There is little that rivals The London Library’s eclectic physical collection of around one million books, but its collection of ebooks comes close – and is constantly evolving. Of the more than 1,500 titles to choose from, these were some of the most borrowed of 2024.
1. Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das (borrowed 26 times)
2. Belfast: The Story of a City and its People by Feargal Cochrane (borrowed 23 times)
3. The Library: A Fragile History by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (borrowed 23 times)
4. Babel: Or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution by RF Kuang (borrowed 22 times)
5. Politics On the Edge by Rory Stewart (borrowed 21 times) •
→ Members can access the eBook collection through OverDrive or the Libby app. Learn more at londonlibrary.co.uk/ebooks or browse the collection at londonlibrary.overdrive.com
FAMILY MATTERS
From military lists to directories and specialist newspapers, such as a full archive of trailblazing Victorian news magazine The Illustrated London News, the collection at St James’s Square includes a huge range of diverse historical records that illuminate the lives of both ordinary and famous Britons.
Many of these volumes have now been digitised and published online for the first time as part of a partnership with genealogy service Findmypast. Highlights include Zozimus , a magazine packed with cartoons and satire, which was published in Ireland in the 1870s, and The Ladies’ Who’s Who from 1924, which recorded the lives of influential and distinguished women from the past, reflecting a social shift towards greater recognition of women’s achievements.
Findmypast, which also has partnerships with the British Library and The National Archives, draws on diverse sources to help users understand their ancestors’ lives in narrative detail, bringing together information on where they lived and worked, their relationships, and the life-changing events they experienced. This will now be further enriched by the addition of The London Library’s holdings. •
→ Start exploring The London Library collection at findmypast.co.uk
BUILDING CONNECTIONS
PHASE ONE UPDATE
Planning permission has now been granted for Phase One of the Library’s Building Connections project. Works are planned to start in late July and be completed by the end of 2025.
Thanks to the incredible support of donors, we have secured the necessary funds to invite tenders from building contractors . The first phase includes a new room on the ground floor, which will be a permanent, dedicated space for uses that pertain to the Library’s public benefit remit as a charity. This includes sixth-form school visits, meetings of the Emerging Writers Programme, speaker events, exhibitions and displays, and workshop collaborations with other charitable organisations. The space will also provide a venue for member special interest groups to meet, as well as hosting trustee meetings and being available for private hire.
Phase One will also see the creation of a basement kitchen to replace the current use of The Study as a field kitchen by event caterers and provide a much-needed storage area.
The construction project will take place in small, contained areas of the building, away from the main reading rooms and most of the collection. The Library and its architects have a lot of experience in keeping the building open during works and keeping disruption to a minimum. This remains a priority.
Technical design work is currently being finalised with the procurement phase now beginning. Members will be kept up-to-date over the coming months with further information about the plans, designs and building works. •
→ To find out more about the building project, visit londonlibrarybuildingconnections.co.uk
A BIGGER PICTURE
Each year, the Library acquires around 5,000 new books, ensuring that the collection continues to reflect members’ varied and evolving reading habits.
Recently, the stacks’ treasure troves have been enhanced with the addition of two new collections: Graphic Novels and Creative Writing. Graphic novelists have been part of the Emerging Writers Programme since 2021; one such writer is Miriam Gold (whose work was featured in The London Library Magazine, spring 2024). Her beautiful illustrated novel Elena: A Hand Made Life, published in August 2024, can now be found on the shelves. The new Creative Writing shelfmark houses books to support members with their writing careers, especially those early career writers, including our Emerging Writers Programme participants
In addition to this, The Philip Mould Picture Archive recently became available to all members as an e-resource. This fully searchable online database comprises every artwork that has passed through the gallery’s doors, covering 500 years of British art. All the images in the archive can be licensed for scholarly, editorial and commercial usage through Bridgeman Images. •
→ To search the new collections, visit catalyst.londonlibrary.co.uk
Above left: Architects’ illustration of the new
Photo: Haworth Tompkins. Above right:
BREAKING SILENCE: THE DAUGHTERS OF IRAN
An extract from a forthcoming memoir about the lives of women in Iran by AD Aaba Atach, a member of the 2023–24 Emerging Writers Programme. Atach’s book was recently signed by Canongate in a major deal
Tehran, 1999
It was the day when my father – Baba – received an abrupt phone call informing him that the editorial board for the Salam newspaper would not be meeting until further notice. He was in his late 20s, but he was already being described by his chiefs as a promising up-and-coming force within Iranian politics.
Earlier that week, Salam newspaper had leaked a government memorandum that had revealed the Islamic Republic’s plans for the suppression of reformist publications, of which Salam was one. Until then, for the first time since the inception of the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranians had been given a taste of what a progressive – though never quite liberal – Iran could be: no longer wishing death upon the Americans nor the Brits, but looking ahead toward dialogue, democracy, civil society, or so they said.
The newly elected President, Mohammad Khatami, had promised many things, amongst them the protection of press freedoms, so that the new generation could transcend the muted voices, the whispers, and the stifled expressions of their parents. The age of compliance was over: a society where your thoughts could be aired, even published; where women and men could mingle, talk, and debate freely in neighbourhood cafes, to the robust aroma of tobacco and freshly brewed tea, hands occasionally swaying ever so slightly closer, close enough for the fingers of the opposite sex to brush against each other. Freedom, with all its breeze, yearning, joy. They had been sold a dream, and now they wanted to live it.
Within days of the leak, the Clerical Court had mandated the swift closure of the newspaper, and its publisher, Mohammad Mousavi Khoeniha, had been summoned. Though Baba did not yet grasp the scale of the coming uproar, the day before we were to protest the newspaper’s closure, he knelt before me and tried to explain why he might disappear at any moment, just as three of his colleagues already had. I was a month short of turning five, but that was a peripheral matter: in a country where my childhood could be stolen at any moment, he saw no need for sugar-coating –he wanted me to be fully informed, as any adult would be.
On July 9, it was no different. I recall it was getting dark, and the atmosphere was charged: some wanted to start protesting at night time. Baba was not at ease, and he had not told my mother – Maman – of our whereabouts. He couldn’t – it was too risky, but he also did not want her to be concerned, not so soon. Though they had separated, they did not see it reasonable to do so with hostility – not yet – so they often remained in communication with each other, for my sake.
While Baba tactically planned for a second attempt at protesting the following day, some of his peers already set out to do so when the night was at its darkest. Their efforts, however, were cut brutally short: at 3am that night, while we were sound asleep, over 400 police officers broke into the dormitories, methodically searching each room, not shy to assault any student on the way. By the time Baba and I woke up to his friend’s erratic phone call, over 800 student rooms had been ransacked, stomped over, damaged; windows shattered, books thrown out, wallpapers burnt. To Baba’s fury, and to the shock of his friends and colleagues in Tehran, five of their fellow university members had been killed, 400 wounded, and half of that number arrested. While Maman’s concerned phone calls went straight to voicemail, Baba prepared us for a fight. Maman still did not know of our whereabouts, or that we were heading to what later became known as Iran’s Tiananmen Square moment.
A longer version of this extract appears in the EWP anthology, From the Silence of the Stacks,
Jilly Cooper on sex and football
Keep the story going…
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“The London Library collects the books of each generation and hands them down as an heirloom to the next. What could be a more fitting purpose for a legacy?”
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Lough, member
FROM THE ARCHIVE
How a Romanian journalist ran one of Europe’s most important literary journals with the help of fellow writers in St James’s Square – including HG Wells, TS Eliot and Dame Rose Macaulay
The London Library has long been a home for all those dedicated to the written word – one such person, perhaps less well known to members today, is the Romanian journalist Miron Grindea, who joined in 1948.
Grindea was born in Romania in 1909 and was an editor of the significant literary journal the Adam International Review from its beginnings in 1930s Bucharest as a Jewish cultural review ( Adam was an acronym for Arts, Drama, Architecture and Music). He took on sole editorship in 1938 and remained its figurehead until his death, aged 86, in 1995. Its last published issue was in 1988.
If you would like to find out more about how a gift in your Will can help the Library, or if you would be interested in attending one of our events, please contact us at legacy@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4731.
At the start of the Second World War, Grindea emigrated to the UK from Romania with his wife Carola, a pianist, in response to the threat of fascism and antisemitism. After arriving in London, he secured a position with the BBC’s European Services, based in Bush House near Fleet Street, which broadcast news behind enemy lines, monitored foreign reports and even sent coded messages to resistance groups.
During this period Grindea began to form important connections that would influence Adam. At a conference
held by PEN International (a writers’ society), of which Grindea was the Romanian representative, Grindea offered Adam as a forum for writers fleeing Nazioccupied Europe. The first London issue (no 152) of Adam appeared in 1941, published in English and French, with a focus on European literature, the fight for freedom of expression and the plight of European Jews. Wartime paper rationing soon caused the cessation of publication, however, and Adam did not reappear until 1946, after the war, now featuring the arts more prominently. Many of its contributors were writers Grindea met after joining the Library. Prominent members HG Wells, Stefan Zweig and TS Eliot, the Library President from 1952–65 and a good friend of Grindea’s, all contributed articles. According to Grindea’s daughter, Nadia, and his grandson, David Lasserson, he felt at home at the Library, describing it as “his club”.
In her introduction to Art, Drama, Architecture and Music: An Anthology of Miron Grindea’s Adam Editorials, the editor’s granddaughter, Rachel Lasserson, highlights the journal’s “remarkable scoops”. These include an
Grindea valued the Library’s extended loan periods, calling them “part of the magic” of membership
essay by Marcel Proust on Honoré de Balzac (which was submitted by Proust’s niece), a play by Jean-Paul Sartre, and the correspondence of Charles Dickens with the artist and socialite Count D’Orsay. Grindea also had a knack for discovering people, and was in contact with Franz Kafka’s niece, Leo Tolstoy’s secretary and Proust’s waiter from The Ritz, all of whom offered Adam “alternative, personal reminiscences”. After the Second World War, its focus was not solely European, either. Writing was introduced from Sri Lanka, Senegal, Canada and India, offering, says Lasserson, a “truly global perspective”.
Though nominally a quarterly journal, Adam was published at differing intervals, usually when Grindea felt he had gathered sufficient material. He valued the Library’s extended loan periods, which allowed him to hold onto research books while building an issue, calling them “part of the magic” of membership. Reflecting on Adam’s decades-long run, The Times declared Grindea a “born editor”, and the journal “the most remarkable one-man performance of our lifetime”.
In recognition of the inspiration he found at St James’s Square, the 1978 issue of Adam, published in book form by Boydell Press, was titled The London Library. In the opening pages Grindea expresses gratitude for his “miracle” sponsorship by Dame Rose Macaulay, which enabled him to become a member. The issue also includes essays by former Librarians Stanley Gillam and Charles Hagberg Wright.
Both this issue and the two anthologies edited by Rachel Lasserson are available to borrow from the collections. They can be found under Periodicals; Grindea, Adam, along with other issues donated by the journalist and his family. The complete Adam International Review archive, as well as Grindea’s personal library of 20th-century European literature, was acquired by King’s College London in 1984 and is known as the Adam Collection.
As a Romanian emigre, who arrived in London unable to speak English, Grindea told his family that there were “types of club where he wouldn’t be able to be a member… places he couldn’t understand and that may not understand him”. Ultimately, however, he “found his home” at The London Library.
Resurrection of connections, People left with forlorn flowers
Scattered, smothering their lungs
Are gifted roots to pull the stems
Back to where they belong.
Petals pushing and urging and gently loving the heart
Nothing is aching for us to be apart
This is the poem I wrote that we were talking about at lunchtime.
It is about the platonic love I have for my friends and sister. It was done rushed and late at night, but I like it.
YOUR PALE, PROSTRATE CHRIST (2024)
Your pale, prostrate Christ
Enamelled in his melancholy
Waxen tears crowning carved eyelids, White hands pierced with the Stars driven across the heavens
Like matches struck in the delicacy
Of ebony. If only we could be saved, If only sacrifice were to be a tenable
Position the tender meat of snowy heifers, Their heads once bowing under
The weight of flowers is burned to Unknown Gods. And I see you,
With your own constellations, Other interpretations. I want you
To kneel under the burden of the stars, And start your journey of atonement And redemption in light of the eternal eyes that will follow your path through this sky.
SHELF LIFE
Rescuing weird, wonderful, weathered, warped and worn books is one of the joys of her job, says Michelle Hunter, the Collections Manager
Collection care is all about the physical wellbeing of a book. There are two main strands to this: conservation and managing the open stacks. As Collections Manager I am in charge of the day-to-day running of the department, along with a Senior Collections Assistant and five part-time Collections Assistants. I also run book handling training for all Library staff. There’s a lot of pull on my time, but I still get to do practical things such as parchment cleaning, and book and paper repairs. Our work has recently been given a boost thanks to the generous support of our members in response to the 2023/24 Library Fund appeal, Refresh and Restore, which helped raise just under £140,000 to enhance the collection. The funds are being used over the next three years to develop our existing collection, and to care for items in need of repair. When a book comes to us for conservation, we note its measurements, a description and its provenance for Library records and assess the condition of the binding and text block. This is done whenever special collection books (anything fragile, printed before 1699 or valuable to
the Library financially or historically) arrive at the Library, which is mostly through donations, but any member of staff can bring a book to the department for inspection. One of the oldest books I’ve worked on is a German book from 1530, titled Ein seltzam, vor vngehörte Practica… by Peter Creutzer. When I opened it, it was “oversewn”, meaning that the pages could rip from the tension. I had to completely disbind it, before carefully resewing the pages using linen thread. In 2023, the Museum Wormanium , a 1655 catalogue of curiosities – including giant tortoise shells, Roman jewellery and a “unicorn horn” (which was later discovered to be a narwhal tusk) – owned by Danish collector Ole Worm, was donated to the Library from the collection of historian Clive Wainwright. I cleaned the parchment cover – which is made from animal skin, possibly vellum (from a calf, and commonly used for important books at that time) – using a small amount of water and cotton wool wound around sticks. Small repairs were also made to the yapp edge (the part of the cover that extends past the text block of a hardback book for protection) by
a consultant conservator, who used strong, lightweight Japanese tissue paper fixed with gelatin.
A 1919 print of Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens, featuring woodcuts by Vanessa Bell, required more extensive repairs including the restoration of the original covers and the creation of a brand new four-flap case to house the book. The original paper covers – thought to have been handpainted in the Omega Workshops run by artist Roger Fry – were removed from the back of the old binding and reattached to the text block. A consultant conservator made Japanese tissue repairs along the spine and colour matched it to the original covers, restoring the binding to its original design.
In general, the Collection Care team works on books, but in April 2023 an unusual series of documents came to the Library. Between Two Fires is a “lost play”, written by suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst on toilet paper and medical gauze wrappers while she was imprisoned in HMP Holloway between 1920–21. Pankhurst’s play was performed at the Library in 2023 and 2024 and we mounted the papers for display for both occasions. We would usually
address paper folds, as they affect an object’s stability, but we felt they were part of the documents’ history.
Any member can ask to view a special collection item under invigilation, but we limit how often these objects are handled in a year to avoid wear and tear. Even taking a book off the shelf by the top of its spine, which feels natural, can cause damage. If you can, you should push a book out from behind. People also create dust, which invites pests (as does bringing food and coffee to the Library, which is why it’s only allowed on the 6th floor).
Before working in Collection Care, I ran my own glass and jewellery business, working in all sorts of different libraries on the side. I decided to do something practical in that field so I took bookbinding and conservation classes. As soon as I started at The London Library, I knew this was going to be my home for some time.
I love working with my hands. It’s a privilege to handle beautiful books, show them respect and make them last. •
Interview by Deniz Nazim-Englund
“I love working with my hands”
Above: An illustration in the 1655 volume Museum Wormanium Right, clockwise from top left: A 1919 print of Kew Gardens rebound with a new cover made from the book’s existing endpapers; specially made protective cases for the mounted papers of Sylvia Pankhurst’s play
FROM THE INSIDE SEEING
William Boyd, who renders his characters’ interior and exterior worlds with equal acuity, tells Katie Glass why novels are the most empathetic artform
Portraits by Charles Cave
There are so many books in William Boyd’s Chelsea townhouse it appears they are growing: volumes bunch on tightly packed shelves and mushroom from the floor up in unsteady towers. In the drawing room, where we sit beside a flickering fire, fat tomes pile on the coffee table: a cook’s herb companion, Lavery On Location (from a recent exhibition on Irish painter Sir John Lavery), and a biography of the war poet Robert Graves. “Much to my wife Susan’s sort-of dismay, whenever I start a new novel, the books start arriving for the research,” says Boyd with a grin. “That’s why we have this chronic storage problem.”
The author’s eclectic collection is testament to the kind of writer he is. In his prolific career (18 novels, three plays, numerous screenplays – and the rest) he’s become known as an unparalleled storyteller; not just a creator of characters but a builder of worlds. His meticulously researched novels are so richly detailed the reader feels themselves transported. His most famous work, Any Human Heart, the apparent diaries of Logan Gonzago Mountstuart, span 1923 to 1991, taking in meetings with Ernest Hemingway in 1920s Paris, Evelyn Waugh in Oxford and Virginia Woolf in London, following Mountstuart through the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War – encountering Ian Fleming – 1960s New York, West Africa, then London again for a run-in with Marxist terrorists, the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
Boyd is currently writing the sequel to his latest, 1960sset spy-thriller Gabriel’s Moon (he’s been commissioned to write a trilogy). His challenge is “to create Guatemala in 1963… to make it live and breathe on a page”. His research includes cookery books “because what people eat at a certain time in a century is very revealing”, modes of transportation, timetables, clothing “and how people dressed and for certain occasions”, and more. He’ll examine old photographs with a magnifying glass for details.
No wonder then that Boyd, now 72, has been a member of The London Library for more than 40 years. He joined in 1983, originally using it as a workspace after moving to London with his wife, the screenwriter and former Harper’s Bazaar editor-at-large, Susan Boyd. “We lived in Fulham and I had a tiny little cupboard-study, so I went to The London Library every day. Because my novels require a lot of research, there was nowhere better.”
His late friend, the novelist Justin Cartwright, was also a regular (as was Ian Fleming, whose James Bond books Boyd continued with Solo in 2013). “It was a kind of club, because you’re a member of this unique place with its extraordinary collection and access,” he says. He has always written in libraries. He wrote two novels while studying and teaching
at Oxford, “but there you’d have no access to the shelves.
The thing about The London Library that’s amazing is you can go down into those labyrinths of stacks. And because you’re a novelist, and you’re not writing non-fiction, you can cherry pick what you want.” He relishes the fun of “sniffing things out, looking for a book on Berlin in the 1920s, but you might see another book… [it is] a phenomenal resource”.
Boyd used the Library frequently writing his 1987 novel, The New Confessions, the first of his “cradle-to-grave” works, spanning John James Todd’s remarkable life from the pre-First World War years through to 1972, from Berlin to Scotland to Hollywood, via the Second World War. “I could find anything I needed in The London Library,” he says.
Even the internet hasn’t changed its usefulness.
“When I was writing Any Human Heart, I decided to give the central character’s father a job in the corned beef industry in Uruguay, so in the early days of Google I typed in ‘corned beef manufacturers’ and got 5,000 recipes for corned beef dishes. The only way I could find out how corned beef was actually made was to go to The London Library. And amongst the shelves of forgotten books on Uruguayan history, I found out how Fray Bentos was created.”
The complex worlds Boyd’s characters inhabit seem to reflect his own life story. Born in Ghana to Scottish parents, his father was a doctor of tropical medicine in Africa, where Boyd lived as a boy. From age nine he attended the boarding school Gordonstoun, as Prince Charles’s contemporary, alternating between school holidays in Africa and termtimes in Scotland. “I had this slightly schizoid identity,” he says in the soft Scottish burr he’s never lost. “I think, as a writer, so much the better… It did shape me, a lot,
“The only way I could find out how corned beef was made was to go to The London Library”
William Boyd adapted his novel Any Human Heart for a television drama for Channel 4, with Matthew Macfadyen, Jim Broadbent and Sam Claflin (above top, from left to right) playing the book’s protagonist Logan Mountstuart at different stages of his life. Photos: Joss Barratt, Courtesy of Carnival Films
“Only in the novel do you get this free, uncensored access to the thoughts of other people”
that curious relationship with my native country and my inherited country, Scotland. There’s no doubt it’s contributed to what I write and think, and how I feel about things.”
He notes that Graham Greene claimed authors were forged by their first eight years. Boyd thinks it’s closer to 20 years: “My theory is it’s before you become self-conscious about being a writer. Your great quarry of emotions, experiences and sensations before you started filtering it through a writer’s perspective… [it] forms the mulch in which I plant my seeds.”
Greene was one of the first writers who inspired Boyd. As a teenager he read The Heart of the Matter, set in Sierra Leone, “just next door to Ghana… the landscapes and the ambience of the novel were completely familiar to me. I think that’s when I saw how your everyday experiences were the material you needed to write something fictive.”
Originally, he wanted to be a painter, but his father said he hadn’t “a hope in hell”. “One of my great regrets,” says Boyd, “is that he didn’t live long enough to see my novels published, and a certain kind of success arriving – to know I wasn’t a fantasist.” His father died at 58, when Boyd had published a few short stories. “He had absolutely zero confidence in this ambition of mine to be a writer.”
If Greene inspired Boyd to take external inspiration, F Scott Fitzgerald opened his eyes to the novel’s potential for revealing a character’s interiority. He holds the longstanding conviction that novels are the only way we can truly know each other. “Whether it’s Jane Austen, Charles Dickens or Saul Bellow, what the novel does is give you effortless access to the interior life of other people. Life is
A VOICE IN THE DARK
Historian Hallie Rubenhold brought a measure of literary justice to the victims of Jack the Ripper – now she’s investigated the music-hall murder that shocked Edwardian London, writes Nancy Groves
Portraits by Ellie Smith
“If you read traditional tellings of this story, it’s all Crippen-focused and that influenced my choice of title,” explains Rubenhold. “I realised as I was reading these books, they’re the story of a murderer. And that’s what so much true crime is. But we have to look at the story of a murder: a panoramic view with a wider understanding of the implications: the lives, the communities, the families it affects, but also the imprint it can leave on history.”
Rubenhold is a historian first and foremost. Born in Los Angeles, she moved to the UK to study history and art history as a postgraduate. Her first job was for the art dealer Philip Mould, just a few streets away from The London Library. “It was Philip who said: ‘This is where you’re going to be doing your research,’” Rubenhold recalls, looking out over the rooftops of St James’s Square from the Library’s sixth floor, where we meet today.
She’s now an ambassador for the Library, and considers it an “honour” to represent an institution that has “helped [her] in so many ways. The collection is so diverse and such an important resource, in part because it’s possible to take the books home. This saves a fortune when it comes to tracking down obscure texts.” She also notes that “being a writer is a lonely job” and while she’s not a Reading Room regular (preferring her favourite secluded desk near a window), she says the Library has “provided a sense of community”.
From Mould’s Historical Portraits, she became an assistant curator at the National Portrait Gallery, before embarking on a writing career. Two books on 18th-century sex workers, The Covent Garden Ladies and The Harlot’s Handbook , spawned a BBC documentary, and her next, Lady Worsley’s Whim , about an aristocratic divorce in Georgian England, became the racy television period drama The Scandalous Lady W. “What drives me as a historian is the unspoken stuff,” she says of her output. “People in the past lived a dual life, as much as us. I’m more interested in what we actually do than what we say we do. Especially in all the front rooms and domestic settings of this book.”
Story of a Murder is set at the beginning of the 20th century when “everything is changing”, says Rubenhold, who points to the speed of both technological change –motorised buses, aviation, passenger ships and Marconi wireless technology (which played a crucial role in Crippen’s capture) – but also social change, especially for women.
“In the public domain, we only talk about suffrage,” she says. “But if you think of women’s experiences at this time as a pie, suffrage is one slice. Women were entering the workforce in white collar jobs, they were empowered financially, they could live on their own… all this leads to suffrage, because it’s not until [women] have access to these things that they realise they can effect change.”
While writing, Rubenhold says she becomes “completely obsessed” with her characters. “I literally dreamt of these people every single night. Ethel in particular absolutely haunted me. You oddly have sympathy for her, but she makes bad choices in her life as, to be perfectly honest, does any killer.” She also throws herself into “every single corner” of her story – “from homeopathy to pathology”. She even made contact – “an absolute joy” – with descendants of Charlotte, the first Mrs Crippen.
During Covid lockdowns, with travel restricted and archives closed, there was a period when Rubenhold could only read secondary sources, making The London Library a lifeline for her research. “They would send you books,” she says. “I was like: ‘Hallelujah!’ At least I could keep the pilot light burning in my head for what the story was about.” She remembers, with relief, the reopening of The National Archives at Kew, where the bulk of the Crippen case material is kept. No pens or papers were allowed in, just a phone, which she used to photograph her sources during a frantic four-hour slot.
In both the primary and secondary sources, she found a pervasive narrative, that Elmore was somehow “too much” or “deserving of her own death” – in common with the Ripper victims. “Yes, the ‘asking for it’ line. It never goes
“I literally dreamt of these people every single night. Ethel in particular absolutely haunted me”
Rubenhold’s latest book required her to research homeopathy and pathology
away,” she laments. “The way Belle is discussed is what happens to women who go for a night out, get drunk and get raped. ‘What was she doing? What was she wearing? What did this person do to make this happen to them?’ But no. Men shouldn’t rape. People shouldn’t murder.”
Rubenhold’s indignation is clearly a driver. “We need to look more holistically at a murder,” she says. “Not just, ‘Oh, this is a really good story.’ There is a good story here, but it’s also other things. It’s important to do true crime ethically.” She can, she says, “almost hear people groaning” at that. “‘Oh, ethical true crime! I guess that means making it boring.’ But it means creating a bigger picture. There’s all this stuff that gets pared away when you’re regurgitating a tabloid headline from over 100 years ago. These stories deserve more investigation.”
It’s here she adds a disclaimer: she is “not a true crime person” (“I find a lot of it really distasteful”), but believes the genre is evolving. “I think we’re moving away from the House
of Horror depiction of known murderers,” she says, shouting out the original Serial podcast, as well as Monsters, a drama about the Menendez brothers by writer and director Ryan Murphy. “I was blown away by that, because [Murphy] was doing exactly what I was trying to do,” she says. “It’s deeply uncomfortable: those sons murdered their parents, but the parents were physically abusing their sons in the most horrific way. The perspective moves and you get to know all the characters. Murder is difficult. Human beings are horrifically messy, you know. And we have to lean into that.”
Just without being gratuitous. In Story of a Murder, Rubenhold details the dismembering of Elmore’s body in a single paragraph – a conscious choice. “Between Belle disappearing and finding her remains, she ceases to be a human being. She is in pieces. She is so thoroughly dehumanised,” she says. “Some of this is necessary for scientific examination, of course. But when she’s also being dehumanised in court, by her husband, by the press, it becomes horrific. She ceases to be: she is hair, she is viscera, she is a bit of clothing. She is not Belle Elmore. No one deserves that.”
In one sense, this book is a righting of that wrong. Rubenhold also gives short shrift to conspiracy theorists and the television show Secrets of the Dead ’s 2008 episode Executed in Error, which claimed mitochondrial DNA evidence from a slide of Elmore’s skin proves the remains in Crippen’s cellar were not hers. Rubenhold fends off the theory with a detailed appendix from Professor Turi King, the geneticist who proved the remains found in a Leicester carpark in 2013 were those of King Richard III. Professor King highlights flaws in the methodology of the recent DNA testing. Rubenhold, for her part, believes producers were “chasing the drama”.
Scripted drama is where Rubenhold sees herself working next, with both Story of a Murder and The Five having been optioned for screen. “One of the things that drives me crazy about the Ripper thing is people constantly trying to solve the case,” she says. “It’s a waste of time. And the desire here to say [Crippen] must have been innocent. I hope this is disproved by looking at the case from all these different perspectives and really diving into the documentation.” Spoiler alert: Crippen was guilty and Elmore was not “asking for it”. “Exactly, yes,” says Rubenhold. “Mic drop, you know?” •
Nancy Groves is a writer and editor from London
Four titles from Hallie Rubenhold’s shelf, while writing her latest book
“This is a classic bit of late Victorian social satire, which parodied the lower middle classes and put Holloway on the map in the decade before Harvey and Cora Crippen [aka Belle Elmore] moved there,” says Rubenhold. In 1910, the Crippens’ house on Hilldrop Crescent became a crime scene of global infamy when Elmore’s remains were found there.
Find it in: Fiction; Grossmith, George
“Memoirs fascinate me for their ability to speak directly to the reader,” says Rubenhold. “They feel so intimate and yet are so performative.” Though Inspector Dew’s “entertaining” memoir, written during his retirement, is “a tangle of embellishment, fact and total fabrication”, it is a useful insight into his personality, says Rubenhold.
Find it in: Biog; Dew, Walter
Written at a time when women were advocating for their suffrage and greater social freedoms, Wells’ novel is “a fascinating reflection of Edwardian social mores and just how rebellious young women at the time could be”, says Rubenhold. The titular character’s experience of the capital also has parallels with the real life of Dr Crippen’s mistress, Ethel Le Neve. “[She] was living on her own, enjoying her equally secretive and scandalous freedom.” Find it in: Fiction; Wells, H. G.
This “truly beautiful and moving” semi-autobiographical novel is a revealing portrait of life in Brooklyn, New York, at the turn of the century, says Rubenhold. “So much of what [Smith] wrote could apply to the life of Belle Elmore, who came from the same neighbourhood as the author and her main character, Francie Nolan.” Find it in: Fiction, 4to.; Smith, Betty
THE DIARY OF A NOBODY BY GEORGE AND WEEDON GROSSMITH (1892)
I CAUGHT CRIPPEN: MEMOIRS OF EX-CHIEF INSPECTOR WALTER DEW (1938)
A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN BY BETTY SMITH (1943)
ANN VERONICA BY HG WELLS (1909)
Belle Elmore, who was killed by her husband Dr Crippen, is given a voice in Story of a Murder. Photo: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy Stock Photo
“I got deep into a book about balloonists, because the French army had observational people in balloons”
encounter with the subject,” he says. When the pandemic hit, he was working on then-showrunner Chris Chibnall’s third series, but restrictions halted production. The subsequent period was tough for Patel. “I’d come through a period of difficulty with illness,” he says. The fatigue and brain fog that accompanied long Covid meant Patel was struggling to focus. “Suddenly, I just couldn’t deliver on time,” he says. He needed a gentle environment to reorientate himself. “I was looking for a way to take my writing seriously again that wasn’t going to a WeWork [shared office space] or rotting at home,” he says. It was around this time he landed at the Library. “At first, it was a place where I thought I was going to be very serious about writing,” he says. Patel had initially imagined the Library as a disciplined and scholarly place, the equivalent of a rap on the wrist. But the reality felt more like a hug.
Patel jokingly describes wandering the Library’s warren-like stacks before sitting down to his desk as soothing, like “a physical version of reading to the bottom of the Guardian ”. Getting lost among rows and rows of books made him feel like a child again. “The world feels bigger than you there, in a nice way,” he says. Peeking into Topology, say, and pulling a book from the shelf was a reminder that the Library might lead him to new ideas through a process of discovery and play. “The act of being in a space where there’s so much expertise about something you know nothing about is really exciting,” he adds. “You never know what you’ll stumble on.”
Patel began spending more time at the Library, which was starting to feel like a haven. On Saturdays, he’d sit in the Reading Room all day “in an armchair and read a play and doze off”, he says, chuckling. As he felt more like himself, the writing started to flow. He’d spend gloomy days looking up at the skylight in the Foyle Lightwell Reading Room, allowing ideas to trickle
down. He redrafted “an adaptation of The Cherry Orchard that was set on a spaceship, and everyone was brown”, a project that had stagnated during lockdown, and adapted a young adult novel set in 19th-century Cairo. “I got deep into a book about balloonists, because the French army had observational people in balloons,” he says. “I didn’t know places like this still existed. I’ve been in London nearly my whole life. That has mostly been a journey of watching nice things disappear.”
The youngest son of two Gujarati pharmacists, Patel grew up in “the hinterlands of southeast London”, in Bexley. As a child, he was introspective. He took pictures with expired disposable cameras he found in his dad’s pharmacy and developed them in its photo lab. At the kitchen table, he’d write stories; in his bedroom, he’d read. In the living room, Patel watched television with his grandparents. He remembers seeing Star Wars at Christmas with his late grandmother. “I could tell they didn’t really know everything that was going on,” he says, but it never stopped them connecting with what was on screen. As a teenager he rewrote the script of The Matrix, setting his version in Dartford, the town he travelled to for school. “I loved trying to fashion my own realities,” he says, adding that: “It was a way out of a suburban life.”
Patel jokes that he convinced his father to let him apply to study English by telling him it was a “more employable degree than business studies”. But, even then, Patel’s ambition was serious. Desperate to escape his hometown, he drew a 200-mile radius around it on a map.
He knew he wanted to be somewhere that wasn’t here and was struck by the beauty of the South Downs, which felt a million miles away from London. A girl he was dating had applied to the University of Exeter, so he added it to his list. “I ended up flipping a coin between the University of East Anglia [UEA] and Exeter,” he recalls. When the
Vinay Patel wrote Demons
Who Photo: BBC / Ben Blackall
coin came down as UEA, he flipped it again. Exeter, Patel says, turned out to be exactly the right choice.
Many years (and libraries) later, Patel began work on a project for the stage about the filmmaker George Lucas and his former wife, the film editor Marcia Lucas. “I’ve been writing a play about the 1970s American filmmaking scene and American Zoetrope,” he says, referring to the production company Lucas co-founded with Francis Ford Coppola. It began as an exploration of how the guy who was supposed to make Apocalypse Now became the guy who wrote Star Wars, he says, but as he delved deeper into the research, Marcia emerged as a protagonist. He combed the Library’s collections for biographies on the New Hollywood scene, citing Dale Pollock’s biography Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas as a key text. “It was supposed to be an authorised biography of Lucas and then he read it and was like: ‘Make it unauthorised!’” he says, cackling, “which is actually great as a source.” Information on Marcia, however, was more elusive. “She basically became a recluse after they divorced, so I spent a lot of time on the internet and in the Library,” he says. He trawled through articles about female film editors, describing the process as “like trying to see the light around a black hole”.
Patel says it was a Monday, one of the days when the Library closes late, when he finished writing the play.
“I had worked a 10-hour day,” he remembers. Quietly, he slammed through the draft. “I love being able to stay in that one spot and keep my focus.”
Patel says that the thing he misses about being a new writer is that no one expects you to be an expert. “It’s a journey of discovery,” he explains. He met David Byrne when Byrne was the Artistic Director of the New Diorama Theatre in Camden; when Byrne took over at the Royal Court in 2024, he hired Patel as an Associate Playwright. Alongside six other writers, Patel is part of a leadership team whose role is to shape the direction of the theatre, and to mentor and train new talent. He says the key to doing good work is knowing what it’s for. Murdered by My Father was “about shame and pride”, he says, comparing it to Arthur Miller’s 1955 play A View from the Bridge. “Writing a partition episode of Doctor Who, I knew what that was for,” he says, adding that the Royal Court has given him a renewed sense of purpose. “As someone who didn’t grow up with theatre, to now work in one of the most influential writing buildings in the world feels really validating,” he says. “I wish my grandparents were still alive to see that.” •
Patel in the Reading Room
Above right: Patel’s 2018 play An Adventure at the Bush Theatre with Shubham Saraf and Anjana Vasan. Photo: Helen Murray
READING LIST
Vinay Patel on his dream adaptations
This story of a shipwrecked man discovering a scientist’s horrifying genetic experiments has been adapted several times, but Patel would like to take on the mantle, too. He says: “There’s a lot more than gun-toting bison within Wells’ strange, creepy exploration of faith and science.”
Find it in: Fiction; Wells, H. G.
DAVID ASHTON HANDMADE IN LONDON
Mitchell’s epic, which unfolds via six stories about characters separated through time but interconnected through fate, makes “a troubled world feel more hopeful”, says Patel. He is adapting it for the stage and describes it as “one of the most maddening pleasures of [my] career”.
Find it in: Fiction, 4to.; Mitchell, David
After watching a “riveting” revival of Treadwell’s play based on the life of Ruth Snyder, who was executed by electric chair for the murder of her husband, Patel believes “there’s an incredible film to be found there”. He says: “There’s so much that’s unfortunately still relevant in this masterpiece nearly 100 years after it was first staged.”
Find it in: L. English Drama; Treadwell, Sophie
This “woozy, vivid tale of romance across time and tribes” is told through letters passed between two rival timetravelling secret agents. Unfortunately for Patel, the authors are adapting the book themselves. “[They] will do a phenomenal job,” he says. “I’ll be first in line to see it.”
Find it in: Fiction; El-Mohtar, Amal
020 7401 2405
From 1st – 12th October 2025 10:30am - 5pm (including Sundays)
A loan exhibition in celebration of Wartski’s 160th anniversary Free entry Catalogues £10 for the benefit of The King’s Trust Janiform fibula, 1st-2nd century A.D. Rupert Wace private collection. Shown life size.
wartski@wartski.com
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU BY HG WELLS (1896)
MACHINAL BY SOPHIE TREADWELL (1928)
THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR BY AMAL EL-MOHTAR AND MAX GLADSTONE (2019)
CLOUD ATLAS BY DAVID MITCHELL (2004)
EVENTS
Hear about King James I’s court favourite from biographer Lucy Hughes-Hallett and explore textile art with Tate Britain and Barbican curators
30 April
COMPLEX RELATIONS: BRITAIN AND RUSSIA ACROSS THE CENTURIES
Historian Barbara Emerson, novelist Marcel Theroux, and journalists Luke Harding and Giles Milton discuss the complicated relationship between Britain and Russia, from the 19th century to the present day.
7pm – 8pm, in person
7 May
THE STUART STORY WITH LUCY HUGHES-HALLETT AND DR ANNA KEAY
The Stuart period was a dramatic century marked by dynastic intrigue, religious strife, civil war and regicide. Join authors and Library members Lucy Hughes-Hallett and Anna Keay for a discussion on the politics and personalities of the 17th century. From King James I and his “favourite”, the Duke of Buckingham – on whom Hughes-Hallett published a critically acclaimed biography last year – to the extraordinary decade following the execution of Charles I in 1649.
This is a London Library Patrons event. If you would like to become a Patron, please contact patrons@ londonlibrary.co.uk
6.30pm – 8pm, in person
15 May ART/LIT SALON: TEXTILES/CULTURE
Dominique Heyse-Moore, Senior Curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain, returns as host of the regular Art/Lit Salon. This edition features visual artist and writer Himali Singh Soin, winner of the 2019 Frieze Artist Award, and Wells Fray-Smith, curator of Unravel at the Barbican, discussing the intersection of textiles, politics and cultural identity as part of London Craft Week.
6.45pm – 8.45pm, in person
3 June
BOUGHTON HOUSE
We are grateful to be able to offer an exceptional day trip to discover the literary and artistic treasures of Boughton House, hosted by its owner, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry, a London Library member. The stately home, known as “The English Versailles”, houses
a remarkable collection that offers us a glimpse into centuries of literary and historical heritage.
From illuminated manuscripts to rare first editions, its library reflects the scholarly pursuits and cultural passions of generations of the Montagu and Buccleuch families. The Duke will provide personal insights into the library’s history and some of its most notable volumes, offering a unique perspective on one of Britain’s finest private book collections.
This is a London Library Patrons event. If you would like to become a Patron, please contact patrons@ londonlibrary.co.uk
10am – 3pm, in person
5 June
PRESERVING CULTURE IN CONFLICT
In the lead-up to Refugee Week (16–25 June), Sudanese author Yassmin Abdel-Magied, EritreanEthiopian-British novelist Sulaiman Addonia, Ukrainian historian Dr Olesya Khromeychuk
Palestinian
discuss their endeavours to hold onto the foundations of their cultural heritage and identities in the face of war and devastation.
7pm – 8pm, in person
6 June WRITE & SHINE: CITY OF MEMORIES –VIRGINIA WOOLF AND PATRICK HAMILTON
Start your day with a burst of creativity. Join Write & Shine bright and early, live from The London Library for a 90-minute virtual writing workshop that explores literary London.
7.45am – 9.15am, online
For more information, and to be the first to hear about events at the Library, refer to the fortnightly newsletter, scan this QR code or visit londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on
Above: A portrait of George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham from 1625–26, by the Dutch artist Michiel Jansz Van Miereveld. Photo: Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Top: Boughton House in Northamptonshire. Above: Wells Fray-Smith, curator at the Barbican Art Gallery, will join May’s Art/Lit Salon
