen to Jeremy Lewis* shedding light on Graham Greene’s siblings and first cousins, and Rod Mengham discussing Greene in the 1930s. An exciting new feature this year is the one-day writing workshop scheduled to take place on the Saturday, at which the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust Creative Writing Awards will be launched.

Highlights at the Henley Literary Festival (1–5 October, henleyliteraryfestival.co.uk) include a theatrical tribute to the late Sir John Mortimer, a riverside reading by Hugo Williams and Lionel Shriver’s take on 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 John Cooper Clark, Audrey Niffenegger, Tracy Chevalier, Hilary Mantel, Justine Picardie, Grayson Perry and Michael Palin.* The London Library is delighted to be hosting an event for the festival, with Selina Hastings* talking about her new biography of Somerset Maugham on Friday 9 October 38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

at 7 p.m. Younger readers can visit the Cheltenham Book It! Festival. The Wellcome Trust will also be sponsoring a series of lectures examining the relationship between literature and medicine.

In the character of Maigret, Georges Simenon created one of the immortals.

On 13 October die-hard fans John Gray and John Banville will be launching the New York Review of Books’ editions of Simenon reprints at the London Review Bookshop (lrbshop.co.uk) alongside Edwin Frank, the NYRB’s Classics Editor.

Margaret Atwood will be headlining the Manchester Literature Festival (15–25 October, manchesterliterature festival.co.uk) with a dynamic fusion of music and spoken word, to launch her new novel The Year of the Flood, which tells the story of God’s Gardeners – a religion devoted to the preservation of all species. During the festival, the Rainy City will also be playing host to Martin Amis, Ruth Padel, Will Self and Eoin Colfer, who’ll be reading from And Another Thing, his 30th anniversary sequel to Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Leading lights of academia, including Grey Gowrie,* Derek Walcott and Christopher Ricks, will be coming together in October for the first British Academy Literature Week (19–22 October, britac.ac.uk/events/2009/literature-week).

The programme combines three of the academy’s established literary lectures with panel discussions and ‘in conversation’ events, and will also feature readings by acclaimed actors in a special Poetry Hour, organised by Josephine Hart. All the events are free and are available on a strictly first-come, first-served basis.

EMMA HUGHES

All writers affect (and are affected by) the places in which they live and work. Think of Joyce and Dublin, or Zadie Smith and contemporary London. For further proof, spend an afternoon looking around the Wordsworth Trust’s latest exhibition, Romantic Poets, Romantic Places (25 October 2009–14 June 2010, wordsworth.org.uk). Drawing on diaries, letters and manuscripts, the exhibition aims to examine the impact that nature has on art, as well as the ways in which association with poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Burns changes the feel of a place forever.

NOVEMBER Calling all Russophiles! The Russian Film Festival (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 each showing will be followed by a Q&A session with the director and actors. Quote the London Library Magazine when booking tickets to get a 20% discount.

Now in its eighth year, the Swansea-based Dylan Thomas Festival (23 October–10 November, dylanthomas.com) keeps going from strength to strength. This time round the theme is the Second World War. Confirmed speakers include Louis de Bernierès, Peter Porter, John Fuller and 2005 Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year winner Owen Sheers. Poetry Review editor Fiona Sampson will also be running a workshop designed to help aspiring poets into print.

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

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lively workshops, close readings of wellknown poems and revealing ‘blind’ criticism sessions, you’ll be continually surprised by what’s on offer at this seaside gem.

The likes of Jane Gardam,* Penelope Lively, Libby Purves, John Julius Norwich* and Diana Quick* will also be enjoying the bracing Suffolk sea air at Ways with Words, the Southwold Literature Festival (12–16 November, wayswithwords.co.uk).

Why not join them? * Current Library member

©Word Box by Peter Everard Smith at the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival.

RECENT LITERARY AWARDS Congratulations to the Library members who were nominated for or have won literary awards since May 2009 Sabina ffrench Blake, Henry Tonks, winner of the Society of Authors 2009 Authors’ Modulation Award.

Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, winner of the 2009 Sheridan Morley Prize.

Kate Summerscale, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, shortlisted for 2009 Independent Booksellers’ Book Prize for Adult books.

Andrew Taylor, winner of the 2009 Crime Writers’ Association Cartier Diamond Dagger, for sustained excellence in crime writing.

The magazine would welcome any information from members who have won or been nominated for prizes, to be included in future issues.

Please send details to: development@londonlibrary.co.uk

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