Issue 14: winter 2011

M A G A Z IN E winter 2011 / ISSUE 14

WRITERS AND CERAMICS

Edmund de Waal on the relationship between word and vessel

War cartoons

A celebration of the satirist’s skill

by Mark Bryant

A FESTIVE FEAST

£3.50

Jojo Tulloh provides a glutton’s guide to the Library’s gastronomic titles

The London Library Magazine / issue 14

16

C ontent s

From James Gillray’s creation of Little Boney to David Low’s Colonel Blimp, wartime cartoonists have satirised political and military leaders with impunity. Mark Bryant salutes their artistic skills and believes their contribution to the war effort deserves greater recognition.

7 FROM THE LIBRARIAN 8 Contributors 11 BEHIND THE BOOK

The Feast of Mars, 1869, by Honoré Daumier.

20

Lisa Chaney’s recent biography of Coco Chanel included some fascinating details unearthed from various London Library titles

12 bibliotherapy

Louise Yates gets a life-affirming kick from the vividly imagined characters in Angela Carter’s Wise Children

Edmund de Waal explores the links between clay and words, studio and library, from inscriptions on Yuan Dynasty blue-and-white jars to more esoteric literary associations conjured up by his own recent works

16 Graphic Warriors: War Cartoonists 1792–1945

Mark Bryant on the significant influence satirical cartoonists have had over public attitudes to war

Scenes from Early Life (detail), 2011, by Edmund de Waal.

24

20 I PLACED A JAR

Edmund de Waal, by his own description a ‘potter who writes’, places himself in a long tradition of ceramicists with similar literary inclinations

23 THE Delhi Durbar OF 1911

On the anniversary of the spectacular pageant celebrating George V’s and Queen Mary’s coronation as Emperor and Empress of India, Jessica Douglas-Home describes the event’s extravagance and historical significance

Why is it that writers love swimming, but are not generally very good at it?

Christopher Woodward examines the evidence and assesses his own writing performance since his obsession with swimming took hold.

High-diver, 1936, by Leni Riefenstahl.

28

24 LIBRARY VERSUS LIDO Christopher Woodward on the apparently conflicting forces of swimming and writing

28 HIDDEN CORNERS

Jojo Tulloh dips into the Library’s large collection of epicurean tomes

Jojo Tulloh discovers a diverse range of colourful cookery writers in the stacks, from the wit of Eliza Acton (whose ‘Poor Author’s Pudding’ recipe is in stark contrast to the stodgy ‘Publisher’s Pudding’) to Edward Bunyard’s love letter to lost fruit varieties in his Anatomy of Dessert (1927)

32 MEMBERS’ NEWS 38 SPECIAL OFFERS

39 EATING OUT

Patience Gray’s Ring Doves and Snakes (1989).

p

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

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f rom the L I B R A R I A N With the cold weather upon us and no excuse needed to curl up in a cosy corner with something to read, we hope Issue 14 of The London Library Magazine delivers something for everyone: fashion, cartoons, ceramics, swimming and – crucially, at this time of year – food.

Writer and illustrator Louise Yates, the third contributor to our new Bibliotherapy column, nominates Angela Carter’s Wise Children as the book she turns to when in need of ‘a kick’; a vivid evocation of the joys and hazards of living. Her description of Carter’s irascible Chance twins might immediately conjure the festive eccentricities of certain relatives on Christmas Day, though a more outrageous pair of characters would be difficult to find, in literature or in life!

On the cover

An English Matins, 2010, by Edmund de Waal. White lacquer cabinet with 42 thrown porcelain vessels in white and buff glazes with gold leaf. © Edmund de Waal. Courtesy Alan Cristea Gallery, London.

Other contributors look at how and where writing intersects with other forms of expression: Mark Bryant charts the early history of war cartoons and their vital role, alongside verbal reportage and analysis, in international conflicts; Edmund de Waal, a ‘potter who writes’ , examines the links between clay and words; and Christopher Woodward wonders why so many writers not only love swimming but also tend to make exaggerated claims about their aquatic abilities. Do let us know if the latter inspires you to try some unseasonal outdoor swimming – but, be warned, we may not believe you …

In Behind the Book, Lisa Chaney takes us inside her research for a biography of the inimitable Coco Chanel, while Hidden Corners sees Jojo Tulloh foraging for gastronomic inspiration in the Library’s collection of books about food. A festive feast, indeed.

If the annual challenge of Christmas shopping is becoming all too much, do take a look at page 34 of Members’ News, where a cornucopia of London Library gifts is laid out, including our new Gift Vouchers and half-price Spouse/ Partner Memberships. Whether you give the exceptionally generous present of Library membership or simply pop some of our note cards into a stocking, your gift will win our gratitude and help to spread some bookish cheer.

On behalf of all the Library’s staff, the very warmest of Christmas wishes and our thanks for your support, companionship and enthusiasm during the year. We look forward to bringing you more exceptional reading in 2012.

Inez T.P.A. Lynn Librarian Published on behalf of The London Library by Royal Academy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction by adtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published 17 November 2011 © 2011 The London Library.

The opinions in this particular publication do not necessarily reflect the views of The London Library.

All reasonable attempts have been made to clear copyright before publication.

Editorial Publishers Jane Grylls and Kim Jenner Editor Mary Scott Design and Production Catherine Cartwright

Editorial Committee David Breuer Lottie Cole Aimée Heuzenroeder Peter Parker Erica Wagner

Advertising Jane Grylls 020 7300 5661 Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658 Hannah Jackson 020 7300 5675 Development Office, The London Library Lottie Cole 020 7766 4716 Aimée Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to development@londonlibrary.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 7

BBR LL Ad:BBR

21/10/2011

13:14

Page 1

CONTRIBUTORS

Mark Bryant

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www.bbr.com/london 0800 280 2440

joined the library in 2006

Mark Bryant has worked as an editor in book publishing and as a lecturer, writer, journalist and exhibition curator. A former Secretary of the London Press Club, he has written for History Today, the Independent and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and is the author of several books including The World’s Greatest War Cartoonists & Caricaturists, 1792–1945, which is published this month.

Lisa Chaney

joined the library in 2000

After a nomadic childhood, Lisa ran away from strict schooling, thought better of that and read philosophy at London University. She was Elizabeth David’s first biographer. Following this with a life of J.M. Barrie, her latest book is a life of Coco Chanel (October 2011).

Jessica Douglas-Home joined the library in 1988

Jessica Douglas-Home studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. She is Chairman of the historic Mihai Eminescu Trust and the author of Once Upon Another Time (2000) and Violet: The Life and Loves of Violet Gordon Woodhouse (1996). Her latest book, A Glimpse of Empire (2011), tells the story of the 1911 Durbar taken from the diaries of Lilah Wingfield.

Jojo Tulloh

joined the library in 2007

Jojo Tulloh has been food editor of the Week since 2000. Her first book, Freshly Picked: Kitchen Garden Cooking in the City (2008), a collection of stories and recipes inspired by her East London allotment, was published in paperback by Vintage as East End Paradise this April. She lives in East London with her family.

Edmund de Waal

11— 6 Oct/ /12 19 Feb

ies ct carr archite Ever y ian gene p the uto oolhaas K – Rem

joined the library in 2001

Ceramic artist Edmund de Waal has most recently created major installations for the V&A and Tate Britain. He was apprenticed as a potter before studying English at Cambridge. He has written widely on art and ceramics, and his memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2010), won several awards including the Costa Biography Award. In 2011 he was awarded an OBE for services to art. He lives with his family in London.

Christopher Woodward joined the library in 1998

OMA/ ss progre

Christopher Woodward is a curator and art historian. He is Director of London’s Garden Museum and a Trustee of The Heritage Lottery Fund. His book In Ruins was published in 2001.

In this issue he writes about his attempt last month to become the 549th person to swim the Strait of Gibraltar since the first crossing in 1929.

d by curate Rotor

Louise Yates

The City of London Corporation is the founder and principal funder of the Barbican Centre

Media Partner

8 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Supported by the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, The Netherlands Architecture Fund and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Additional support provided by The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture.

Photo: Philippe Ruault

joined the library in 2011

Louise Yates writes and illustrates children’s books. Her first book, A Small Surprise, was published in 2009.

Dog Loves Books followed in 2010, debuted as a New York Times bestseller, was nominated for the Kate Greenaway Medal and won the 2010 Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Louise read English at Christ Church, Oxford, and studied drawing at the Prince’s Drawing School, Shoreditch. She lives and works in London.

BehinD The

Book

Lisa Chaney, who wrote the first biography of Elizabeth David (1998), made extensive use of the Library’s Biography and History collections while researching her new book on Coco Chanel (published last month).

‘

’

Lisa Chaney’s Chanel: An Intimate Life (2011).

Chanel left no diaries and only a handful of letters, so my first approach to writing her biography, Chanel: An Intimate Life, was to come at her peripherally, and see if she featured in the letters, diaries and biographies of her contemporaries. Here, the Library proved a rich source and led me to some extraordinary discoveries.  The Allure of Chanel by P. Morand, trans.

Euan Cameron (London 2008). Biog. Chanel.

Avoiding reprisals for having had a German lover during the war, in 1946 Chanel left France for Switzerland. There, Morand, also in retreat, took down this extraordinary memoir. Unpublished until 1976, it remains the prime source for this ‘witty, strange and mesmerising’ woman. Her own versions of her life shifted like the sands, but as I understood Chanel better I learnt to interpret this fascinating and beautifully translated document, and saw that between its lines much information had lain hidden.  Peasants into Frenchmen: the Modernization of Rural France, 1870-1914

by Eugen Weber (London 1977).

H. France, Social &c.

Using quantities of unpublished archives, Weber illustrates the French state’s uphill struggle to unite and engender a sense of nationhood in its loosely connected and unruly provinces. Looking at themes such as the land, the family, beliefs, traditions, schooling and migration from country to city, we see the peasant dragged from his ancient agrarian ways into the light of the industrial nation state and its alien tongue, French. Weber’s rich narrative is peppered with anecdote and shocking fact, reinforcing this magisterial piece of scholarship, which was crucial to my understanding of Chanel’s own origins and trajectory.  A Life of Picasso by John Richardson (3 vols., London 1991–2007). Biog. Picasso, 4to.

This opus is unlikely to be superseded.

Richardson knew Picasso, has interviewed everyone of importance who knew him, and has had unrivalled access to the unpublished sources. Robust prose matches Richardson’s analysis of the work in a hugely detailed account of the period and the complex Picasso. Indispensable for an appreciation of this flawed genius, the books made me understand better why Chanel had an affair with him.  Diaghilev: A Life by Sjeng Scheijen, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle & S.J. Leinbach (London 2009). Biog. Diaghilev.

As Scheijen’s discoveries forcibly remind us, this Russian art critic, ballet impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes and, like Chanel, a monstre sacré, also played a crucial role in the development of modern art. Diaghilev’s tyrannical methods and extraordinary achievements were driven by a deeply anti-establishment mission: to reveal the role of art in delivering us from any constraints of morality and convention.

Chanel was a friend, patron and one of the handful of mourners at his funeral.  Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller (London 1970). Biog. Cocteau.

Stick with this book, it’s worth it. I had to; Cocteau was close to Chanel for many years. In the end it’s a masterly account of the opium-addicted homosexual poet, playwright, novelist and film maker. A paradoxical, utterly charming, utterly nasty, generous egomaniac, he knew everyone

and made it his business to be at the centre of the Parisian avant garde. Steegmuller’s precise and acid pen persuaded me of Cocteau’s importance as an artist.  Memoires by Elisabeth de Gramont (4 vols., Paris 1928–39). Biog. ClermontTonnerre.

Elisabeth De Gramont was beautiful and intelligent, with daughters by Duc de Clermont-Tonnerre, and never hid her lesbian relationship with the libertine salonist, Natalie Barney. A deliciously dry humour informs her insightful commentaries on her chaotic times. Spare yet dramatic descriptions of events and people, such as the aftermath of the Wall Street Crash, Chanel herself and a number of their mutual friends, evoke well the tenor of this febrile period. Quicksands: A Memoir by Sybille Bedford (London 2005). Biog. Bedford.

The novelist, and travel and food writer (and close friend of Elizabeth David) is commendably discreet in her last book.

Although this is frustrating, the mystery holds us as we glimpse her aristocratic childhood, spent in Italy and the south of France, her friendship with the Huxleys and her mother’s decline into addiction. Bedford’s description of her half-sister, Catsey, provided an astonishing lead for me. It was Catsey’s husband, Baron Hans von Dincklage, ‘a disaster of lifelong consequences’ – who divorced her because she was half-Jewish – who was Chanel’s lover and a German spy.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 11

BIBLIOTHERAPY

Writer and illustrator Louise Yates recommends the book she turns to when in need of a tonic, a pick-me-up: a kick

WISE CHILDREN ANGELA CARTER Feeling old? Daunted by the passage of time? Shake a leg. This is a novel that looks at life from a startlingly limber perspective.

The ‘wise children’ of the title (twins, Dora and Nora Chance) are celebrating their 75th birthday. These gaudy old birds fizz and spit energy as they go about selecting their party get-up in the market on Brixton’s Electric Avenue. They share their birthday with their 100-year-old father Melchior Hazard, who has (though never officially acknowledging these illegitimate daughters as his own) invited them to join him for his centenary celebrations.

Wise Children is a rebellious shout of a book, as the issue of the twin’s legitimacy becomes a wider exploration of what is ‘legitimate’ Art. While their father earned renown as a Shakespearean actor, they earned their crust as dancers ‘on the halls’ .

His rejection of them inspires a subversive survival spirit that transforms all that is bawdy, base or vulgar into an elevated form. A belch becomes a thing of beauty, while Shakespeare’s sober lines fall into farce. The world is on its head; we’re on the wrong side of the tracks. This is fun!

Carter’s carnivalesque exaggeration describes an unstoppable life force and a fecund, regenerating spirit. Throughout the book, ambitiously staged extravaganzas resist order and descend into chaos and orgy. True ‘Art’ lies in the natural, the spontaneous, the untamed and illegitimate, while pomp, pretence and contrivance lead to

Illustrations by Louise Yates, 2011.

12 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

disaster. Melchior’s several, heavily orchestrated parties manifest his desire to stage-manage his life and reputation, yet it is only when this imposed order is undone that the real party begins. Artifice is confounded by the forces of nature – by fire and sexual desire. Indignities, exposure and the revelation of carefully concealed truths are the unexpected, jubilant result.

Grandma Chance (who we are led to suspect is really the twins’ mother) has an uncanny ability to explode social hierarchy and protocol with a belch, a giggle or an incendiary line. (What a refreshing way to turn up in Hollywood, for example, with only an oilskin bag and the opener ‘Who the fuck are you?’)

The book is a great riot of filthy colloquialisms, of cliché and euphemism.

The Chance sisters speak their ‘mother tongue’ – not the fruity, mellifluous tones of their father, but the mangled vowels and vulgar quips of their grandmother.

This casual torrent is every bit as rich and stimulating as the more elevated speech of legitimate Art and the ‘right’ side of the family. It is a particular language and humour that I fondly associate with an older generation in my own family. My great-grandmother, born in 1892, and – relative to me – the oldest person I’ve known, was tremendously funny. There is something of her in the characters described here: the pithy, laconic humour, the ego-deflating asides. She could floor pretensions with a well-placed swipe: the conspicuously unnecessary use of a long word would be met with the casual and solemn remark – ‘we had one of those, but its leg fell off’ – and she would eye up rich or unusual foodstuffs with the quietly satisfied ‘you-mark-my-words’ assurance, ‘That’ll turn your shit black’ .

Like Grandma Chance, Peregrine

(the Chance twins’ nominal ‘father’ , but really their uncle) embodies an energy that gains its vim and vigour from protecting and preserving youth. He is just the sort of character I love in books and in life – charismatic, breezy natured and life affirming, a conduit of affection – a live wire. He’s also a reminder that living can be a magical experience. He engenders life, conjuring newborn babies and creatures from his pockets, and wonder out of thin air. ‘Larger than life, ’ physically and metaphysically, he busts the mould; he cannot sit still nor keep the measure of mediocrity, but must be gone. A force of nature, an adventurer and (rather aptly) a butterfly expert, his flight is always away from the ‘known world’ of the novel and into the realm of the extra ordinary: into imagination and enchantment. I miss him when he wanders off page, yet his absences appear as small rehearsals for death and are a calm reminder that in life, in spite of love, people come and go.

‘Nothing is a matter of life and death except life and death, ’ Dora says. Angela Carter was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1991, the year Wise Children was published, and died the following year aged 51. I’m deeply grateful to her for a book that celebrates the joy and hazards of living. I hope that I have the good fortune to grow as old, incisive and irreverent as the Chance twins; I believe it could be – as Carter so vividly imagined – one of life’s highest kicks.

GRAPHIC

WARRIORS War Cartoonists, 1792 to 1945

The role of wartime cartoons produced by satirical artists is often underestimated by historians, yet they can be significant in shaping popular opinion towards conflict, argues Mark Bryant

I

N 1805, NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, stung by constant personal attacks from British cartoonists, wrote to Joseph Fouché, his Minister of Police: ‘Have caricatures made: An Englishman, purse in hand, entreating the various Powers to take his money, &c …

The immense attention which the English direct to gaining time by false news shows 16 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

the extreme importance of this work. ’ Similar opinions by other military and political leaders have been expressed about wartime cartoonists and caricaturists over the past three centuries, yet satirical artists (with some notable exceptions) have often been overlooked in the histories of international conflicts. At best their images have been used to enliven the pages of

scholarly treatises, but even then their names have frequently been omitted and little information has usually been given about their lives.

The history of international war cartoons and caricature can be traced back at least to the graphic satirists of the seventeenth century, but the first professional exponents only began to

Opposite The Corsican and His Bloodhounds at the Window of the Tuileries Looking Over Paris, 16 April 1815, by Thomas Rowlandson.

Above, left to right Snuffing Out Boney!, 1 May 1814, by George Cruikshank; The Triumph of the Year 1813, January 1814, by Johann Michael Voltz; ‘General Février’ Turned Traitor, by John Leech, in Punch, 10 March 1855.

emerge in Europe during the wars that followed the French Revolution. The first and most important of these was James Gillray (1756–1815). The son of a former soldier, Gillray had first-hand experience of warfare himself, as he was present as an artist in Flanders during the Duke of York’s campaign in 1793. Though not the first to caricature Napoleon, Gillray was the creator of the image of him as the diminutive ‘Little Boney’ , and his print The Plumb-Pudding in Danger (26 February 1805), showing British Prime Minister William Pitt and Napoleon carving up the globe, is one of the most famous political cartoons of all time.

Technically speaking, these are not cartoons but caricatures (from the Italian, caricare, to overburden or exaggerate), a style of drawing that can trace its origins to ancient Egypt. The word ‘cartoon’ (from another Italian word, cartone, a sheet of paper or card) was originally applied to designs or templates for tapestries, mosaics or fresco paintings. Its more widely used modern sense dates from 1843 and derives from a Punch spoof by John Leech (1817–64) of a Government-sponsored competition for pictures to decorate the walls of the new Houses of Parliament in London. Entries in the form of classicalstyle cartoon designs were exhibited in Westminster Hall, and Leech attacked this as a waste of public money at a time when Londoners were starving. His drawing Cartoon No.1: Substance and Shadow

(15 July 1843) showed ragged and disabled figures viewing the exhibition. Further ‘Cartoons’ on social problems appeared over the following weeks and eventually the regular full-page topical drawing became known as ‘the Cartoon’ (and its artist as ‘the Cartoonist’). By association the word gradually came to be applied to comic or satirical drawings generally.

Another significant caricaturist who emerged in Britain during the Napoleonic Wars was George Cruikshank (1792–1878).

Indeed, his first published print was a war cartoon, Boney Beating Mack and Nelson Giving Him a Whack!! (19 November 1805).

It appeared when he was only 13 years old and featured the Austrian General Mack surrendering to Napoleon, and Admiral Nelson presenting Britannia with the remains of the combined French and Spanish navies after the Battle of Trafalgar.

Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827), meanwhile, not only produced some powerful political prints, such as The Two Kings of Terror (November 1813) and The Corsican and His Bloodhounds at the Window of the Tuileries Looking Over Paris (16 April 1815) – both featuring Napoleon and the figure of Death – but also created the first ever war cartoon character, Johnny Newcome, a newly commissioned British officer serving in the Peninsular War. French caricaturists of this period tended to remain anonymous because of strict censorship laws, as did artists in countries such as Spain and Italy, which

were then ruled by the French Empire. A similar situation existed in Russia, and it was not until Napoleon’s fateful campaign of 1812 that a long ban on caricature was lifted, and Ivan Terebenev (1780–1815) and others began to produce satirical prints, some of which were copied or adapted in Britain by Cruikshank and Rowlandson.

There were also very few German war cartoons before the French were defeated at Leipzig in 1813, after which Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850) and others produced some powerful images.

Notable among these was The Triumph of the Year 1813 (January 1814) by Johann Michael Voltz (1784–1858), which featured Napoleon’s head composed entirely of dead bodies. It allegedly sold 20,000 copies in a single week, was reproduced and/ or adapted overseas, appeared on pottery designs and is even referred to in The Trumpet Major (1882), Thomas Hardy’s novel of the Napoleonic Wars.

In the nineteenth century prints began to be replaced with satirical magazines.

Punch was launched in 1841 and the first major conflict covered by its artists was the Crimean War (1853–6). One of its most famous cartoons from this period was John Leech’s ‘General Février’ Turned Traitor (10 March 1855), commenting on the death of Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. Another Punch artist, John Tenniel (1820–1914) – the first cartoonist ever to be knighted and later famous as the illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’ books – made his reputation during THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 17

p

the Indian Mutiny with The British Lion’s Vengeance on the Bengal Tiger (Punch, 22 August 1857), which was later reproduced as a popular print. Tenniel also drew some poignant anti-Union cartoons during the American Civil War, while the North’s main supporter was Thomas Nast (1840–1902) of Harper’s Weekly. Abraham Lincoln described Nast as ‘our best recruiting sergeant … his emblematic cartoons have never failed to arouse enthusiasm and patriotism’ .

The Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1, and the subsequent short-lived Commune, took place during the heyday of some of France’s greatest satirical artists. Among these were Honoré Daumier (1808–79), Cham (Amedée de Noé, 1819–79) and Alfred Le Petit (1841–1909). Faustin (Faustin Betbeder, 1847–after 1914) also produced some particularly gruesome drawings, such as The Blood Harvest of 1870 (1871), featuring a skeletal figure attempting to cover itself with newly harvested bloody grapes.

Britain’s colonial wars in Africa, Afghanistan and elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century were not only covered by the more familiar Punch cartoonists but also by other weekly magazine artists, such as Gordon Thomson of Fun, William Boucher of Judy, John Proctor of Moonshine and others. (Bound volumes of many of these magazines, as well as a complete set of Punch, can be found in the open-access stacks of the London Library.) However, it was not until the Boer War (1899–1902) that staff

cartoonists on daily newspapers began to appear, notable artists in Britain including J.M. Staniforth (Western Mail) and Francis Carruthers Gould (Westminster Gazette).

The Boer War also attracted significant attention from graphic satirists, and those working for the European press (especially in Holland, France and Germany) were highly critical of Britain’s actions. Particularly savage in their attacks were the Frenchman Charles Léandre, the Dutchman Johan Braakensiek and the artists of German magazines such as

‘

Some of Illingworth’s drawings were found in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin after the war

’

Simplicissimus and Kladderadatsch.

One of the most virulent anti-British artists of the war was Jean Veber (1864– 1928) of L’Assiette au Beurre. His drawing L’Impudique Albion (‘Shameless Albion’ , 28 September 1901), featuring the face of Edward VII imprinted on the naked bottom of Britannia, led to the magazine being banned by the French Government.

The First World War saw a resurgence in gruesome ‘hate’ cartoons, drawn in particular by Britain’s Edmund Sullivan (1869–1933), the Australian Will Dyson (1880–1938) and the Dutchman Louis

Left to right The Blood Harvest of 1870, 1871, by Faustin Betbeder; Taming the Crocodile, in Fun, 26 July 1882, by Gordon Thomson; L’Impudique Albion, in L’Assiette au Beurre, 28 September 1901,

by Jean Veber.

18 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Raemaekers (1869–1956). Indeed, Raemaekers’ drawings were so inflammatory that he was put on trial for endangering his country’s neutrality. Later, when the German Government offered a reward for his capture, dead or alive, he fled to London. Here his work so impressed Prime Minister Lloyd George that he persuaded the artist to go to the USA in an effort to enlist American help in the war.

On the lighter side, it was also during the Great War that H.M. Bateman (1887–1970) and William Heath Robinson (1872–1944) had considerable success (the phrase ‘Heath Robinson contraption’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1917). Cartoon poster artists also played a significant part. These included two published in 1914: Kitchener Wants You by Alfred Leete (1882–1933), later adapted by James Montgomery Flagg in the USA (with Uncle Sam replacing Lord Kitchener); and ’Arf a Mo’ , Kaiser (featuring a grinning Cockney soldier lighting his pipe before engaging the enemy) by Bert Thomas (1883–1966), who was awarded an MBE for his wartime drawings.

The following year ‘Old Bill’ Busby, the long-suffering Tommy character created

by Bruce Bairnsfather (1887–1959), first appeared in the Bystander magazine.

Though criticised in Parliament as ‘these vulgar caricatures of our heroes’ , Bairnsfather’s drawings were popular with the troops, and his One of our Minor Wars (‘Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it!’ , 24 November 1915) is one of the most famous war cartoons of recent times.

Cartoons about the lot of the ordinary soldier, sailor or airman continued to be

Graphic warriors

From top The Path of Glory, in The Kaiser’s Garland, 1915, by Edmund J. Sullivan; The Bill, 1918, by Louis Raemaekers; ‘What is an “Aryan”? He is Handsome as Goebbels’, 1941, by Boris Efimov.

popular in the Second World War. In the USA they included those featuring Willie and Joe by Bill Mauldin (1921–2003). Like Bairnsfather’s earlier creations, Mauldin’s characters were criticised by the authorities (General Patton said they looked like ‘goddamn bums’) but were well received by the troops on the front line. Mauldin was even awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It was the first time that it had been given for work on a military paper, and he was then (at the age of 23) its youngest ever winner.

Back in Britain, the walrus-moustached buffoon ‘Colonel Blimp’ also caused problems with authority, and Winston Churchill himself tried to ban the 1943 film The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (which was loosely based on the character), saying it was ‘detrimental to the morale of the army’ . However, Churchill was not against cartoons. In an essay published in 1932 he said that they were ‘a very good way of learning history’ and during the war he even presented an MBE to the Welsh cartoonist JON (William John Philpin Jones, 1913–92) for his ‘The Two Types’ series about a pair of Eighth Army ‘Desert Rat’ officers. Field Marshal Earl Alexander of Tunis added that ‘They deserve to be remembered and honoured’ , and General Sir Bernard Freyberg VC even went so far as to say they were worth ‘a division of troops’ .

In Britain some of the best-known humorous wartime artists included Paul Crum (Roger Pettiward) and Ian Fenwick (both of whom were killed in action), Pont (Graham Laidler), Nicolas Bentley, Joe Lee, David Langdon and Frank Reynolds. It was also Norman Pett who drew Jane, Fougasse (Kenneth Bird) who created the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ poster series, and Osbert Lancaster who drew single-column topical ‘Pocket Cartoons’ for the Daily Express, socalled because, like pocket battleships, they packed a punch despite their size.

The Second World War also produced some poignant political cartoons. Among the foremost Allied artists of this period were the double Pulitzer Prize-winning Americans Daniel Fitzpatrick (1891–1969) and Vaughn Shoemaker (1902–91), the Dutchman Leo Jordaan (1885–1980), the Australian Mick Armstrong (1903–78), the Polish-born Arthur Szyk (1894–1951) and the Czechs Stephen Roth and Adolf Hoffmeister. In addition, posters and books featuring cartoons by the Soviet Union’s Boris Efimov (1900–2008), the Kukryniksi

group and others were distributed in the UK and elsewhere to support the Soviet War Relief Fund.

Those working for British newspapers included George Whitelaw of the Daily Herald, Clive Uptton of the Daily Sketch, Sidney Strube of the Daily Express, Vicky (Victor Weisz) of the News Chronicle and Leslie Illingworth of the Daily Mail (some of whose drawings were found in Hitler’s bunker in Berlin after the war, date-stamped and catalogued by Joseph Goebbels).

Another notable wartime British cartoonist was Philip Zec of the Daily Mirror. His drawing, The Price of Petrol Has Been Increased by One Penny – Official (5 March 1942), depicting a torpedoed sailor clinging to a raft, was seen by the Government as subversive, unpatriotic and ‘Worthy of Goebbels at his best’ (Herbert Morrison, then Home Secretary) and for a time the Mirror was under threat of closure.

All these artists allegedly featured on the Gestapo’s ‘black list’ (of those to be executed if the Nazis invaded Britain), but perhaps the most prominent was David Low of the Evening Standard (who had also created ‘Colonel Blimp’). Low produced some of the most memorable cartoons of the war, especially Rendezvous (1939) and the 1940 classics, The Harmony Boys, All Behind You, Winston and Very Well, Alone.

Low’s wartime editor on the Standard was Michael Foot, the future leader of the Labour Party. Born nearly 150 years after Napoleon, he would certainly have agreed with the French Emperor’s comment on the ‘extreme importance’ of the work of cartoonists, both in wartime and peace, and even listed Will Dyson as one of his ‘true prophets’ . The opening paragraph of his essay on Dyson in Loyalists and Loners (1986) sums up the impact of all the thousands of other international graphic warriors of the past three centuries: ‘Nothing to touch the glory of the great cartoonists! They catch the spirit of the age and then leave their own imprint on it: they create political heroes and villains in their own image; they teach the historians their trade. ’ It is a viewpoint to which I readily subscribe, especially when it comes to wartime cartoonists and caricaturists.

These are not unknown soldiers. Their names should not be forgotten.

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THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 19

I PLACED A JAR Edmund de Waal traces the development of the close intersection between ceramics and words, from Yuan Dynasty jars to his own contemporary installations

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hen challenged about how I spend my time I describe myself as a ‘potter who writes’ . I feel that this covers the ground: clay and words, studio and library. It also puts me into a happy, aspirational continuum with other potter-writers across the centuries stretching from Xanto, the poet-potter of Renaissance Urbino, to the polymathic Josiah Wedgwood and his Lunar Society friends, from the lustre-ware potter and novelist William De Morgan and on to the towering figure of Bernard Leach. For an apparently contemplative profession, potters are a noisy, argumentative lot and much given to the writing of manifestos and polemics. Some of these are of mild art-historical interest, whilst others are wild imaginings of the possibilities of ceramics. I recommend Aeroceramica (1938), the Italian Futurist ceramic manifesto, full of gilded porcelain racing cars, and an exhortatory Russian revolutionary text from 1919 calling on potters to join ‘the parade of objects’ to stir the blood.

There are also the publications where artists, architects and poets have written with passion about why clay matters to them. My ideal anthology includes Joan Miró’s journals, Lucio Fontana on why Pablo Picasso is hopeless at ceramics, 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Paul Gauguin on pottery as ‘a central art’ , the designer Henry van der Velde on the horrors of Meissen porcelain, Le Corbusier on collecting vernacular pots, the poet John Ashbery on Funk ceramics, the Danish potter Axel Salto on the power of transformation in ceramics.

This is a project that will never conclude: those endless anthologies of poems about cats, or locomotives, loom as an awful warning.

Many of these intersections between ceramics and words are rather mundane. In the English Staffordshire tradition there is writing to commemorate particular events of particular weight: a birth, a coronation, a death. The writing completes the visual image, the slightly over-helpful inscription of Adam and Eve twines around the loaded apple tree with the man and woman. Then there are the short verses on Chinese blue-andwhite jars of the Yuan Dynasty (1260– 1368) made for temple use, imploring protection for families, good renown and success in business. All exemplary uses Top Tin-glazed earthenware bowl depicting the Conversion of Saul, c.1525, by Francesco Xanto Avelli. © The National Gallery of Art, Washington.

Right Tea bowl, early 18th century, by Ogata Kenzan.

Photograph © Erik Thomsen Asian Art, New York.

of words on pots, though rather lacking in the synapse of energy that I search for.

But there are other traditions in which the word and the vessel are intricately linked. In the Japanese tradition centred on Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743), the maker and designer of pots for the Tea Ceremony, we see a master balancing the associations of colour and form, image and poem. He was, according to Richard L. Wilson in The Art of Ogata Kenzan (1991), ‘the first to produce ceramics whose artistic focus was handwritten script, and in

Left Press-moulded bottle vase with enamel over decoration, c.1958, by Bernard Leach.

Right Word for Word, 2010, by Edmund de Waal.

Vitrine containing thrown porcelain vessels in celadon, grey and white glazes.

doing so he vastly increased the range of associations that a pot might have’ . By putting words on to pots in a culture that was highly attuned to the arts of both calligraphy and ceramics, he made his audience learn to read pots, to connect the associations of a particular form with a particular poem or quotation. Kenzan was layering the meanings of his pots.

The other great tradition of writing on ceramics is Persian. Koranic quotations occur only on tiles, secular verses on both tiles and vessels. While some of the verses are the work of contemporary THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 21

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Word for Word, 2010, by Edmund de Waal. Vitrines fronted with opaque (left) and clear (right) glass, containing thrown porcelain vessels in celadon, grey and white glazes.

‘

For an apparently contemplative profession, potters are a noisy, argumentative lot and much given to the writing of manifestos and polemics poets, others are the work of the potters themselves. Art historians are a little disparaging of poems by potters, but there is something deeply affecting about these lyrics: they seem to capture the common belief that ‘when the heart is right, the brush is right’ . These halting sincerities express the idea of a pot as a love letter. Often in early Islamic ceramics – from the ninth to the late twelfth centuries – the horizontal line used as the base line for all letters of an inscription makes the deciphering of the calligraphy difficult, and this has led a number of scholars to call it simulated writing, or pseudo-calligraphy. However, more recent research on the inscriptions reveals that what appears to be simulated is in fact the repetition of one word, usually ‘al-mulk’ , ‘the Kingdom’ , which is an abbreviation of the phrase ‘almulk lillah’ , ‘the Kingdom of God’ . As the historian Helen Philon has pointed out, in her book Early Islamic Ceramics:

22 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

’

Ninth to Late Twelfth Centuries (1980), ‘the inscriptions on pottery are not simulated, pseudo, meaningless, or just decorative … but they carry a definite meaning which if not benedictory, can be traced back to the Koran’ . This is a fascinating insight: the writing is beautiful, but its essence only comes alive through recognising repetition.

This is complex territory. For it is not repetition as a mystical act of selfimmolation in process. It is a necessary – and finely judged – way of reaching an end. This is repetition as in the laying of another small white mark on a Robert Ryman canvas, Pierre Boulez’s ‘serial concept of composition’ , or the careful limning of another word in a manuscript.

My recent installations of porcelain vessels return to the gaps between words and phrases. Word for Word (2010), a pair of large vitrines filled with a series of celadon and grey white pots, sit next to each other like the pages of an open book. Another, glazed with opaque glass, has the slightly smudged quality of a palimpsest. And I’m working on a piece called Unpacking my Library for an exhibition at Waddesdon Manor next year. The idea for it came while desperately trying to write about Emile Zola in the London Library stacks, proving my theory that there is nothing so generative of ideas as a missed deadline.

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Fish punch bowl, 1890–1904,

by William De Morgan.

Decorated by Fred Passenger. © De Morgan Foundation.

The Delhi Durbar of 1911 On the centenary of this display of British colonial power, Jessica Douglas-Home describes a spectacle like no other

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he 1911 Delhi Durbar was intended – in its scale, drama, beauty and pageantry – to be the greatest spectacle since the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

In a ceremony borrowed from the Moghuls – ‘Durbar’ refers to a Moghul court – the British staged the event to celebrate George V’s and Queen Mary’s coronation as Emperor and Empress of India, and to display in public the loyalty to the Crown of India’s princes, the nawabs and maharajas through whom Britain exercised its rule, which was being threatened by a rising tide of nationalism.

To accommodate the 250,000 visitors, a great tented city north of Delhi was erected in the space of four months, with its own post office, light railway, electricity, hospitals and farms. Among the encampments were the luxurious gardens and silk-lined tents of the Royal and Viceregal entourages, alongside the carved gateways and shamianas (ceremonial tents) of the maharajas.

Durbar Day, on 12 December, followed five days of continuous parades and festivities.

The King and Queen travelled in an open landau along long corridors of magnificently uniformed soldiers lining the route. As the cavalcade entered the giant amphitheatre, the Royal couple was greeted by the strains of a 2,000-strong military band. Dressed in coronation robes and seated on a throne under a gold and crimson shamiana, George V received India’s ruling princes as they each bowed down to him as Emperor-King.

Did the Coronation Durbar succeed in its aim of entrenching British power? Significant numbers of the rising middle class resented India’s colonial status. And great changes were coming. In 1915 Gandhi would campaign for the removal of foreign powers, and the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 would leave an indelible stain on the Raj. The princes were not to hold the key to India’s future after all, and faded so totally from the scene that their days of glory today seem as distant as those of the Moghuls.

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Clockwise from top Procession in front of George V and Queen Mary; the Begum of Bhopal, India’s only female ruler; the Royal couple; gateway into the tented city; George V and Queen Mary receiving the Maharaja of Sikkim. Photographs from Lilah Wingfield’s collection.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 23

LIBrary VERsus LIDO Christopher Woodward explores why writers love swimming, and how he came – through his own testing feats of endurance in the sea – to be suspicious of writers’ tales of heroic and reckless feats in the water

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hy do writers exaggerate the distances and the dangers of their swims?

And why do their biographers believe them? I recently put down a book about the Fitzgeralds, which tells a story of how Scott and Zelda dived 30 feet into the sea one reckless night on the Riviera. According to their friend Sara Murphy, Zelda stripped to her slip, and Scott followed her up the cliff; the dive had to be timed with the waves or each would have been dashed to pieces on the cliff. Pause and look up, and count 30 feet. It is half the height of an Olympic diving board and I, at least, would be much too scared to dive from a cliff that height, sober or elated, day or night. Why, I wonder, do biographers who scrutinise laundry lists and bank accounts never question writers’ claims of achievements in the water?

Edgar Allan Poe claimed to have swum six miles up the James River against a turning tide. Charles Baudelaire believed him; I don’t. Nor do I believe that Edward John Trelawny swam across the whirlpool below Niagara Falls, as he claimed in a much-quoted letter. If I had the vice of writing illicit, crabby marginalia you can guess in which passages the scribbles would be. But, you may ask me, why do you care?

I care because in my twenties and thirties I taught myself to be a good swimmer. I began with breaststroke and my lips turned blue crossing Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, on a day when the autumn reflections met in the black centre of the lake. That was the first time I became 24 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

suspicious of writers: Henry David Thoreau declaimed about ‘bathing’ but I do not think he ever swam across the Pond and back.

At a ‘wild swimming picnic’ in memory of Roger Deakin I swam from Grantchester Meadows to Cambridge and the cold penetrated my belly. (Rupert Brooke had the grace to admit that he could only swim 200 yards in the river.) Rounding a lonely rock off the Devon coast, fantasies of a sunless death fly towards you like a field of asteroids.

Distances matter if you swim 10 miles in the mist from Lulworth Cove to Weymouth, and every yard a wave hits you in the face. Lord

‘

Am I an ex-writer, I wonder, because I have become a good swimmer?

’

Byron would understand. Famously, he declared that he was prouder of swimming the Hellespont than of being a poet.

I am writing in a café in Tarifa, the town that is the southernmost point of Spain. Beside me is Colin Hill, an athletics champion and Channel swimmer. For five days we have looked at palm trees tossing their branches in a crazy east wind. If the wind drops, and changes direction, we will try to swim to Africa: 12 miles across the Strait of Gibraltar. I met Colin on a swim of the Hellespont on the 200-year anniversary

of Byron’s crossing. A total of 139 swimmers met on the shore. South Africans and Australians flexed their shoulders and talked loudly and confidently. A man walked over. ‘Hi. I’m Harry Mount. I loved your book about ruins. ’ I gravitated towards his circle of fellow writers and journalists.

Thinking about identification if washed up, I slipped my London Library reader’s card into my wetsuit. Colin came first. To my surprise, I was twenty-first, and a Times columnist declared that I had won ‘the literary category’ . (Graciously, I point out that the man in front wrote the EasyJet guide to Dublin).

This swim is four times the distance, and we must be fast enough to catch the bit of Africa that sticks out. Colin chuckles about the talk before the Hellespont swim: ‘Do you remember all the stories about Greeks and Romans drowning?’ The speaker recounting the tales was Charles Sprawson, whom I last saw clapping the swimmers home on the Asian shore. (Charles is a very good swimmer, who swam the Hellespont solo and tried to follow Byron across the Tagus.) His Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (1992) is my desert island book, on which I modelled my In Ruins (2001). Charles has not tried to write a book since. I have tried, and failed. Is that a coincidence? Am I an ex-writer, I wonder, because I have become a good swimmer?

For eight years I tried to write a book about the British cult of Napoleon. I failed, and should have realised much sooner the impossibility of explaining our obsession Opposite Weimar Diver, c.1928–30, by Kurt Reichert.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 25

Above, from top The Swimming Hole, c.1883–5, by Thomas Eakins, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; Annette Kellermann, aged 60, in the Yarra River.

with the man. In The London Library Napoleon has a longer shelf than anyone except William Shakespeare, and in that darkness you stumble over the bones of men who have intended to write the book, or turn a script into a film: the giant bones of Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Stanley Kubrick, or obscurities such as G.L. de St M. Watson, author of one of three books on the puzzle of the death mask. The darkness is illuminated by flashes of brilliance such as Lord Rosebery’s Napoleon: The Last Phase (1900), but the overwhelming sensation in that dark stack is of being buried alive in soil which has been turned over time and time again, like an old graveyard. I have a job so can only write between 6.30 a.m. and 8 a.m. By the end I woke to a grey, fat, silent figure, beckoning to me from the end of the bed. I began to fantasise about swimming around St Helena, an extinct volcano whose flanks slip steeply into the bottomless black Atlantic. If I were the first person to swim around the island would that break Napoleon’s hold on me?

One daybreak I put down my pen, 26 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

picked up a towel, and walked across London Fields to the Lido. Climbing out after a swim a few months later, a sudden vision: Napoleon was floating on his back in the Lido. He was in full uniform and in the early sunshine medals sparkled on his high, round belly. He was drowned. I was free, and did not put my shoes on as I walked back across the grass.

To the obsessive swimmer the world of suits and elbows, tables and chairs, soon becomes less real than the world inside the pool. Two minutes in the clarity of water is worth twenty minutes twitching on land.

At long, air-conditioned meetings I would close my eyes and imagine blue water rising to fill the room. And once I imagined The London Library welling up with blue water, and kicking my legs up through the stacks to an open shimmering sky.

My hunch is that for many Library members a pool would be the perfect annexe. Writers love swimming, as Sprawson explores in his beautiful descriptions of Percy Bysshe Shelley plunging into mountain pools, Iris Murdoch into fast country rivers, or Jack London fantasising that the perfect wife would be able to swim beside him through the breakers and far out to sea. But why aren’t they very good at it, with the one exception of Byron? Perhaps the answer is obvious: writers are not good at swimming for the

same reason they are not good at boxing, or football. They are reflective, and selfdoubting, and step outside themselves at the decisive moment.

While Colin zaps zombies on his iPhone I read Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (published posthumously in 1982), snatched from the classics section of W.H. Smith at Gatwick Airport. Its opening pages are a masterful analysis of contemplation versus action: ‘For those few like me who live without knowing how to have life, what’s left but renunciation as our way and contemplation as our destiny?’

But it’s deeper than that, I think: immersion in water takes us back into the past. It is a paradox, as the water in seas and rivers is eternally new. Somehow, it is easy to think of the past as contained in a stone, or the touch of trees, or footsteps on a dusty path. But water has no memories. It can chill you, or drown you, but it doesn’t care, and it won’t remember.

Swim coaches tell you to make alphabetical lists in long-distance training.

In Dover Harbour the Channel swimmers meet to swim laps, a kilometre at a time. I make a list of animals, as instructed; battles of the Napoleonic Wars; more animals. But I have just met a girl called Zoe and after six kilometres begin an A–Z of the girls I have kissed. In the water names forgotten on land resurface. There is no one whose

Left to right Illustration by S.T. Dadd from A. Sinclair’s and W. Henry’s The Badminton Library: Swimming (1908); illustration from Harold E. Annison’s Games and Recreation Series: Swimming (1937).

LIBRARY VERSUS LIDO name begins with Q, U, V, W or X; ‘Venetia’s cousin’ doesn’t quite count. It is the first time I’ve made such a list, and I’m a little shocked, then sad, weighing the waste of so many starlit, leafy moments. My pace drops even more with an alphabet of unrequited crushes. But at ‘S’ , the coach whistles us into the shore.

Matthew Arnold wrote his poem ‘Dover Beach’ (1867) in one of these hotels above the shingle. In Thyrsis (1865), water became a vessel of grief for his dead friend Arthur Hugh Clough, and of the nostalgia of Arnold’s middle age. Swimming was an escape into an idealised childhood for Victorian writers, Sprawson shows us. For Charles Kingsley, for whom ‘A woodland bathe to me always brings thoughts of Paradise’ . (Were Adam and Eve the first swimmers?) Richard Jefferies, the nature writer and farmer’s son, lying cramped and dying in a small room in Clapham, transported himself to the lake in Wiltshire in which he swam as a boy: ‘the water did not seem to resist him, it parted and let him through. Between the strokes he glided buoyantly, lifted by the water as swallows glide on the plane of the air. All this portion of the water was in his power, and his elasticity as his stroke compressed it threw him forward. He did not see where he was going, his vision was lost in the excstacy of motion, all his mind was concentrated in the full use of his limbs. The delicious delirium of strength – unconsciousness of reason, unlimited consciousness of force – the joy of life itself filled him. ’ But you cannot be ‘lifted’ by water, and water does not ‘part’ or ‘let you through’ . Your limbs push water out of the way. It is not ‘elastic’ , and cannot be compressed by your stroke.

The medium Jefferies describes is memory, not water.

It is Tuesday. By Friday, the coastguard tells us, the sea may be calm enough to cross. Colin zaps more zombies. Staring at the white-caps I mouth from memory the last words of The Great Gatsby (1925): we beat against the current boats borne back ceaselessly into the past.

What do you think about in a race, I ask Colin. He divides his ideal time into quarters, and dedicates each to one of his four children. Quickly, I realise that I am guilty of another literary delusion: to romanticise the sportsman as ‘the other’: purposeful, and concentrated, and untroubled by self-

The author (right) with Immanuel Kant (left), 2011. Photograph by Rick Morris Pushinsky.

reflection and fantasy. I am wrong: Colin, it turns out, has the latest Cormac McCarthy in his bag, and we compare notes on Richard Matheson’s zombie masterpiece I am Legend (1954). Colin sees the drowned Greeks too. The difference is that he has a stronger leverage of mind.

Friday 8 October, 10.20 a.m.

Because of the ten-day blow there is a queue of swimmers in the town: at the front a policeman from Chicago who swam the Channel fifteen years ago, and behind us two young Germans. My only chance of a swim is to join the American, if I am fast enough in a trial. I swim at his speed for a hundred strokes. But he pulls away. A few hundred metres later, I give up. There is a ruthless but refreshing clarity in judging sporting ability. And there is also the writer’s

curse: through a crack in the moment, you picture an ending, and the ending is what happens.

The two young Germans are faster too. I pack for home; my wetsuit lies flat and black on the floor like Peter Pan’s shadow. At least failure is more interesting to write about, I reflect. Suddenly, the coastguard calls: the authorities will permit a second crossing in the afternoon, on condition that the first group crosses quickly. From the cliff we watch their escort boat reach the shipping lanes. I sit and look at the silhouette of Morocco and resist the temptation to imagine an ending.

Christopher Woodward completed the crossing in 4 hours 11 minutes. He is believed to be the first member of The London Library to have swum the Strait of Gibraltar.

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Left to right Charles Sprawson’s Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero (1992), 2009 edition; Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (1982), 2010 edition.

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 27

HIDDEN CORNERS

‘Roncival and

winged peases ’

A Cook’s guide to the food collectionS Cookery writer Jojo Tulloh finds that the literary qualities and classic recipes of the Library’s food titles of the past still have much to offer the contemporary gastronome

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nyone who studies in the Library regularly will know that food can be a hard subject to banish from your mind. In the hour before lunch, the growl of an empty stomach quite often breaks the silence of the Reading Room. It doesn’t help that the Library is riddled with food. Up on the fourth floor, in Fiction, Kim begs a fried cake and a bowl of rice and curry for his lama; in Biography, Colette is matching a pink wine with a green melon; while in Topography’s basement home, Patrick Leigh Fermor feasts like an ogre on a sizzling joint of roast lamb.

Of the million books in the Library’s collections, very few can be without some reference to food. This isn’t much of an insight.

Food is a universal subject; we all have to eat. But within the entire collection there are a large number of books (more than 1,400 titles)

Illustration from Alexis Soyer’s The Gastronomic Regenerator (1846).

28 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

that deal specifically with food. To read down the list of the separate food shelfmarks is to go back to a Victorian system of classification and a sensibility that described food and drink as a commodity rather than a pleasure. The list – Beer, Cheese, Cocoa, Coffee, Fruit, Drink, Hops, Salt, Sugar, Tea, Vegetarianism, Vines and Wine – has the unfortunate side effect of reading like a recipe for indigestion.

When passing through the stacks in Science & Miscellaneous towards the Food section, one must banish all thoughts of the way food is generally presented in modern books, newspapers and magazines. If they work on the senses like a surfeit of luridly iced cupcakes, then the Library’s collection, like a water biscuit with a slice of good cheese, offers a less obvious but no less enjoyable pleasure. Anyone looking for the latest glossy, photo-heavy tome by any of our current celebrity chefs will be disappointed. The characters represented in this collection are all from the past (and a good deal more colourful).

The celebrated Victorian chef, Alexis Soyer (1810–58), was also a writer, inventor, campaigner and entrepreneur. In his Culinary Campaign (1857), Soyer describes his efforts to improve the British Army’s food during the Crimean War (1853–6). Soyer was a technical innovator, designing state-of-the-art kitchens with watercooled refrigeration at the Reform Club, and inventing a portable ‘magic stove’ . He was also a compassionate man of action. As well as going to the Crimea, he ran a soup kitchen in Dublin during the Irish famine that fed thousands. He also lost a fortune opening an ill-judged culinary theme park named the Universal Symposium of All Nations, on the site now occupied by the Royal Albert Hall. The Library has his Pantropheon, or, History of food, and its preparation, from the earliest ages of the world (1853) and The Gastronomic Regenerator: A simplified and entirely new system of cookery (1846).

Devotees of pared-down seasonal cookery should search out the recipes of the original Evening Standard chef, Xavier Marcel Boulestin (1878–1943). Boulestin was an unpretentious French cookery writer who sought, in his witty, unpatronising way, to help English men and women achieve the ‘excellence, simplicity and cheapness’ of French bourgeois cookery. Writing in the 1920s, Boulestin appealed to everyone from society hostesses to

Left to right Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), 2011 edition; Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977); The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (1954); Edward Bunyard’s The Anatomy of Dessert (1927), 2006 edition.

Below Title-page spread from Xavier Marcel Boulestin’s What Shall We Have To-day? (1931), 1933 edition.

those cooking on a one-ring burner in a bedsit. In 2011, even the humblest and least practical of cooks could do well with What Shall We Have To-day? 365 Recipes For All The Days of the Year (1931).

Boulestin’s recipes seldom run to more than four ingredients, often fewer. Whether he is writing about the suitability of pairing fresh watercress with roast chicken, or describing a soup of peas flavoured with sorrel and chervil, his recipes have that rare and praiseworthy quality of being both immediately appealing and thoroughly achievable. His biography, Myself, My Two Countries (1936), offers further insight into his straightforward yet elegant approach to cooking.

Members interested in baking can start with Eliza Acton’s The English Bread Book: For domestic use, adapted to families of every grade (1857) and go on to Elizabeth David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery (1977; revised edition 2010). The latter is a history, a practical guide to every aspect of bread making, from flours to mills to bread ovens, and a huge collection of recipes. Those who like her writing (and all her more famous works are in the Library) might also look up the less well-known Spices, Salt and Aromatics in the English Kitchen (1970). In it David describes the ‘English love affair with Eastern Food and Arabian Nights ingredients’ .

The book’s introduction doubles as a masterclass in cookery-book writing. It also explains how David’s own interest in cooking began with Hilda Leyel’s The Gentle Art of Cookery (1929). Although Leyel is better known as a herbalist (she founded the Society of Herbalists and Culpeper’s, the chain of herbalist stores),

it was this book, with its ‘wild and imagination catching’ recipes and emphasis on appreciating fruit, vegetables and salad in their own right, that first propelled David into the kitchen as a young woman and shaped her approach to her own work.

Eliza Acton (1799–1859) was another of David’s heroines.

Her book Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) is, like David’s work, written in a style that is as practical and succinct as it is elegant and observant. Alan Davidson, in his supremely enlightening Oxford Companion to Food (1993), describes Acton as possibly the ‘most accomplished’ cookery writer in the English language. He likens her lucid style and quiet wit to Jane Austen’s.

This wit is revealed in the titles she chooses for her recipes in the book. ‘Poor Author’s Pudding, ’ a simple baked pudding made with milk, eggs, lemon and cinnamon topped with bread, for example, is contrasted with a far stodgier sounding concoction, ‘The Publisher’s Pudding’ , consisting of almonds, cream, macaroons, beef suet and marrow, flour, sugar, raisins, dried cherries, candied lemon peel, eggs and brandy. The latter, says Acton, can ‘scarcely be made too rich’ .

Going back even earlier, the Library’s safe contains one of the most famous cookery books of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747). The chapter headings range from the everyday – ‘Of Roasting, Boiling & C’ – to the obscure, ‘A Certain Cure For Bite of Mad Dog’ and advice ‘For Captains of Ships’ . You can learn how to tell if a hare is young or old (look at the cleft in its lips and check its claws) THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 29

p

or how to dry lemons (string them with a articles and cartoons from the 1920s to needle and thread and hang them up in the the present. If you aren’t already aware of kitchen). At the back, a month-by-month her, it will introduce you to the apposite list of what is best from the kitchen garden and scholarly world of the American food provides a sharp lesson in the poverty of writer, M.F.K. Fisher. In this collection our current fruit and vegetable varieties. she describes a sinister if impeccable Who could not be seduced by a description lunch in a French country inn where she of ‘Roncival and winged peases’ or ‘The is fed to the gills against her will. It has an Nutmeg, Isabella, Perfian, Newington, unsettling yet very memorable tone. The Violet, Muscal and Rambouillet Peaches’ . only other of her books in the Library is It’s still an enticingly direct and tasty read, With Bold Knife and Fork (1983, revised and only slightly spoilt by reading Glasse’s edition 2001), a collection of recipes and entry in the Oxford Dictionary of Food. essays. Still in New York, anyone thinking She is described here as an unscrupulous of encouraging their child to become a plagiarist who loudly and erroneously chef should first read Anthony Bourdain’s claimed innovations in style and layout of Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in recipes, none of which were hers. Glasse’s the Culinary Underbelly (2000), a good success was down to luck and her own introduction to the seamier side of fine vigorous marketing efforts. dining (oddly shelved in S. Hotels &c.).

For those who love recipes that Patience Gray’s extraordinary, instruct and improve, combined with autobiographical cookbook Honey eloquent and pithy writing, it is a pity From a Weed (1986) is a paean to the that the Library does not have the Mediterranean peasant traditions of American food writer and painter fasting, feasting and foraging. It’s not Richard Olney’s classic book, Simple in the Library, but fans of Gray can find French Food (1974), or indeed any of two of her more obscure books on the his hugely influential recipe books. You shelves. Ring Doves and Snakes (1989) can, however, read Reflexions (1999), his describes a year spent cooking and eating posthumously published autobiography. in primitive conditions on the island of It was hastily brought out shortly after his Naxos; the book ends in an atmosphere death and is far from perfect, but does of menace and foreboding that is as good reveal the life glimpsed in the margins as any thriller. Those wishing to know of his cookbooks. In it he describes more about Gray can also read her huge, his friendship with Sybille Bedford, a rambling Work Adventures Childhood woman with whom he shared a ‘passion Dreams (1999), as much history and for the table, for freshly plucked or dug autobiography as food writing. vegetables and creatures pulled from This wildly subjective list hardly the sea the moment before being eaten scratches the surface of the Library’s food alive, grilled or sautéed’ . The casual collections. Many of the books are as descriptions of the food he cooks for enjoyable for their prose style as works of her and other friends in his Provençal fiction, such as Claudia Roden’s Book of From top Illustration from Honoré de Balzac’s Le kitchen – lamb chops rolled up and Jewish Food (1997), Jane Grigson’s English Cousin Pons (1847), 1897 edition; illustration from Patience Gray’s Ring Doves and Snakes (1989). skewered with a rosemary branch, Food (1971) and The Alice B. Toklas Cook rubbed with olive oil and salt and grilled Book (1954). What of the current world of over fruitwood embers, and dishes of scrambled eggs with food writing? The journal of food studies and history PPQ (Petits truffles – give a flavour of his recipes.

Propos Culinaire) is in the Reading Room, as is the slightly less One of England’s greatest epicures, Edward Bunyard (1878– dry American journal, Gastronomica, and a recent addition, the 1939) was moved to write an entire and lyrical book, The Anatomy excellent The Art of Eating, also American. of Dessert (1927), on the subject of fruit eaten unadulterated and The food collections are capacious and can satisfy the whims at its best. Even if you love making puddings, it’s worth reading as of the most contrary reader. I should know; I am one. In recent a lesson in how to really taste fruit and as an inspiration to seek weeks I have flitted from Catalan Cuisine by Colman Andrews out and grow as many old varieties as you can. The title is a bit (1997) to Andre L. Simon’s A Catechism Concerning Cheeses misleading; by dessert Bunyard means a course of fresh fruit served (2011), in search of a recipe for goat’s curd. I have quailed on after the pudding. He may well have eaten puddings, too, but it reading Honoré de Balzac’s Le Cousin Pons (1847; 1897 edition), is clear that fruit is his overwhelming passion. It is a sensual and a book that reads like a cautionary tale written for gourmets, beautiful book that reads like a love letter to lost varieties. and dipped into Jason Hill’s Wild Foods of Britain (1939) for Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink inspiration when foraging. I follow no method but my appetite (2007), edited by David Remnick, collects the magazine’s best food and, for this greedy reader, The London Library is a perfect match.

30 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

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MEMBERS’ News The Founders’ Circle From strengtH to strength The Founders’ Circle has now been up and running for almost twelve months, bringing invaluable financial support to the Library and creating opportunities for donors to meet one another, attend a range of special events and see a little more of the Library ‘behind the scenes’. After such a successful first year, we spoke to one member, Harriet Tuckey, about why she joined the Founders’ Circle and what she has gained from being part of it.

When did you first join The London Library, and why?

I joined in 1992 looking for somewhere to study and write, and was thrilled to find a library that would allow me to take books home and keep them until other people asked for them; a library with a wonderful reading room, the atmosphere of a welcoming club and staff who were helpful, flexible and unbureaucratic. Best of all, it had the books. I have stayed a member since then and would be bereft without it.

What have you most enjoyed about being a Founders’ Circle member thus far?

Aside from the pleasure of knowing that I am making a much-needed donation to the Library, I have loved the Founders’ Circle events, which have given me wonderfully varied opportunities to do things I wouldn’t be able to do otherwise – sitting next to V.S. Naipaul at this year’s literary dinner was quite an experience! The Founders’ Circle visit to the College of Arms was fascinating and an extraordinary privilege. Likewise, I enjoyed being part of a small group talking with Sebastian Faulks about his writing, which was a rare chance to hear a best-selling author being entirely candid and far more personal than he would have been in another setting.

What encouraged you to become a Founders’ Circle member?

The London Library is such a blissful place: it is unique among all the libraries I know – and I have used many over the years.

I feel privileged to be a part of it and value everything it stands for, so to be able to make a contribution above my membership fee makes me feel I am, in my own small way, doing something to help it to flourish. I also enjoy the Library’s sense of community, and joining the Founders’ Circle is a great way to meet other members, supporters and devotees.

What would you say to encourage anyone who is considering becoming a member of the Founders’ Circle?

In these straitened times, not everyone is in a position to make a donation to the Library, but I would urge those who are to consider the Founders’ Circle, not least because, among the many other things achieved by our contributions, by joining the Circle they would help to subsidise the memberships of those who have difficulty meeting the basic fee. The Library needs support more than ever, and the rewards of being a Founders’ Circle member are considerable. I hope to see many new faces at events in 2012 – believe me, it’s a group you will be very glad to have joined.

NEW: The London Library BLOG

ADOPT A BOOK: Acquiring new

We hope members have now had a chance to explore and enjoy the Library’s new website, and perhaps to see what we’re doing, and join in, on Facebook and Twitter. The newest addition to our online activity is The London Library Blog (blog.londonlibrary. co.uk), where we’re giving readers all sorts of insights into London Library life, from the highlights of our most recently acquired books to accounts of what it’s like to be one of our fresh-faced Graduate Trainees. Staff in many different parts of the Library, from Reader Services to Conservation, will be telling us more about their work and what makes the Library tick from day to day.

Do drop by and take a look at the Blog, and let us know your feedback or ideas for future posts (development@londonlibrary. co.uk) – we’re keen to make it as engaging and interesting as possible for members and potential members alike.

Members responded to the Adopt A Book brochure in the last issue of the Magazine with great generosity and enthusiasm, demonstrating what a passionate group of bibliophiles our members are.

There are three ways you can take part and ensure your name will be in a London Library book for posterity: by adopting a new book, adopting your favourite book, or adopting one of our precious rare books. To learn more about adopting a book for yourself, or perhaps as an original Christmas gift, go to the ‘Support Us’ section of the website and click on ‘Adopt Schemes’, or contact Bethany McNaboe in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4719, email bethany.mcnaboe@londonlibrary.co.uk).

32 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

books and taking care of older ones

Calling all budding writers!

The London Library Student Prize, supported by FreshMinds and the Times, was officially launched in the Reading Room last month, and entries have already started coming in.

Open to all final-year undergraduates studying at higher education institutions across the UK, the Student Prize offers a substantial cash prize – £5,000 to the winner – as well as the chance to be published in and enjoy a mini-internship at the Times, and a year’s Times subscription. Three runners-up will each receive £1,000, a year’s Library membership and a Times subscription.

Entrants need to submit an 800word piece of writing in response to the competition’s theme – ‘The future of Britain lies with the right-hand side of the brain’ – with all kinds of responses, from any perspective or academic discipline, most welcome.

Entries close on 14 January 2012. If you are a final-year undergraduate, or if you know somebody who is, please help spread the word!

More information can be found at londonlibrarystudentprize.co.uk, or by contacting Elena in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4704, email elena.smith@londonlibrary.co.uk).

WANTED PENSION SCHEME TRUSTEE The Library closed its final salary pension scheme to further accrual from April 2011, but we still need skilled and conscientious trustees to govern it. Scheme trustees are distinct from those of the Library and their duties are to the members of the scheme (pensioners and current or former staff with accrued deferred pensions). Their role is to ensure that the scheme has sufficient funds to pay its pension obligations as they fall due, that these are paid in accordance with the rules and that the scheme complies with legislation and regulatory guidance.

One of the present scheme trustees will be stepping down in the next few months and we are looking for a replacement. If you have previous experience as a trustee, actuary, administrator or investment manager for a defined benefit pension scheme and would be interested in becoming a trustee of the Library’s scheme, then we would like to hear from you.

Full details can be obtained from the Vacancies section of the Library’s website, or can be sent by post on request to Sarah Farthing on 020 7766 4712. The closing date for applications is Friday, 16 December 2011.

29 OCTOBER 2011 – 22 JANUARY 2012 Tickets 0844 209 0051 www.royalacademy.org.uk

Richard Pare, Shabolovka Radio Tower, 1998, 154.8 x 121.9 cm. Richard Pare, courtesy Kicken Berlin © Richard Pare

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 33

London Library.indd 1

18/10/2011 16:09

Christmas

with The London Library This year we have more gift options than ever, helping you spread the Library cheer to book lovers in your life.

GIFT MEMBERSHIP Give someone you love a million books for Christmas and share the experience of being a London Library member.

Whether a full membership or a half-price Young Person’s membership, you will be sent a new member pack to present to the recipient; or, if you prefer, it can be sent to them directly. Library membership in 2012 will continue to bring the extra benefit of daytime access to Blacks private members’ club in Soho, so your gift will be two-fold!

SPOUSE/ PARTNER GIFT MEMBERSHIP: NOW HALF PRICE As agreed at the recent AGM, Spouse/ Partner Memberships will be half the cost of full membership in 2012. Spouse/ Partner Membership at the new reduced rate (£225, or £18.75 per month) can be purchased now, via the website or the Membership Office, in time for Christmas giving.

Memberships will be valid from 1 January 2012.

NEW: LONDON LIBRARY GIFT VOUCHERS Contribute to someone’s London Library membership, or their membership renewal, by giving one of our new London Library gift vouchers. Vouchers are available in denominations of £50 and £100 and are valid for two years from the date of purchase.

LONDON LIBRARY MERCHANDISE from £5 Our striking canvas bags make an excellent stocking filler, or can be used as a stocking with a difference! With gift card packs starting at £5, there are plenty of smaller items in our online Shop, including our new Gift Pack (£35 including postage and handling), which gathers together one canvas bag, one note book, one pack of note cards, one pack of pencils and a copy of Library Book, Tony McIntyre’s fascinating history of the Library and its buildings.

ADOPT A BOOK Ensure that a book or books inscribed with your loved one’s name will be forever on the Library’s shelves by adopting a book on their behalf. An original and lasting gift, as well as a wonderful way to support the Library.

Books can be adopted via the ‘Support Us’ section of the website (click on ‘Adopt Schemes’), or for more information contact Bethany McNaboe in the Development Office (tel. 020 7766 4719, bethany.mcnaboe@londonlibrary.co.uk).

34 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

MEMBERS’ NEWS

CHRISTMAS CARD 2011 Our delightful Christmas card offers an excellent opportunity for members to help make the Library more widely known and to generate much-needed income.

This year’s card is by acclaimed illustrator, author, teacher and Library member John Vernon Lord, whose illustrations have graced texts from Aesop’s Fables to Epics of the Middle Ages. John’s own hit picture book, The Giant Jam Sandwich, has remained in print for more than 30 years.

Cards are printed in full colour on high-quality card at a standard size (184 x 121mm). The cards are available in packs of 8, together with high-quality peel-and-seal envelopes.

The price is £5.00 per pack, including VAT, postage and handling. Cards will also be on sale in the Library at £4.00 per pack including VAT. MESSAGE INSIDE CARD READS: With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year

Please return this form to: The London Library Christmas Card Orders 14 St James’s Square London SW1Y 4LG

ORDER FORM

YOUR NAME (BLOCK CAPITALS PLEASE)

Please send me:

_________________________________________________________

______ pack(s) of Christmas Cards, at £5.00 per pack: £______

ADDRESS ________________________________________________

_________________________________________________________

TOTAL: £______

Please make your cheque payable to ‘The London Library’

_________________________________________________________ ____________________________ POSTCODE ________________

HEYWOOD HILL To mark its 75th year Heywood Hill, the famous Curzon Street bookshop and clubhouse for readers and collectors alike, is offering 10% off all new book purchases before Christmas for card-carrying members of The London Library.

Heywood Hill, 10 Curzon St, W1.

020 7629 0647 heywoodhill.com THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 35

Striking a Blow for Lasting Quality Richard Conyngham on the unlikely story of Slightly Foxed

I

n 2002, when the ownership of the distinguished old publishing house of John Murray changed hands, and the company moved from its Piccadilly home at 50 Albemarle Street to a tower block on the Euston Road, it felt to many of those working there that it was leaving behind not only the high-ceilinged drawing-rooms where Lord Byron’s unpublished memoirs were once infamously burnt, but also some of its soul.

Two Murray editors cast about for a new direction, and so, in the spring of 2004, was born Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, a somewhat unusual book review, dedicated, as they declared in the first issue, to ‘striking a blow for lasting quality, for the small and individual against the corporate and mass produced’ . Its mission was not to review the latest books but to draw attention, by personal recommendations, to the fact that there are many more books worth reading than those featured in the review pages and bestseller lists.

The 96 satisfyingly thick cream pages of the current issue contain an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction, and an eclectic mix of contributors too – some well known in the literary world, others from entirely different walks of life. The scientist Catherine Merrick writes on The Double Helix (1968), James Watson’s account of his decoding, with Francis Crick, of the secrets of DNA, and her experience of meeting Watson. The poet Laurence Scott recalls (humorously) what an inspiration Neil Astley’s Staying Alive – real poems for unreal times (2002) was to his adult

Covers of Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly.

The Slightly Foxed Bookshop in Gloucester Road.

evening class; and a Catholic priest, Alexander Lucie-Smith, describes his friendship with Alice Thomas-Ellis and ponders on the legacy of her novels.

There is, too, an introduction to Ysenda Maxtone-Graham’s Mr Tibbits’s Catholic School (2011), the latest of the Slightly Foxed Editions. This series of handsome little limited-edition hardback reprints of classic memoirs was launched in 2008 with Rosemary Sutcliff’s Blue Remembered Hills (1983). Mr Tibbits, having a living author, is something of a new departure, but has already sold out and has been reissued as a Slightly Foxed Paperback.

In 2009 Slightly Foxed acquired the Gloucester Road Bookshop in South Kensington. Now rechristened ‘Slightly Foxed on Gloucester Road’, it’s a shop that invites serendipity, with its eclectic but carefully chosen range of old and new books. It also (with the help of The London Library’s incomparable shelves) produces a twice-yearly catalogue arranged by subject that, in the style of the quarterly itself, invites subscribers to explore the riches of publishers’ backlists.

So, encouragingly and despite gloomy predictions when Slightly Foxed was first launched, an enterprise that began with just a few hundred subscribers whose issues were dispatched from the kitchen table has since grown steadily into an expanding independent publishing house, a shop and a readership of well over 7,000 book lovers in 60 countries. foxedquarterly.com

SIGN UP TO RECEIVE SPECIAL OFFERS WITH THE LONDON LIBRARY E-NEWSLETTER To receive an exclusive member offer from Slightly Foxed, and special offers from other organisations, be sure to sign up for The London Library’s soon to be launched 36 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

e-newsletter. If you’ve not already subscribed, email news@londonlibrary.co.uk with your name, membership number and ‘SUBSCRIBE – MEMBER’ in the subject line.

SPECIAL OFFERS BOOKROOM ART PRESS Fine Giclée Art Prints Exceptional limitededition prints after works

by Ravilious, Bawden, Ardizzone and Grosvenor School artists Cyril Power’s Tube Station (£148) Cyril Power, Andrews et al. Hand-numbered and embossed, and printed to highest Fine Art Trade Guild standards in low numbers (max. 1/950) on mould-made 100% cotton rag. Prices range from £49 to £325. A 10% reduction to members if ordered via the phone before 24 December 2011. bookroomartpress.co.uk.

01273 682110. shop@bookroomartpress.co.uk.

This is an advertisement feature.To advertise call Janet Durbin on 01625 583180

FLORIS

N. PEAL

Established in 1730 and still run by the original family from 89 Jermyn Street, Floris create exquisite English perfumes to stand the test of time. To celebrate the launch of their redesign Floris are delighted to offer London Library members a 15% discount and a complimentary Rosa Centifolia Hand Treatment Cream worth £10 when they spend £75 or more in the Floris Shop. Offer closes 24 December 2011.

89 Jermyn Street, SW1. 020 7930 2885. florislondon.com

Offering modern fashion, easy elegance and timeless style for men and women, N.Peal is the London destination for stylish cashmere knitwear, all designed and crafted to the highest quality standards for which we are rightly famous. Members of The London Library enjoy a 15% discount on production of their membership card. This offer closes 24 December 2011. 37–40 Burlington Arcade, W1.

020 7499 6485. npeal.com

D.R. HARRIS D.R. Harris, Royal Warrant holder to HRH The Prince of Wales and purveyor of fine soaps, fragrances, shaving creams and other luxury grooming products, are pleased to welcome you into the store, or to visit us online, to enjoy an exclusive 10% discount (quote ‘London Library’ along with your membership number). From soaps to shaving creams, body lotions to skincare, as well as our newly launched Naturals collection, sample something special with D.R. Harris.

29 St James’s Street, SW1. 020 7930 3915. drharris.co.uk

FOSTER & SON Fosters is renowned for its exquisite bespoke and readyto-wear boots, shoes and slippers; traditional English bridle leather luggage, cases and accessories; repair and refurbishment of shoes; and high-quality leather goods. Each item is made in England in the traditional way and can be bought in the shop or commissioned to give a unique, beautifully crafted product custom-made to individual specifications. Fosters is offering a 10% discount to London Library members on proof of membership. 83 Jermyn Street, London SW1. 020 7930 5385. wsfoster.co.uk

the personal paper co.

The Personal Paper Company specialises in personal stationery, where quality and style really matter. Using luxurious papers, with our own custommade envelopes, we can design and print your writing paper, correspondence cards or business cards in a wide range of inks and fonts. If you require your crest added or a motif designed, our artists can create these for you. We are delighted to offer London Library members a 10% discount on any of our products or services, please quote ‘London Library-Win11’ when buying online or ordering by telephone. Offer closes 24 December 2011.

0845 310 5732. thepersonalpaperco.co.uk

emmett shirts

LALIQUE René Lalique is synonymous with creativity, beauty and quality. This year we celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth by reproducing some of his iconic designs. In 2009 the Lalique Company merged with Daum Crystal and the famous porcelain maker Haviland in order to offer a wider range to its clientele. To members of the London Library, Lalique is pleased to offer a 10% discount on its collections on production of their membership card.

47 Conduit Street, W1. 020 7292 0444. cristallalique.fr

WINEARCHIVE After 30 years of collecting prints on wine, Wine-Archive are pleased to offer a wide selection of prints from 1600 –1920, printed on art paper in fadefree inks.

Please visit our website, wine-archive. com. There is a 10% discount for all orders received before 31 January 2012; please quote the reference ‘LLO’ when ordering. wine-archive.com

Emmett Shirts are delighted to offer a 10% discount until 24 December 2011 to London Library members on their first purchase from our range of ready-to-wear shirts. If you appreciate superior quality and are looking for a degree of exclusivity, then visit our shops at Jermyn Street, King’s Road and Eldon Street, where there are over 400 designs each season to choose from.

Please show your London Library membership card to obtain your discount.

112a Jermyn Street, SW1. 020 7925 1299. emmettshirts.com 38 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

EATING OUT

DINING OUT NEAR THE LONDON LIBRARY This is an advertisement feature.

3 1 2 5 9 11

To advertise please call Janet Durbin

4 10

7

6 12 8

on 01625 583180.

1 ALAIN DUCASSE AT THE DORCHESTER Retaining three Michelin stars for the second year running, Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester has quickly become one of London’s most exciting restaurants. It is located in a light and elegant room with a contemporary design by Patrick Jouin, which overlooks Park Lane and Hyde Park.

The restaurant offers a modern but refined French cuisine, as interpreted

by Executive Chef Jocelyn Herland.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

4 DELHI BRASSERIE For over 20 years, the Delhi Brasserie has served outstanding traditional Indian cuisine to the discerning diner. Situated in the heart of Soho on Frith Street and next to Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club, we provide a welcoming and vibrant atmosphere. Pre- and post-theatre menus are available. 15% discount for students with ID. We are open 365 days a year including Christmas Day and Boxing Day. 44 Frith Street, W1, 020 7437 8261. delhibrasserie.com

7 GETTI A modern Italian restaurant at the fast-paced heart of London’s West End, Getti Jermyn Street is an authentic Italian dining venue in London’s historic tailoring district, dedicated to offering a traditional and memorable Italian dining experience.

A splendid destination for London locals and tourists alike, Getti Jermyn Street focuses on serving simple, regional dishes from mainland Italy.

Private dining available.

16/17 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7734 7334. getti.com

10 HIX AT THE ALBEMARLE This fashionable restaurant offers an outstanding menu of classic British dishes, using local seasonal ingredients. Mark Hix and Marcus Verberne offer a full à-la-carte menu alongside a special set-lunch, pre-theatre and dinner menu of £27.50 for 2 courses and £32.50 for 3 courses. Brown’s is also home to the award-winning English Tea Room and the chic Donovan Bar. Brown’s Hotel, Albemarle St, W1, 020 7518 4004. thealbemarlerestaurant.com

2 THE BAR AT THE DORCHESTER The delights of the cocktail hour have returned to London at the Bar at the Dorchester, which is renowned for its rich, opulent interior and its menu of new and classic cocktails. The Bar boasts a fine selection of spirits, champagnes and wines, with a menu of elegant tartines, indulgent caviars and a chic afternoon tea.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

5 THE FOX CLUB Situated a stone’s throw from Green Park and the famous Hyde Park.

Our Dining Room is one of London’s best-kept secrets and, for those in the know, a lunch-time essential. The modern European menu changes on a weekly basis, offering refined excellence without being pretentious.

The effect is a change from the jaded palate of life. The Fox Club now offers a delightful afternoon tea from 3– 5pm.

To avoid disappointment make a reservation. 46 Clarges St, W1, 020 7495 3656. foxclublondon.com

8 GREEN’S This is a truly British institution that serves world-class food; simple, well-presented dishes, including fresh fish, meat and seasonal game, that everyone likes and that allow you to have meaningful conversation. For an important business meeting or a relaxing meal with family or friends, we offer the perfect venue.

36 Duke Street, St James’s, SW1, 020 7930 4566. greens.org.uk

11 THE PROMENADE AT THE DORCHESTER Very much the heart of the hotel, the Promenade is open all day for informal dining, serving breakfast, morning coffee, lunch, afternoon tea and a light supper menu. A perfect place to watch the world go by and enjoy the Dorchester’s world-famous traditional afternoon tea.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

3 BELLAMY’S RESTAURANT Located in central Mayfair (near New Bond Street), Bellamy’s offers a classic French brasserie menu with an affordable famous-name wine list. The Oyster Bar, among other dishes, serves Bellamy’s famous ‘open’ sandwiches. Le patron mange ici. Open for lunch Mon–Fri; dinner Mon–Sat. 18–18a Bruton Place, W1, 020 7491 2727. bellamysrestaurant.co.uk

6 FRANCO’S Franco’s has been serving the community of St James’s for over 60 years. Open all day, the personality of the restaurant evolves from a quietly and gently efficient breakfast venue to a sharp and charged lunch atmosphere, to elegance and romance in the evening. The lunch and dinner menus highlight carefully prepared traditional and more modern Italian dishes. Our service is always relaxed, friendly and personal. 61 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7499 2211. francoslondon.com

9 THE GRILL AT THE DORCHESTER Brian Hughson, Head Chef at the Grill, is passionate about using quality produce sourced from the British Isles. In addition to the British and classic grill dishes offered at the Grill, Brian has reinstated classics from the original Grill menu such as ‘Dish of the Day’, and the traditional roast-beef carving trolley introduced at the Grill when it first opened in 1931.

The Dorchester, Park Lane, W1, 020 7629 8888. thedorchester.com

12 WILTONS Established in 1742, Wiltons enjoys a reputation as the epitome of fine English dining in London. The atmosphere is perfectly matched with immaculately prepared fish, shellfish, game and meat. Choose from an exclusive wine list. Open for lunch and dinner, Mon–Fri. To make a reservation, please quote the London Library Magazine.

55 Jermyn Street, SW1, 020 7629 9955. wiltons.co.uk

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 39