BEHIND THE BOOK

Adrian Leak reveals some of the Library titles that aided his research for his latest collection of essays, which were inspired by his wide and colourful experience of life as a country parson

Adrian Leak’s Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (Book Guild Ltd, 2018).

‘My recent book, Archbishop Benson’s Humming Top and Other Reflections (2018), includes among other ’ u Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age by C.E. Stevens (Oxford 1933). This book describes Sidonius Apollinaris, classics, she admitted an occasional preference for the polished elegance of Terence to the rugged Latin of the Vulgate. pieces 15 thumbnail portraits of churchmen and women over the centuries. For these I made extensive use of the Library’s collections. fascinating account of this ‘squarson’, who had little time for bishops and once described William Thomson, the officious a fifth-century country gentleman born u Memoir of Richard Busby, D.D. Archbishop of York, as possessing ‘an into the Romano-Gallic aristocracy. He (1606–1695): With Some Account of autocratic temper such as was naturally held public office under his father-in- Westminster School in the Seventeenth bred in a man rapidly advanced from law, the Emperor Avitus, and later under Century by G.F. Russell Barker (London a breeches-maker’s shop in a small the Visigothic king, Theodoric II, before 1895). provincial town’. becoming Bishop of Clermont. He had In this slim volume the author gives u Things Past by Michael Sadleir a large library of classical authors and an account of Richard Busby, the (London 1944). enjoyed a good read with his meal. schoolmaster who taught Christopher This most readable collection of essays u Bede’s Lives of the Abbots of Wren, John Locke and John Dryden. For by the publisher, art collector and author Wearmouth and Jarrow, ed. Christopher much of the seventeenth century Busby Michael Sadleir contains a piece about the Grocock and I.N. Wood (Oxford 2013). was Headmaster of Westminster School. bibliophile and country parson Francis This edition of the Venerable Bede’s Asked how he and the school survived Wrangham (1769–1842), whose library account of the foundation by Benedict the turbulence of the Commonwealth, he contained over 15,000 volumes. Biscop of the twin monasteries at said, indicating Parliament next door: ‘The u Christina Rossetti: A Divided Life by Wearmouth and Jarrow, in 674 and fathers rule the country, the mothers rule Georgina Battiscombe (London 1981). 682 respectively, has a translation the fathers, the boys rule the mothers and In Max Beerbohm’s caricature an and introduction setting the historical I rule the boys.’ After the Restoration the exasperated Dante Gabriel Rossetti asks context. Biscop’s abbey at Wearmouth school’s link with the Church was restored his sister: ‘What is the use, Christina, of (Sunderland) possessed one of the best- and remained as strong as ever; Busby having a heart like a singing bird and stocked libraries north of the Alps; it was claimed to have birched 16 future bishops. a water shoot and all the rest of it, if destroyed by Vikings. u Onward Christian Soldier: A Life of you insist on getting yourself up like a u Hroswitha of Gandersheim: Her Life, Sabine Baring-Gould, Parson, Squire, pew-opener?’ Christina Rossetti, now Times, and Works, ed. Anne Lyon Haight Novelist, Antiquary, 1834–1924 by best known for her poem In the Bleak (New York 1965). William Purcell, with an introduction by Midwinter, was afflicted throughout her Commissioned by the Hroswitha Club John Betjeman (London 1957). life by self-doubt, which would probably of New York, this title includes an A dedicated country parson, folklorist, be recognised now as clinical depression. informative account of Hroswitha, the historian and all-round polymath, Georgina Battiscombe’s sensitive tenth-century playwright, poet and Sabine Baring-Gould had a huge literary biography shines a light on the life and nun of Gandersheim in Lower Saxony. output, much of which is in the Library. work of this troubled poet and – obliquely Influenced by the humanism of the William Purcell’s biography provides a – on the world of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Photograph: Alun Callender

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