Juxtabook

The Oxbridge Formula by Paarul Shah, Jessica Grindlay and Chris Parker - review

 

It has been a while since I posted on education and most children (and their parents!) are missing the support of school at the moment so this is excellent timing for the publication of The Oxbridge Formula by Paarul Shah, Jessica Grindlay and Chris Parker.

If you have a child in years 11 or 12 likely to do well/ or having done well in their GCSEs then this book is well worth your time. Although principally aimed at those planing on studying sciences and the more mathematical subjects such as economics there is much good advice here for any student in lower 6th (year 12).

Applying to Oxford or Cambridge brings challenges that applications to other universities do not - the entrance exams and admissions interviews. These can be daunting to point of putting students off even considering an application, and can also be a minefield to navigate even if they do decide to go for it. Here, then, is your answer, clearly organised and full of sound good sense.

It is a much weightier tome than you might think but is well designed for dipping in an out of the relevant sections to you. Courses are explained with "what it's like to study x" sections and explanations of how the subject differs between school and university, or what a day or week in the life of a student of that subject is like. It also summarises what you need to apply for the courses at Oxford or Cambridge in terms of A level results, or specific A level subjects. The various different entrance exams are explained - this is something of a sea of acronyms but that's hardly the authors' fault. There is plenty of depth of detail with styles of questions and the nature of the different papers discussed and QR code links for more information, sample or past papers, and free guides. I am also impressed by how many joint honours courses or courses that more interdisciplinary are considered: PPE, or Economic History for example.

The book adds to its strengths with really useful annotated sample personal statements and candidate interviews transcripts, as well as spot the successful candidate sections which compare different approaches to preparing for the exam and interview. The former show what is good to include, and how to display your experiences and interests to your advantage. Although the letters are subject specific the advice could easily be applied to any subject and would make useful reading if you're stuck on writing your personal statement (or advising your son or daughter) for any Russell Group university not just Oxford and Cambridge.

The interview transcripts show how the tutors are looking for teachability and an informed, enquiring mind. The amount of backtracking and "uming and erring" in the transcripts show how good candidates think on their feet and engage with what the tutor is asking them, but should also help nervous future applicants realise that they don't have to get everything right first time to be successful. I also like the focused sub-sections such as what a candidate without an Economics A level might get asked in an interview to study for a degree in Economics for example.

The third significant feature, the candidate profiles, are just brilliant. You can see immediately (perhaps more so if you're the parent) what are the useful ways for you (or your young person) to be spending time in the run up to the entrance exams and then the interviews. Clear differences are shown between targeted useful preparation, ill-thought out preparation or over-confidence or over-ambition, and candidates that work very hard but in the wrong way mis-directing their energies in someway, or applying for the wrong courses for their talents and interests. I think this feature as much as the more academic parts of the book is the real social leveller: it invites all candidates, whatever their background, to the world of what used to be called middle-class know-how.

Lastly there is much recommended further reading to help you prepare for the exams and most importantly for the interviews. These are potted reviews of the books not just lists. There is even recommended reading for you once you have an offer, to help you keep up to speed for your first year at university (again useful for students applying elsewhere). This latter is particularly useful if you are taking a gap year. With maths and science where so much knowledge is cumulative, you will slip back a little in your year-out and this advice will keep you on track.

As an arts graduate I asked myself was there enough here to help me understand the differences in the application systems if I was supporting a child to apply for science, medicine or maths (ie a subject far removed from mine), and there was. You can see the pathway if even if you don't understand the subject!

After closely reading the bonus chapter on studying philosophy (something I did read as an undergraduate!) I thought it balanced and informative. The suggested reading was demanding but very much in line with what I might expect to be recommended to a bright 6th former.The interview sample was thought provoking and you could see the way the student was thinking their way around the problems posed and what the tutor was trying to get out of it.

As for criticisms my biggest gripe is the sample letters are a bit London/private school-centric. Debating societies and work experience in Parliament for example are in one letter, though to its credit the notes explain that the key thing is to mention how the work experience fits with your subject choice which could apply to a much great range of life experiences. Another mentions spending a gap year working for a publicly listed software company when applying to study computer science, again unlikely to be available to you if you live in, say, rural Wales. I would like to have seen more of how a student whose background is a comprehensive school in a deprived area or a rural area, and whose out-of-school experiences might have been looking after younger siblings or working on a supermarket till might make the most of those experiences in their statement. It is fairly easy to see how working in parliament can be made to apply to the PPE course but more imaginative examples here and there would have been good. Equally though the same letter mentions doing an Open Yale course - providing ideas of something the reader could do to add to their CV with enough notice.

Overall, this is a five star guide with much to recommend it to a broad range of students. You can read more on their website here. You may also find the Russell Group website regarding the best choices for A level subjects here.

Notes:

PPE is Philosophy, Politics and Economics. A degree much beloved by future politicians, city workers and journalists.

The Russell Group is a group of 24 leading research universities (which means they prioritise academic research as well as teaching). There are many well respected universities outside of this group but it would be foolish to pretend other than that attending one of these does help graduates in the jobs market for some employers/industries.

The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy by John Gaskin

 

 

The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy by John Gaskin is one of my favourite discoveries in the last twelve months. Those of us who benefited from and '70s or '80s comprehensive school education avoided Latin. Many of my contemporaries may thank their lucky stars for this but, for me, lacking this entry level means to a classical education is a source of regret. You're not more than five minutes into an undergraduate English degree before you realise that our literary canon is under-pinned by thought developed from western Christianity and from the classical world. First year undergrad courses in philosophy (my subsidiary subject) hardly scratched the surface. My lack of knowledge on the latter has been a source of irritation since then.

I know from my sales of Latin and Greek books that there are many autodidacts out there, but most them are going back in their retirement to subjects begun at school in the '40s and '50s. In a busy life the motivation to start from scratch is sadly lacking. And here's where the wonderful The Traveller's Guide to Classical Philosophy comes in. Firstly it is based on lectures: hard stuff based on the spoken word originally is always easier for a tired brain to take in, and often much more entertaining. Secondly it is big on historical and literary context which for a literary critic coming to philosophy in some trepidation is excellent. And lastly, and this may seem trivial, it is short being a beautifully brief tour at 192pp. This, you see, is exactly what I am after.

It has a great first chapter, "A Scheme of Things Entire", being a detailed chronology bigger on explanation than dates, that I keep dipping back into for context. I'm now thoroughly enjoying Part II: The Ideal of Homer and the Ideas of the Philosophers which is clear, well paced and enlivened with drawings. Other elegant features include a proper index (I'm amazed how often indexes are missed out these days) and a gazetteer making it literally a traveller's companion. A review copy that is definitely a keeper.

Offer: free P+P on UK orders of this book until the end of January. The book is £8.99. Just send me a message to order.

We also have a couple of thousand out of print and hard to find philosophy books in stock. You can browse the philosophy shelves here.

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-Life Settings of the World's Favourite Fiction

 

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Topography of Classic Literature edited by John Sutherland is not the first to chart this kind literary geography but it is certainly one of the most wide-ranging. Dozens of novels are explored here, with settings across the world. As well as the obvious Brontës in Haworth, Dickens' London, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, Harper Lee's Alabama, or even A. A. Milnes' '100 Aker Wood' here we also find essays on Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (set in the Swiss Alps), Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavrandsatter set in the Gudbrand Valley, Norway, Orphan Pamuk's Snow set in Kars, Turkey, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart set in Onitsha, Nigeria, and Tim Winton's Cloudstreet set in Perth, Australia. If you look the evocation of place then this not just a place to catch-up with old favourites but to find new ones too.

 

 

The format is by movement and era: Romanticism, Modernism, etc. This gives the book both a thematic as well as a chronological structure. The vast number of essays mean that each treatment is fairly short, but there is no sense of hurry amongst the essays themselves. I assume the range and organisation are down to Sutherland and both features are a strength of the book.

Also standout are the visual production values. It is lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs (in colour for the more modern books), author photographs, stills from films, maps, and images of books covers. As a book dealer I particularly like the page of evocative mid-twentieth century William Faulkner covers and the full page given over to the anniversary edition cover of La Colmena (The Hive) by Camilo José Cela.

Each essay is bordered by wide margins finely filled with more detail on the authors and their books. Beautifully presented and meaning the essay writers don't have to waste time on background before the exposition on the place in the novel. I like this feature and it is especially useful as for those authors you are less familiar with (and there will be quite a few).

The obvious essay for me to focus on is Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, set as it is fairly close to where I am typing and an area I know well. The essay is excellent: it immediately brings together the weather and landscape, not simply the oft mentioned cruelty of the landscape which is really the landscape combined with its weather. We certainly get a lot of weather round here (in the never that extreme rather British way). I remember an American book blogger who visited here commenting that until she'd ventured up on the moors behind Haworth she had no idea wind could come from so many directions at once. The moors do take your breath away. Sutherland (for this is one of the literary critic's own essays) then finds a rather lovely sunny quote by contrast that has me reaching for Wuthering Heights again to re-live some its texture. The skies aren't always grey over Haworth.

 

The essay is finished off beautifully with a double page spread of a painting by L.S. Lowry, The Witherns near Haworth; this Lancashire painter is an unexpected choice but the blue-grey-khaki palette of Lowry fits the essay's themes extremely well.

So far I can heartily recommend, but I do have a few quibbles. The essays are very uneven - not surprising perhaps when there are so many - although the Brontë one is one of the best and I love the one on Anne of Green Gables. In addition, some of the sub-editing choices are poor - Wuthering Heights is on the Yorkshire Moors apparently. That phrase, particularly with a capital M, usually refers to the North York Moors. (See this for an example, and this). This is a National Park and Haworth is not in it nor particularly even near it, Yorkshire being a huge county. Obviously Yorkshire moors could be used to described any upland Yorkshire area. This rogue capital letter is small point but an irritating one (why didn't they look at an OS map and call it Haworth Moor?) There are other little quibbles like this on the books / places I know well so there must be others on those I don't.

The most significant problem though is the lack of attribution of the essays. It is possible to eventually find out who wrote what only by turning to the the back where there is an A-Z of contributors, where you have to read through each one till you find who wrote the essay you're interested in. This hassle could have been solved by the use of the old-fashioned by-line.

Having moaned about the difficulty of discovering the contributors, they are generally of a high quality though, which probably means you've never heard of them, as they are mostly academics like Sutherland. They include people like Daniel Hahn (Oxford Companion to Children's Literature), Julie Curtis (Professor of Russian Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford), Andrew Watts (Senior Lecturer in French Studies, University of Birmingham, The Cambridge Companion to Balzac), etc., as well as more general writers such as the ubiquitous Robert Macfarlane.

Overall all, I enjoyed this beautiful book. It is a worthy successor to last years' Literary Wonderlands: A Journey through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created from the same publisher, and an excellent addition to what you might call the book-list genre.

 

 

Literary Landscapes: Charting the Real-Life Settings of the World’s Favourite Fiction

General Editor: John Sutherland

Published 25 October 2018 – Price: £25 hardback, full-colour illustration.

You could buy this from your local book shop or by using the Amazon link in the text, or directly from me (who is also assessed for Uk tax!). I can offer free UK postage on pre-orders until the 24th October. Just contact me to order.

You could win a copy too: Follow @modernbooks and tweet your own favourite #LiteraryLandscape for a chance to win a copy of Literary Landscapes.

Blog tours can be a bit samey but there is so much to read and discuss in this book that this one might well be worth following.

 

Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers, edited by Dr Naomi Folb

The book I am about to review is by dyslexic writers. As a dyslexic myself I felt it was time to 'out' my writing, and so for the first time (and probably the last!) I am going to review this book as myself - me the dyslexic, with none of the usual checks and strategies to make it easy for you. Easy for you because writing conventionally is such a strain for me. From here on there are no more spells checks, proof reading, reading it out loud or backwards, leaving it 48 hours in the hope that I will 'see' my own errors with a bit of time passing, or asking my "normal" literate husband to check my work. After the colon is my unamended style:

Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers, edited by Dr Naomi Folb is a collections of poems and essays by writers ho are dyslexic. I met the editor Nim Folb on twitter abut eight months ago. She runs RASP - rebel against spelling publishing - which specilisies in publishing deslixic writers and is dysleci herslef. We exchanged a few amused emals. Nim was entertiained by the idea of a dyslecic bookseller and I by the idea of a dslexic publsier.

Nim has a wonderfully positve line on dyslexia and has no time for cures or other attitudes that suggest we need fixing. I have struggled with writing, and especially spelling all my life, and as you can see have troubl with it to this day despite two English degrees, a post grad teching qualification, 5 years teahcing experience (two as whole school literatcy coordinator) and 8+ years as an assistant examiner for th GCSE literature paper. My main probem is sequencing: letters withing words, words withing sentences, sentences within paragraphs and ideas with an essay or indded a blog book review. Normally writng is very hard for me and takes a long time. I have a lot of stregegies to cope but they are time conduming. his oine reaosn why I trouble fitting blogging in- getting my prose fir for public sondumption take so much linger than I guess it doe sfor most of you. The one things I envy 'normal' people is the ease at which they can produce something so crisp and reable. I am guessing tht quite few people have given up readingt his already, but it is incredibly liberating for me.

So, it must be incredibly libberating for dysleic writers to be able to submit to a publish whos says: "no need to use ‘spell check’ or nondyslexic grammar rules. RASP is more interested in dyslexic creativity than the ability to conform to external ‘standards’." Nim, as you;ll see from ehr site, can like me, make a show of largely conforming to the external standard but frankly it is like speaking another language!

Forgotten Letters, to continue the refreshing theme, is a very resfeshing read. it is not as hard to read as this probably is for you, as many of the sydleci writers do conform. better known names included are Benjamin Zepaniah, Billy Childish (the painter0), Sally Gardener etc. The poems and the essays are moving and funny and show the wide veriation in experience and talent of these writers. It makes wonderufl book for dipping into whether you any interest in literacy or not, but it is amust read for a teacher, parent or employer.

It has been long argued that dyslexia is not simple a disbility it is a differnt ability. I've never been anything else so it is difficult to comment but my husband maintains I think in very peculiar ways. My very self-employment as a books seller (and Nim's as apublisher) might be held as typcial of the dyslei who can think outsife the usual box. If you intereste din teh subject of what dyslecis can do rather then what they can't the Proust and the Squid,. which cover the science history of how humand learn to read is also veyr good on the dslecic gift. Fate throuh me two lifelong conditions. I suffer from Hypermobility Syndroem. I *suffer* from that, but I merely am dysleic and am quite happy being so. It is wonderful to see dyslxia so postivley protrayed. It is a bit of an effort  to write but I am not uduly bothered by it. I never wake up thinking I wish I wasn't dyslexic.

Having praised all that positiveit do I really thnk we dyslecixs shoudln't try and confirm? No. On ethe whoel I thnk we hve to - written communicvtion is too hard with out the ttempt. But it might be nie for thse who are nrmal to see just how much effort we have to put int o communicationg with you! We hope you appreicate it! So, if your a dys;eic teenager who has stumbled on this I'm afriad yI still think you need to learn strategies tha work for you. there is no way roudn working harder in thend.

And it is a very speedt post for me this - I#d normally spend an hour sorting the above out! So, Forgotten Letters: An Anthology of Literature By Dyslexic Writers (I cut and pasted that can you tell??), come with a more than usually personal commendation from me, but don't buy it becuse you feel sorry, or even just curios, buy it because it is actually a damn good read. And that's no more surpising than a sylexic English teacher, or bookseller or publisher!

Maths for Mums and Dads by Rob Eastaway and Mike Askew

Not the usual fare for Juxtabook but Maths for Mums and Dads is so darn good I have to mention it. Now there is nothing wrong with my maths, I have a good GCSE in it, an A level in Economics and I run my own business. I am not scared of numbers as some people are. However, when I started to help out at my daughter's primary school they asked me to do extra maths practice with some KS2 children. I was lost. At sea. Bewildered.

How odd...

But they did the most peculiar things in their maths lessons. It was not that I could not have done the maths had I had it explained and had a few minutes to practise a couple of examples on my own, but rather as someone flung into the middle of the weirdest ways of doing things I was foxed. And I was supposed to be doing the explaining.

The fact is that maths teaching has changed radically over the last few years. If you have primary school age children or grandchildren and have to help with homework you will know what I mean. At the time I started as a parent helper my own daughter was still in Reception class so her home work was not yet an issue but I had seen what was coming and I knew it soon would be.

The answer I discovered was Maths for Mums and Dads by Rob Eastaway and Mike Askew. Take adding up of large numbers. I learnt the borrowing method (which was new fangled in its turn once) as many of you did no doubt, but they don't do that any more. They do some weird exploded version. Eastaway and Askew explain not only the new methods, but why the changes were introduced.

Times tables, already a bug bear in KS1, are also dealt with thoroughly. Lots of general advice and specific short cuts as well as explaining why children don't learn their tables in the order we did. I did 2s, 3s, 4s, and so on. They now start with 2 , 5 and 10 and learn 3 and 7 last. The whys and wherefores of this are explained.

One of the wonderful things about the book is the examples of children's wrong answers to maths questions. By explaining what goes on in children's heads when faced with a maths problem you can see where the potential is for confusion when you are explaining it to a child of your own. It also explains what the schools and examiners expect from your child so you can help them do things the 'right' way.

If it sounds like a dry read, it is not. It is full of tips and tricks and short cuts and little test yourself quizzes. There are games you can play with children, and 'magic' tricks and other ways to bring maths into everyday life. Astonishingly it is a page turner! My mother-in-law picked it up after tea one evening and couldn't put it down. She kept saying, "I must go to bed" and then staying up to read another chapter.

Seriously, if you spend time with kids aged up to about 12 (infants, juniors or even early secondary school age) then this book is so very, very useful despite its (bewildering) lack of an index. Even if you think you are good at maths every parent should have a copy, and every school should stock a few to loan out. I can't remember when I last saw a 'how too' book do its work as thoroughly or as entertainingly as this.

A Childhood in Scotland by Christian Miller

I find it very hard when handling my book stock not to get caught up with reading sometimes! On this occasion the book I couldn't put down was A Childhood in Scotland by Christian Miller. At just 98 pages the reading of it did not distract me for long but the autobiographical tale told has stayed in my mind since.

Christian Miller was born in 1920 into an aristocratic family in the highlands of Scotland. She grew up the youngest of six and lived the kind of semi-privileged, semi-deprived life that, for example, the Mitford sisters appear to have had. In her short memoir she takes us through the rooms of the castle, introducing the family and servants who lived there, shows us the estate, and lets us join her for the key days of the year and her more abiding memories. It is hauntingly written with an economy of emotion that makes it all the more moving. What the reader is left with is the feeling of a vast amount of space and time: of course between our lives and hers, but also stretching back in that echoing empty castle over hundreds of years of ancestors.

When I was a little girl, the ghosts were more real to me than the people. The people were despotic and changeable, governing my world with a confusing and alarming inconstancy. The ghosts, on the other hand, could be relied on to go about their haunting in a calm and orderly manner. Bearded or bewigged, clad in satin or velvet or nunlike drapery, they whispered their way along the dark corridors of the castle where I was born and spent the first ten years of my life, rarely interfering with or intruding on the lives of the living.

And the people in Miller's story seem as ghost-like as the ghosts she describes at the start of the book. Her parents were distant and, though her mother was kindly, her war-wound-pained father was angry and quick to beat the children. She seemed to belong to no-one with no single adult person to call her own, and this seems the saddest thing about her life. Nannies and governesses came and went, her mother concerned herself greatly with the lives of the servants but little with her children, other staff treated the children as nuisances who got in the way. She relates how severe scoldings could happen for the wrong behaviour but there was no common ground among the adults as to what this behaviour was to be. She recalled being deprived of pudding by one governess for not having her hands neatly on the table either side of her place setting and for being scolded by her father for not having her hands in her lap when at the table. On another occasion she was sent to get a refill of sugar for the nursery sugar bowl but Cook would not let her in the kitchen. She knew she could not return with the bowl empty however, so stayed in the passage and wept.

The castle in the book seems more real than the people. Her rather distant mother though was not unkind and one can't help warming to a woman whose priorities included books:

My mother loved the little rooms. She had one fitted out as a minature library, to house her treasured collection of books. Born and brought up in the more urbane county of Perthshire, some hundreds of miles to the south, she had accepted my father's proposal of marriage after a candle-lit courtship - not having seen him in daylight before agreeing to become his wife - and seemed never to have got over her surprise at finding herself chatelaine of so comparatively uncivilised a place as the castle. Perhaps it was a sense of isolation from the sheltered world of her girlhood that made her look on her library as a sort of refuge; the tiny room lit only by the vertical arrow-slit windows, smelled of leather bindings and of the lily of the valley scent she always wore. The almost tangible presence of the characters in the books gave the room an expectant sort of magic, like the atmosphere in an empty theatre that will soon be filled with all the bustle of a play.

That last sentence is one of my favourite in the book.

Despite her childhood's emotional privations she seems to have valued the space of the castle and its estate. Childhood pastimes are regaled with some pleasure and the otherworldliness of the way of living makes every page fascinating. It is not therefore a depressing read but I came away feeling very sorry for the little girl who lived in hand-me-down boys' school jumpers fashioned into a dress with round her waist the collars of deceased dogs "the brass lables of which proclaimed our names to be Rover or Thunder or Trust".

If you are fascinated by the various biographies and autobiographies of the Mitfords then this is a must read. However it is a quieter book and the isolation of the children's lives is here unleavened by Mitford humour. There is though an intensity to the narration that makes this, in its own way, just as compulsive a read.

I have enjoyed a chat on twitter with Cornflower about this book and you might like this link that she gave to me (scroll down) as well reading her review of A Childhood in Scotland too (I didn't read her review till I had written mine, deliberately, but it is amazing how we've focused on the same things). I have also unearthed this piece from the Times archive on Christian Miller, later Bowman (you don't need to be a subscriber to read it) which is another lovely insight into the author.

Diana Mosley by Jan Dalley

Like many people I have had a long fascination with the Mitford sisters and their compelling and complicated lives that contain so many major events and significant people in the mid-twentieth-century. Of all the sisters Diana, the beauty of the family, is perhaps the most complicated and as such she is a difficult and brave choice for a biographer, especially as she was still alive when Jan Dalley wrote Diana Mosley: A Life in 1999.

Diana Mitford was the fourth of seven children of Lord and Lady Redesdale. Their eccentric childhood was well documented, and somewhat exaggerated, by the sisters themselves in Nancy Mitford's novels and Jessica Mitford's Hons & Rebels. The Redesdale's famously kept their daughters at home, refusing to allow them to go to school leaving them resentful for years over their lack of education. Their unorthodox methods of self-education, steeping themselves in their father's library and, as Dalley argues, thereafter throwing in their lot with both a man and a cause, left them prey to the winds of politics that blew about the mid-twentieth century.

Diana is a truly difficult subject. Initially one of the Bright Young Things, with more money than sense, and a beauty and a position that gave her enormous social power, Diana threw it all up for Oswald Mosley then a married man with no intention of leaving his first wife. For years Diana suffered social disgrace and shared Mosley first with his wife Cimmie, and after Cimmie's death with Baba (Lady Alexandra Metcalf) Cimmie's sister with whom Mosley had a long affair. She secretly married Mosley in the Goebbels drawing room with Hitler in attendance just before the war. It is this clash between the private and the public that makes Diana so difficult to assess. As Dalley notes in her introduction, "The backdrop to her life invokes notions of absolute good and evil, and the many shades of compromise in between".

Diana undoubtedly had many positive qualities: she was a loyal and kind sister and friend. Against this has to be balanced her dedication to the the fascists and Moseley and her repellent and unrepentant anti-semiticism. Dalley walks this tightrope well, it seems to me from the outside, being scrupulously fair to her subject without downplaying the nature of her views. She acknowledges that Diana was badly treated during the war and was probably of little national danger, and that in a country that was fighting for freedom Diana's freedom to have her own views was compromised both then and afterwards. She also makes the point that both Mosley's were genuinely motivated by anger at the privations suffered by the working class and that both were undoubted patriots. Dalley however rightly has little time for the Mosleys' self-justification which went something along the lines of we were fascists with no interest in the Jews but because we were fascists the Jews attacked us so in the end we had to attack the Jews. The lameness of this form of argument is self-evident, particularly in the light of Diana's continued regard for Hitler long after the war.

There is much in this biography that I did not know despite having read much Mitordiana including The Mitford Girls by Mary S. Lovell and Charlotte Mosley's Letters Between Six Sisters. The book is light and engaging, without being frivolous, despite the serious political backdrop; these are the Mitfords after all, and I often laughed out loud. A draw back is that it suffers from Diana's refusal to have her and her families unpublished papers quoted from and means that there is an over-reliance on the letters of James Lee Milne the one friend whose unpublished papers were in the academic domain. Also Diana's later life and opinions are dealt with very quickly in two short chapters at the end. That this is brisk is underlined by the fact that her later, post-war, life was nearly 60 years long. There is therefore clearly work still to do on the subject of Diana Mosley. As a biography is strengths are that it does take a long. hard and very clear headed look at this enigmatic woman and does not try to make anachronistic post-modern judgments. Most significantly Dalley can appreciate that "the qualities that made her charming and unforgettable to some were the very traits that made her impenetrable, disturbing or even sinister to others".

Off to read English Literature at University?

As the beginning of the first university term of the academic year is fast approaching, it seemed a good moment to blog about these nifty little tomes. Publishers Icon* have a series of 'Introducing ...' guides which make an excellent starting point for getting your head around literary theory as an undergraduate. They are graphic guides not unlike the '...for beginners' series and as such provide a visual representation of the complexities of theory. I have been sent three to review, Critical Theory, Foucault and Freud, but there is an enormous range of use to anyone wrestling with literary or cultural theory including Postmodernism, Derrida, Marxism etc.

 

Literary theory can be such a shock to the system: after A levels enjoying Shakespeare or Jane Austen, the convoluted dryness of this kind of non-fiction can seem contrary to what drew you to study literature in the first place. Literary or cultural theory is complex and nothing is going to make it simple, but these guides provide another way into the subject, another means of contriving hooks on which to hang all the new information with which you are bombarding your brain.

Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide by Stuart Sim and Borin van Loon roughly takes one concept per page or double spread and attempts to summarise it. There are cartoons and other graphics but the sentences used are no shorter than standard theorizing I'm afraid! One of the wonderful things I first discovered inside is a family tree of cultural and critical theories from the Enlightenment to the late twentieth century. This is the first time I have seen anything or anyone render so neat the relationships between, for example, J F Lyotard, 2nd wave feminism, the French Revolution, neuro-psychiatry, postcolonialism, Umberto Eco, Utopian socialism, Russian formalism and so on. As to the rest it is truly a dip-in style of book with intense compact segments of information.

I don't think that these pocket sized guides are enough on their own, but alongside the inevitable Reader (often Dennis Walder's Literature in the Modern World or David Lodge's Twentieth Century Literary Criticism: A Reader or Philip Rice and Patricia Waugh's Modern Literary Theory: A Reader ) that is no doubt on your reading list, and a good traditional prose introduction such as Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton, then these guides will be invaluable to clarify and reinforce the new-to-you concepts and ideas.

I also found Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide excellent as a refresher having not read much theory over the last few years. It is a neat reference book having a good glossary and a rather shorter index which gets you to the heart of each concept very quickly. As such I would have been glad of it as I embarked on my MA too.

If funds stretched then I would consider acquiring the more specialised guides to one theory or theorist. Beyond a basic run-through of psychoanalytic theory as an undergrad I have not looked at that area of theory much as I specialised elsewhere but Introducing Freud: A Graphic Guide by Richard Appiganesi and Oscar Zarate was a quick and entertaining way back into this area for me. There is more detail here than in Introducing Critical Theory, several pages being dedicated to the development of each aspect of Freud's work or to his patient studies, such as Anna O, and the conclusions drawn. Again there is an index and a very brief little glossary.

To summarise, my ideal basis of a theoretical library would be:

Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents by Dennis Walder (but check your reading list; if another is recommended get that only, you don't want two)

Literary Theory: An Introduction by Terry Eagleton now in its 25th anniversary edition

Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler. Approaches everything very differently to Eagleton so an excellent back-up to that. Read them both together and things start to make sense!

Introducing Critical Theory: A Graphic Guide by Stuart Sim and Borin van Loon

And lastly if you've room in the budget The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought also by Stuart Sim which is sadly out of print but is excellent and, relative to the nature of the subject, quite an easy read.

You can browse a selection of my own bookshop stock on the subject here.

 

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale, like The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield suffers from the blogosphere enthusiasm that precedes it. The quotes on the front, 'terrific', Ian Rankin, and 'absolutely riveting', Sarah Waters, don't help either. The build up makes you approach it like a traditional whodunit, and of course it is not. It is a piece of non-fiction, and as such it is excellent. But as non-fiction it has the 'and then' quality of a bald narrative of events. This is not 'riveting' in itself though the 'story' is certainly readable and keeps the attention. Shardlake it is not. But then why should it be; it is not the same thing at all.

So what is it? The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is a true story of a horrific murder of a small boy and the subsequent investigation. The detective force based at Scotland Yard is in its infancy; there are just eight detective inspectors of which one is Mr Whicher. Once the investigation starts there are faults and failures throughout in the collecting and retaining of evidence. The local force and the London police do not work overly well together and we wonder how things can be brought together. But Mr Whicher and Kate Summerscale eventually do shed light on the events of 1860.

In the introduction Kate Summerscale points out the sociological implications of the murder. We know far more about this family, their possessions, how they lived their lives, because of the murder. What we discover is important not just for the dramatic aspects, the solution of the murder, but for the mundane and the everyday aspects. The social history is incredibly detailed:

Everything we know about Road Hill House is determined by the murder that took place there on 30th June 1860. The police and magistrates turned up hundreds of details of the building's interior - handles, latches, footprints, nightclothes, carpets, hotplates - and its inhabitants' habits.

The second important aspect of this murder is in its place in literary history. The murder and the initial lack of a solution was a sensation and was reported in great detail in both the local and national press. Members of the public pontificated in letters pages of major newspapers and in private missives to the detectives involved, and even to the home secretary. As the weeks wore on the instalments of Wilkie Collins' sensational page turner The Woman in White continued their timely serialisation and parallels are drawn throughout by Kate Summerscale. What is really superb about The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is the high quality literary criticism as Summerscale locates aspects of the murder and investigation in the embryonic British and European crime fiction genre. The murder at Road Hill House is the real forerunner of the countryhouse mystery, and with Summerscale's careful handling of the material we can see exactly why both in terms of literary antecedents and contexts, and in terms of the likely reception of such works with the Victorian public:

A Victorian detective was a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest. In a newly uncertain world, he offered science, conviction, stories that could organise chaos.

Once I had realised that this was not the fictionalised version of a true story but instead a thorough work of non-fiction, then I was away. It is very readable and you do want a dénouement but of course, in real life, the dénouement is not as satisfying as the ones offered by fiction. Whatever the truth after all, a little boy lost his life at the hands of nurse or relative, at the hands of someone in whom he should have had complete trust. Dorothy L. Sayers can make the hairs on the back of your neck stand-up with the shadow of gallows behind her investigations, but this real murder takes that feeling so much further.

On all levels then, The Suspicions of Mr Whicher is to be recommended. If you are interested in the literary history of the detective story then a great place to start is The Lady Investigates: Women Detectives and Spies in Fiction by Patricia Craig and Mary Cadogan which as a read is a nice balance between scholarship and pleasure. There is also the more studious Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel by Sally Rowena Munt. Both are feminist critiques unsurprisingly as crime fiction lends itself well to that approach.

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Edited to add:

Kristen made a comment which I think is well worth bumping up into the main text of this post: She recommends, "The Beautiful Cigar Girl about the real life murder of Mary Rogers, the formation of the NY police force and Edgar Allan Poe's attempts to write his own solution to the murder. I reviewed this and a fiction written about the same topic here."

 

I am Just Going Outside: Captain Oates - Antarctic Tragedy by Michael Smith

The title to this post is also in part the answer to the photographic question from my previous post. The poignant photograph is Lawrence Oates who suffered one of the tragic deaths of Captain Scott's 1910-1913 Terra Nova Antarctic expedition and is taken from I am Just Going Outside by Michael Smith. I think it is a startling photo because it doesn't feel like you are looking at an image of a man who died nearly 100 years ago. Images of men from the late Edwardian period usually show then smartly dressed with well oiled hair and neatly trimmed mustaches (think WWI soldiers) but Oates here, in his scruffy sweater with little threads unraveling, and his clean shaven face and modern soldier's cropped hair is sartorially so close to now as to make his long-ago death seem unreal.

Lawrence Edward Grace Oates, born in 1880, was from a family of explorers. His very wealthy Yorkshire roots included the naturalist Frank Oates. Lawrence Oates was an experienced soldier and a skilled horseman. He was involved in a dramatic incident during the Boer War where he bravely refused to surrender against a numerically superior force, earning for himself the sobriquet 'No Surrender Oates' and a leg badly shattered by a bullet. This wound probably contributed to his scurvy affected body's failure, and his heroic death, in the dramatic wastes of the Antarctic.

Smith's book, despite its bleak subject matter, is a vibrant, pacey read. He examines Oates' childhood, his struggles at school with his dyslexia, his affinity with horses and his love of hunting, his domineering mother, and the bored life of the wealthy gentleman. Oates' psychological state and his motivations to join the army are well worth comparing with Julian Grenfell whose biography by Nicholas Mosley is published by Persphone and makes a very good companion read to this volume.

The story of the ill-fated expedition is closely examined. Scott, as is more usual I think in later considerations of the events, does not come out well. The tradition of polar exploration was a naval one and Oates looked on events, and on Scott's decisions, with the eyes of a soldier and a cavalry officer. He was in fact called Soldier by his companions. Scott and Oates frequently fell out. Oates was there because of his expertise with horses but Scott would not follow his advice. Scott's decisions were often emotional or even romantic and he left the practical, unsentimental Oates baffled.

Two of Scott's more exasperatingly romantic decisions were his use of ponies rather than dogs and his inclusion of Oates in the last party to make the final leg of the walk to the pole. Scott felt ponies and man-hauling (where the men pulled their own sledges) were more dignified and 'British' than the use of dogs. The Norwegians of course used dogs to great effect to reach the pole, months before Scott, on December 14th 1911.

Perhaps the most fatal of the decision especially for the men selected was Scott's choice of company for that final leg. Scott, described as "remote and unapproachable", did not consult others, especially his doctors, on who best to take, and his remoteness meant that the doctors did not volunteer information on fitness. Bizarrely, romantically, Scott wanted Oates along so that both the navy and the army were represented at the pole. Oates with his injured leg over an inch shorter than the other had the resultant problems from a twisted spine. He was a cavalry officer picked for his ability with horses and not trained to march. He had poor circulation and he neither wanted nor expected to be in the final party now reliant on man-hauling and without pony-power at all. But Scott wanted the army there; a decision Smith mildly condemns as 'unscientific'. Of the ratings (Scott saw things very much as men and officers), Scott picked Teddy Evans even though Evans had been man-hauling longer than most and was exhausted before they set off on the last walk. All five men in the final party reached the pole but Evans and Oates suffered health problems immediately. They slowed the party down and their presence probably caused the deaths of the other three. Evans died but Oates lingered. According to Scott, Oates begged to be left behind, but Scott refused. So, on a unsure date but probably on his 32nd birthday, Oates, suffering from scurvy, hunger, frostbite, gangrene and exhaustion, told his companions in his famous throw-away comment, as casual as that sweater in the picture, that he would be going outside and might be some time. In his socks, his feet too damaged to wear his boots, Oates padded or crawled to his death. His body has never been found.

The tragedy for the five men and their families was of course great, and though many millions would not survive the next few years and the Great War, there is still something poignant about this expedition. Oates is perhaps the very last of the old fashioned heroes before the horrors of the trenches and the eloquence of the war poets made heroism a fashion of the past, as odd for men as long skirts were to become for women. Smith notes in his preface that, 'Oates was the finest example of how, if nothing else, Britons knew how to die'. We no longer expect our soldiers to die, though sadly of course they still do, but each loss is examined and gone over in the hope of avoiding a repeat. We rightly remember those that do die, and reward those that perform feats of bravery, but we no longer complacently expect it or treat duty and death as synonyms. I am Just Going Outside is a truly fascinating book and I think, makes vital reading for an understanding of pre-war attitudes to men and heroes.

Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves

Like all those of his generation Robert Graves' youth and early manhood was shaped by WWI. The poet served through all four years, suffered some significant wounds but survived. He then wrote Goodbye to All That, one of the best known autobiographies of the war years which ironically helped pay for his lifestyle in Majorca where he was able to pursue his poetry, his translating, and his idiosyncratic critical works such as The White Goddess.

Robert Graves was born to an Anglo-German family in 1895. His mother was the neice of Leopold von Ranke, widely regarded as the first modern historian, and Graves spent holidays in Germany with his mother's family. Graves' school days are recalled with a good deal of caustic comment. His misery under the constraints of formal education and the bullying privations of the Edwardian public school are mitigated only by a few friendships including that of a young schoolmaster George Mallory (the Everest mountaineer who, along with Andrew Irvine, met his death en route either to, or from, the summit in 1924). Mallory took Graves climbing in Wales leading to a life long love affair with Welsh culture, mythology and history. As a result of being in Harlech when war was declared in 1914 Graves joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers.

The war of course occupies the bulk of the book. Graves writes from the point of view of being a junior officer but he has a great empathy with the men. His retelling is unsentimental but equally does not dwell on horror whilst still managing to convey the relentless waste. Graves details bravery and competence as well as the usual stories of Allied ineptitude. Most interesting he gradually paints for the reader the image of the psychological war fought by the long serving soldiers whose four years in the trenches shifts personalities and relationships in innumberable ways.

For those with a literary as well as a historical interest in the war the most interesting aspect of the book is Graves' relationship with his fellow war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon. It is of course the 90th anniversary of Owen's death this month. Owen's death cut short their relationship which was largely related to their mutual friendship with Sassoon. Graves' pen-portrait of the confused decorated hero-cum-conscientious objector Sassoon is fascinating.

Like his contemporary autobiographer Vera Brittain, Graves is a compelling writer, on a magnetic subject: war. The history in both books is sharp, crisp and often painful, but most intriguing of all is his depiction of the interaction of war's brutality juxtaposed with the development war stimulates. In both Graves' and Brittain's work war is shown as the breeding ground for art and for an unquellable creative drive, sadly mixed in later life with some compromise in personal happiness as a result of both writers' formative experiences. Like Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth, Goodbye to All That is well worth the journey.

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I read the heavily revised and more readily available 1957 version. I gather this is toned down a lot from the first 1929 version. I would love to hear from anyone who has read both versions and to link here to reviews of the first version.

If you find WWI compelling, or wonder why anyone would find it compelling, then I heartily recommend Terry Castles' Article Courage, mon amie  from the London Review of Books (4th April 2002). I am afraid you need to be a subscriber or shell out £2.75 to read the full piece online, but it is one of the best pieces of criticism/analysis/reportage/travel writing on WWI I have ever read, and if you are remotely interested in the Great War is well worth the price.

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands by Mary Seacole was my lovely blog-a-penguin book. It really is a super read.

Mary Seacole was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1805. Her parentage was part Scottish and part Creole. Whilst Creole can have many different interpretations, it is clear from the text that Mary Seacole is mixed-race. In this, her autobiography written in 1857, not long after the end of the Crimean war in which Mrs Seacole was to play a part, and also not long after her bankruptcy from the same source, Mrs Seacole tells us briefly of her early life in Jamaica. However the bulk of the book is the twin tales of her running part medical facilities, part hotel facilities, at first in Panama during the California gold-rush and then in the Crimea where she busied herself in providing food and medical care in support of the British.

Mrs Seacole's writing style is lively and draws us right in immediately. As with any autobiography there is the inevitable degree of obfuscation and confusion over the real facts of what happened but of what there is no doubt is that Mrs Seacole led a fascinating independent life as a traveller, as a nurse and as a business woman; remarkable both for her being a woman but also because of her colour.

The introduction by Sara Salih begins with a quotation from Salman Rushdie:

...here is Mary Seacole, who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping lady, but being dark, could scare be seen for the flame of Florence's candle.

The way Mrs Seacole is read is often dependent upon the interpretation of her actions and of her relationship with the British authorities at the time. Mrs Seacole was not part of any official relief, and though she applied she was not accepted by Florence Nightingale's nurses.

Now no sooner had I heard of war somewhere, than I longed to witness it; and when I was told that many of the regiments I had known so well in Jamaica had left England for the scene of action, the desire to join then became stronger than ever. I used to stand for hours in silent thought before an old map of the world, in a little corner of which some one had chalked a red cross to enable me to distinguish where the Crimea was; and as I traced the route thither, all difficulties would vanish.

However, after many attempts to be taken on by the War Office she approaches Miss Nightingale's nurses where her services are again declined and in a rare moment of candidness Mrs Seacole notes, 'I read in her face that, had there been a vacancy, I should not have been chosen to fill it'. She goes on:

Doubts and suspicions arose in my heart for the first and last time, thank Heaven. Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here? Did these ladies shrink from accepting my aid because my blood flowed beneath a somewhat duskier skin than theirs?

Apart from this quiver, throughout the book the theme of pro-British and Anti-American sentiment flows. Her experience of Americans at this era is obviously very much down to race. Many of the Americans she sees are from the slave owning south. Her reservations about Americans are understandable in the context of the incidents she relates in Panama including an American man whose toast to her, praising her for saving so many of his countrymen from cholera, is recorded as including:

I calculate gentleman, you're all as vexed as I am that she's not wholly white -, but I du reckon on your rejoicing with me that she is not entirely black; and I guess if we could bleach her by any means we would; and thus make her as acceptable in any company as she deserves to be.

To the modern eye, the views above are astoundingly crass but this is by no means the only overt piece of hostility and rudeness she meets from Americans. Is the British gentler ignoring of her any better or worse? I don't know. As the American quoted above is not a stranger to Mrs Seacole and is part of the community in Panama where she lives, it is harder to attribute his attitude to anything other than simple racism, whilst it is not clear that the British attitudes are from the same source being, as Mrs Seacole notes, mixed with human nature's mistrust of strangers. Throughout Mrs Seacole is inclined to forgive the British far more readily than she is the Americans, and I think the reasons for this are complex and would probably fill several undergraduate lectures on post-colonial theory time over time. You must read the book, and please do, and judge for yourself.

My own feelings about the reactions to her are that as she was foreign, untrained, mixed-race, and also a woman travelling alone and therefore of questionable respectability, then these things probably played a part in the reception she received in London. Once she was in the Crimea her services were clearly appreciated and she really does go through many adventures to mother both the officers and the men out there. On her bankruptcy on her return many famous military men and members of the British elite put their names to a letter to The Times to start a fund for her support and so she lived the rest of her life in Britain in relative comfort.

Interestingly Florence Nightingale appears to reject Mrs Seacole on moral grounds, as in a private letter quoted in the introduction (and headed 'burn') she says,

Anyone who employs Mrs Seacole will introduce much kindness - and also much drunkenness and improper conduct ...

Whether this is an excuse for rejecting Mrs Seacole when the real reason is race, whether it is class prejudice, or whether it is the prejudice of a gentle-born lady for the woman adventurer, or whether it is even true, I guess we'll never know. But what we get with Mrs Seacole's book is real boy's own adventure all wrapped up in a woman. We get war and heroes, we get swamps and medical emergencies, the privations of nineteenth century travel and the impact of the coming of the railway. We also get the social observation of a woman with a unique perspective: she has a foot in both British and black communities in Jamaica; she also is in a position to observe the British and the Americans of the 1850s at home and abroad. We see white Americans make fools of themselves and black Americans grow in stature away from the USA. We see British snobbery and British military incompetence as well as the British bravery and British appreciation of Mrs Seacole in the end. All in all it is that rare thing: a rattling good read of travel and adventure and a fascinating social document. You don't need to know much nineteenth century history to get lots from the book as the narrative drive and the company of Mrs Seacole are enough on their own. Regardless of the obstacles society throws in her way Mrs Seacole decides what she wants to do and does it and this can't help but be inspiring. As a read it is witty and lively and worth every penny of the cover price.

As well as Mrs Seacole's Wonderful Adventures available from Penguin there is a biography of Mary Seacole: Mary Seacole by Jane Robinson published by Robinson Publishing.

The Magic Apple Tree by Susan Hill

This lovely book was lent to me by a very dear friend who knows my taste for edgy modern literary fiction. She said, as she gave it to me, "It is a very gentle book", and this was clearly by way of a preemptive apology. She thought it might be too staid for me, and too much the non-fiction book. She's a lady of good taste however, and I am sure many people will find something to enjoy here.

The good news is that though my friend is right, it is gentle, it is also a busy, textured book and there is much to recommend. The Magic Apple Tree is an account of a year in the life of novelist Susan Hill focusing on her life in the country with her husband and young daughter. Beginning with Winter the book is split into four seasons and each covers the family home, the people in the village and surrounding countryside, seasonal change, food, traditions, gardening and wildlife as the changes of the year move though the English countryside. There are recipes, gardening advice, country relationships and the keeping of hens, and it is beautifully written and all very charming.

However, it is not just a sentimental review of a WI lifestyle, and it is certainly not a modern Lark Rise to Candleford. There is modern life here too. Hill, though clearly working, as well as being a housewife and mother, has no 'room of her own':

I do not require a large or grand room, but I have always had one in which to work, to close the door on everyone and to be myself. In winter, I had eventually taken to writing in the kitchen and, later, to having my desk and papers and type-writer on the small, light landing, which is a little room in itself, albeit a passageway too, and overlooks Mr Elder's greenhouse, and a lane up to the village. That, and the kitchen, are fine when no-one else is in the house, but they will not do otherwise, and moreover they are not really mine, not private places.

Which brings to mind of course Virginia Woolf's famous, "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction". For those living a creative life in a property without half a dozen bedrooms, division of space is hard. For Susan Hill the scholar-husband got the study. Here, Mr J and I share a study which is chaos as I blog, run a business and occasionally dabble in the side effects of education (known as exams), and also do Mr J's paperwork. I do this on my large desk, behind the desk, between the desk and cupboard which won't shut, and all over the floor. Mr J meanwhile attempts to run his teaching and part time writing from the alcove in the corner; but he has the best desk, more drawers and a shelf in here for his own books (my study shelves are full of bookshop stock and tax files). The 4 year old sproglet draws on the floor in the 8 square inches of space in the middle. We'd both be happier and more efficient with a room of our own. The 4 year old does have a room of her own, with a desk, but she prefers her creativity should play itself out under her parents' feet; such are infants! I suppose I should be glad it's not lego.

In The Magic Apple Tree the author's room dilemmas are solved and this is the tenor of the book: small but nonetheless important problems have their solutions worked out often by taking one's time and interacting with family and neighbours, and the right person, the right place or the right decision will out.

There are also the contradictions of country living. Only a town dweller could call a book about country life sentimental. The book has its fair share of natural violence, creature upon creature, as well as the local hunt and of course farm animals. Hill reminds us of the complicated provenance of our table:

Spring is lambing time, the fields are full of them, bleating and leaping, frisking in pairs and trios, playing the way all young things play, and Jessica says how lucky the farmers are to have all these lambs to play with, just as we have our cats and dog, and I say, yes, yes, yes, and the first, milk fed legs of lamb are hung in the butcher's stalls in the city market, covered in that creamy white caul that looks so very like a baby's lacy vest, and it will be tender and delicious, served with the earliest of the potatoes, the very first tiny broad beans, and carrot thinnings, and I cannot bear it for the meat tastes of mother's milk and sweet meadow flowers, and turn to ashes in my mouth...But later in the year I shall manage the chops all right, thickly smeared with my own mint or redcurrant jelly, just as I feed our own hens in the morning and then go to collect a freshly-killed one later the same day...to eat at night.

The language might be as tender as the meat but the eating goes on.

Throughout the apple tree in the garden helps pin the whole together. We see it at different times of day, in different seasons, and in different social situations. The tree rather than a cast of characters holds the book together, representing both change and continuity, seasons and landscape, the traditions of the past and the hopes of the future.

I go to the top of the seven stone steps and look down, at the magic apple tree and at my daughter dancing beneath it, arms outspread to the cats and the dog, and to the bending sunflowers, and the country beyond, the Buttercup field, the Rise and all the flat Fen, still sunlight, all the sky, still blue.

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I was lucky enough to read this in the Long Barn Books anniversary edition which appears to be out of print at the moment. If you can find a copy then I recommend you do as it is beautifully produced with John Lawrence's engravings still in attendance from the original Hamish Hamilton publication. Otherwise there are more plentiful copies of the Penguin version easily available. Both Ibooknet and Biblio have secondhand copies of the Hamilton and/or the Penguin.

Bugle Boy by Len Chester

I spent a very enjoyable evening yesterday reading my copy of Bugle Boy by Len Chester, father of Dovegrey Reader. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, as the writing down of reminiscences can easily stifle all the charm and personality that comes with live anecdote, but this book has been beautifully handled by both Len and his publisher, Susan Hill's Long Barn Books, resulting in a great piece of oral history in book form.

Initial impressions do count, especially for small publishers who have to compete on the booksellers' shelves with the big boys, and this book is neat and attractive. The colour illustrated endpapers were a treat to my my bookdealing eyes. But the publisher's successes do not end there; more importantly Len has been allowed to keep a distinctive and genuine voice, and you can hear it as you read. Susan Hill has a long post on her blog at the moment about the importunities of over-zealous editors, and she clearly takes her own advice. Though it is on paper, it really does feel like oral history caught in all its vitality.

Len is a charming guide throughout. Age 14 he joins the Royal Marines as a boy bugler. The war is about to start and Len has his training to get through and, as yet unknown to him, the terrible Arctic convoys, and service in the Far East to survive.

He takes us from his first days of being away from home ("My mother, I now realised, had been very remiss in not showing me how to make a bed"), to the sense of loss at the end of his service ("Standing outside the gates I was completely bemused and afraid ..."), and shows us how the boy grows up in between. Sensibly this takes the format of vignettes of memory rather than a continuous narrative. Everything is covered from the humorous 'Podge's Mum', 'Mutiny!', and 'The Sergeant-Major's Eggs', to the poignant chapter 'Funerals':

The mass funeral started and then it came to my solo pieces, 'Last Post' and 'Reveille'. I started well but halfway through I could feel my lips turning into jelly until eventually I unashamedly burst into tears.

But the book is often more funny than sad. It is also illuminating when you think of the cosseted life of the average British 14 year old today. It makes you realise how little we ask of your young people and how much they could do if given the chance.

I would unhesitatingly recommend Bugle Boy as a jolly good read to anyone, even if you don't normally read history books, war books or non-fiction in general; the human interest here will sustain the most dedicated novel reader. But, I have also put this book into my 9-14 recommend children's books in the  side bar on the left. I think it would make a very good read for young people in that age group, especially for boys. It is unusual to see the war from a child's perspective and also a service perspective at the same time. Children's wars are normally evacuees and bomb shelters as in Nina Bawden's Carrie's War, or Goodnight Mr Tom by Michelle Magorian. Bugle Boy is a splendid alternative.

A Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill

The poetic and romantic relationship of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath has fascinated fans of both their work since the 1970s. The story of the smart girl from Boston, piercingly intelligent and rabidly passionate, and the granite like Yorkshireman with his disconcerting poetry of dissection, power and mythology, ending with her tragic death by suicide, is literary biography at its most sensational. Like the Brownings a century earlier, the story of their relationship seems bigger than their literary legacy.

The causes of Plath's death are many and complicated, and it is certainly true that she had previously attempted suicide and suffered from depression before she had met Hughes. It is also the case at the time of her death that the Hugheses' marriage was in trouble and Ted was having an affair with Assia Wevill, the beautiful wife of a fellow poet.

The biographers in A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Death of Assia Wevill make the point that Wevill has always been seen as a bit part, a walk on player, in the traditionally more important tale of Plath, Hughes and poetry. Yet of course Assia was a person not a sub-plot. She has been portrayed as the other-woman, which she was, and the second of Hughes tragedies, as she (stepping-up the tempo set by Sylvia) kills not only herself but her and Hughes' daughter Shura. As such she has been either portrayed as the wicked femme fatal or, in the feminist assessments of Hughes biography, the final victim. Of course the truth is both more interesting and more complicated.

Assia was born Assia Gutmann in Germany to a Russian Jewish father and a German Christian mother in 1927. Her ethnicity and place of birth combining to make her always, as she said, an exile. Her story is immediately interesting as it follows her family fleeing the anti-Jewish laws, including laws against inter-marriage, to move across Europe to the pre-state of Israel, then still under British control. Books on Germany in the '30s and '40s tend to concentrate on the awful tragedy of those who did not leave. This is the first, fairly full account I have found of what it was like to be such an exile: lucky on one hand because you survive, but nonetheless a victim. The problems for the Gutmanns, and those like them, were many: now in Israel they feared for the safety of the German mother in a state at war with Germany, and they also feared invasion by Germany. Socially the parents felt (as wealthy, middle-class, middle-aged Germans) they did not fit in with a country founded by East European immigrants with their communist ideals. The Gutmanns' fellow Israelis tended to be young men, involved in the physical labour of building a new country and speaking Hebrew, not the educated, literary German speakers that populated their earlier world.

The trauma of Assia's early years, the spoiling favouritism of her adoring father, combined with her intense beauty making her an exotic flower in post-war England, formed an unsettled, butterfly personality, attention seeking and prone to rages and depression: "Assia thought she deserved everything". She was not just beautiful but talented, speaking four languages by the age of 7 or 8, aiding her poetic lovers as an insightful commentator, writing the poetic translations of the work of fellow Israeli Yehuda Amichai, and holding down a succession of successful posts as a copy-writer in London. But none of this was enough. Her life as a copy-writer is a small version of her personal tribulations; her talents and weaknesses just the same:

Assia's free spirit and ability to imply elegance even in the most ordinary ads impressed Angela Landels, who was Assia's group head. 'She was innovative, everything she wrote had charm, and she brought a touch of poetry to mundane subjects like bread.' But Assia was also difficult to work with, brazenly lying to excuse her regular lateness or complete absences. Landels found her unpredicatable, untrustworthy, manipulative, devious, argumentative and petty, but still was charmed by her unconventional , often wild and stimulating ideas, a priceless advantage in the profession. To her fellow workers, Assia's bubbling vitality seemed feverish; her radiant glare was at times menacing, slightly insane; 'all that beauty could turn ugly in an instant'.

By the time she met Hughes and Plath Assia was on her third husband, Canadian poet David Wevill. Normally she was in control of her relationships, she left all of her previous husbands not the other way round, but Hughes was the one man she could not secure. Though Assia was with Hughes as long as Plath was they never married, living together for sporadic tempestuous periods. The ghost of Sylvia never left them. Living in Plath's houses, sleeping in her beds (from the very day she died), jealous as Plath's poetry grew in posthumous stature, resented by both Plath's family and Hughes' as one of the causes of Sylvia's death, meant that despite having Hughes' child they never came together in a stable family home. Assia Wevill gassed herself and her daughter in March 1969.

The tale of all Assia's relationships is psychologically interesting. Her ex-husbands all contributed positive but realistic memories of the unfaithful beauty. The portrait of literary London, the fellow poets, the young novelists working in the copy-agencies (including Fay Weldon and William Trevor) is lively. And though, if you have read the Anne Stevenson biography of Plath or the Elaine Feinstein biography of Hughes you might feel you know the story, the thorough examination of it from Assia's point of view brings new insights into all three people, and into the work of Hughes particularly. Readable, well researched, balanced and fascinating, it does however leave a bit of bad taste behind it when you think of Hughes; it is not overtly Hughes-bashing (I think their assessment is very moderate) but you can't help despairing of his behaviour. If you want to admire Hughes' work untrammelled by the complicated personalities of his women, this biography is best left alone; for everyone else I can heartily recommend it.

A Lover of Unreason: The Life and Death of Assia Wevill by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev is currently out of print in hardback but a paperback version is due out in May and may be pre-ordered at Amazon and no doubt at your local bookshop.

A Very Great Profession by Nicola Beauman

As mentioned a few days ago Persephone Books are reissuing their founder's critical work A Very Great Profession: The Women's Novel 1914-1939. It begins with the image that stays with you throughout the book and is typical of the fiction Nicola Beauman later goes on to publish. The image is quiet, everyday and detailed: Laura Jesson the (ultimately) faithful wife from the 1945 film Brief Encounter going up to Milford Junction once a week to change her library books.

The basket of books is like Laura's life: routine and mundane.  We know her books will be the predictable choices of her age, class and education. It is Beauman's serious but delicate handling of the study of the possible contents of this basket that makes A Very Great Profession both unusual and delightful. It is light-fiction handled lightly but not foolishly. Beauman notes her working title for the progenitor to A Very Great Profession was "Silly Lady Novelists" but far from treating them as silly, her tender touch sees what is good in these works both as literature and as entertainment. She can see both where popular novelists fail to become great and where great novelists fail to be entertaining: "Virginia Woolf sacrificed a great deal to technique".

Throughout the book the traditional dichotomy of literary or popular fiction is handled sensitively. There are no impossible claims made for minor authors but instead a more graduated approach shows the shades of quality within the fiction of the period. Yet sadly inescapable is the slightly resigned note, "Some academics chose to ignore A Very Great Profession's ' incorrect' accessibility, others what they saw as its class bias", when, as Beauman realistically points out, "to attack them for this is to eliminate much of women's literature" and argues for the "fluidity of modern cultural values" where a genuine cultural democracy would not ignore swathes of literary output simply because it does not fit.

Beauman's egalitarian approach to literature is none more evident in the chapter on romance fiction. The most popular writers in this genre, such as Ethel M. Dell, have come in over the years for especial critical derision, the 'true Tosh-horse'. In fact my own first encounter with Dell is from reading Orwell (when Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistras Flying is damning of the ladies who borrow Dell's books from the shop in which he works). Whilst recognising that Dell was merely an entertainer Beauman can generously recognise, "there is also something undeniably cheering in reading and enjoying a novel that has given pleasure to so many for so long". And of her fellow critics Beauman notes, "It has mystified me that someone can have political, often socialist feelings, without wanting to share the herd experience". In essence she pins down the academies' reactions as bizarrely and contradictorily both anti-elitist in principle and anti-democratic in application. The traditional literary critic wants to recognise the common man (or woman) but has no time for what was read in quantity.

Of course the main argument for a continuing interest in popular fiction of this period, after uncomplicated enjoyment, is sociological. Beauman quotes historian Theodore Zeldin's belief that 'if you want too know what people are like you read novels, not history' and this is amply illustrated throughout the book. How popular and literary novelists handled, sex, censorship, the rising popularity of psychoanalysis, the problem of surplus women, or the vagaries of servants, all give windows onto not just the social mores of our grandmothers' time but how our grandmothers felt about the social mores of their time, the possible pace of change, the class and generational difficulties and differences, and more.

There are two great joys in this work for a reader. Firstly the opening up of vistas; it is like a travel book for a mind, if as Hartley says, 'the past is another country'. I may actually try Ethel M. Dell for example, just to see what I can see. If people can climb mountains because they are 'there', then perhaps now and again we should do the same with books. Just because. And lastly because it is a Persephone Book beautifully put together with the grey dust wrapper, it also comes with a bookmark. It is easy to be sniffy about Brief Encounter but the image of a woman here, a first I think for a Persephone Bookmark which usually show the endpaper fabric, is Celia Johnson in a still from the film. It is part of the image used on the 1995 Virago (the earlier edition used a drawing room scene from the film) where Laura stands caught in the half light from the street lamp. She wears her slim suit, her pearls, her hat, all the trappings of her class but she looks bewildered and really rather fragile. Her face is fully lit as she feels the full glow of society's expectations on her, but also catching the light are the contents of her basket. The basket with her library books. I wonder what she thought of them.

An Antidote to the Material Girl's World

Over at Books, Mud and Compost there has been much bemoaning of the life presented to the modern female child with girl's materialism being increasingly sexualized. A similar theme at the Fidra Blog notes the presence of pedicures, of all things, in girl's 'pink covers' fiction. With a week to go to Good Friday it seems a good time to reflect upon the increasingly material way we treat our traditional festivals and to heartily recommend Daring to be Different: Being a Faith Family in Secular World by Sarah Johnson. If you are not of a religious disposition please don't be put off by the title as though a Christian outlook is presumed, there is much food for thought her for those of other faiths, those of a spiritual tendency but no overt faith, and those who would just like to restrain the current rampant consumerism of Easter and Christmas.

Of interest to many will be the chapters on Advent and Lent. Earlier in the book the author notes that we should, "question our traditions, scrutinise our values and morally re-invent ourselves, everyday if necessary", and this she does expertly for these two focal points of the Christian year. With Advent Johnson dates the slide away from vigil to shopping as beginning in 1867 when a New York department store stayed open on Christmas Eve until midnight for the first time. So, her antidotes? Well sticking with the Easter theme, I love her "Busy Family's Forty-day Lent Plan". Her ideas on things to do as a family are both worshipful and practical and will surely give rise to many more ideas of your own. Ideas include thinking about Lenten abstinence in the widest sense of the world's resources, perhaps give up the car one for a day, or if that is really impossible then ban the in-car entertainment and talk to each in stead. Spend time with your child looking at a globe: where do you live? where do friends and relatives live? how much is sea or land? how much is hot or cold? How do our actions impact upon this planet?. Think about Jesus' time in the wilderness and how he was tempted to use his special powers for his own pleasure. What are special gift each member of your family has and how can they be helpful or give pleasure to others? unlike like the material world of chocolate eggs this is an Easter that teaches value, of ourselves, our families, and our world.

Also of interest is her Alien Game chapter where as well as dealing with the difficulties of feeling different in a secular world she suggest a regime of self-analysis that would benefit most families. Stand outside your house, at least metaphorically, as though you are an alien. How would you view the people in there, their lives, their work, their play, their happiness, their interactions? By giving yourself a bit of distance you can see things more clearly. This technique could clearly be applied to a small business, or a classroom too. Once you've looked at the people you live and work with, then think about your roles, if it is as a parent then clearly the onus for improvement of what you saw is on you. Johnson then breaks down problems of interaction into self help steps which are particularly effective for  learning to listen (both for adult's and children) and for rules and boundaries.

And boundaries brings us back neatly to the start of this post: children. They obviously need boundaries but boundaries have been given such a bad name. Hidebound. All sounds very negative and enclosed. But as Johnson points out boundaries make us feel safe, and paradoxically it is only when we feel safe we can get the most out of what we explore.