The London Library Magazine- Spring 2024

RICHARD AYOADE

April 2024 Nº 57

Halik Kochanski Andrew Lycett

GRADUATE PROGRAMMES IN LONDON

Postgraduate Humanities

Open Day

Saturday 25 May 10am to 3pm

Join us in the heart of Bloomsbury to discover our range of fascinating postgraduate humanities courses, available for part-time or full-time study, including:

MA Biography by Reseach

MA Dickens Studies by Research (in association with the Charles Dickens Museum)

MA Decorative Arts and Historic Interiors (in association with the Wallace Collection)

MA Art Market, Provenance and the History of Collecting

MA Migration History: People, Objects, Cultures

FURTHER INFORMATION

Visit the course pages and apply, or email humanitiespg_admissions@buckingham.ac.uk

FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY

Josephine Noti

Head of Marketing and Communications

Elaine Stabler

Marketing Executive, Media and Communications

Felicity Nelson

Membership Director

The London Library 14 St James’s Square

London SW1Y 4LG (020) 7766 4700

magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk

EDITORIAL: CULTURESHOCK

Editor Alex McFadyen

Contributors

Elaine Stabler, Deniz

Nazim-Englund, Elizabeth Owen

Photography

Sarah Weal (cover), Andrew Kimber

Head of Creative

Tess Savina

Art Editor

Gabriela Matuszyk

Designer

Ieva Misiukonytė

Production Editor Claire Sibbick

Subeditor

Helene Chartouni

Publisher Phil Allison

Production Manager Nicola Vanstone

Advertising Sales Cultureshock (020) 7735 9263

The London Library Magazine is published by Cultureshock on behalf of The London Library © 2024. All rights reserved.

Charity No. 312175. Cultureshock

27b Tradescant Road London SW8 1XD (020) 7735 9263

cultureshock.com / @cultureshockit

The views expressed in the pages of The London Library Magazine are not necessarily those of The London Library. The magazine does not accept responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or photographs. While every effort has been made to identify copyright holders, some omissions may occur.

ISSN 2398-4201

WELCOME

Friends old and new

The London Library has always been a vital resource for writers and researchers of all kinds. For our first issue of 2024, we are delighted to feature interviews with three longstanding Library members who have each, in their own way, used the Library and our collections to write and research their books.

For our cover feature, writer, comedian and actor Richard Ayoade speaks about his children’s novel, The Book That Nobody Wanted to Read , inspired in part by the Library’s Science & Miscellaneous collection; his experience of reading Roald Dahl as a child; and his biography of obscure writer Harold Hughes. Recent winner of the Wolfson History Prize Halik Kochanski discusses her masterful survey of the Second World War in her book Resistance, and Andrew Lycett shares the ways the Library helped him to write biographies of a polyamorous Victorian novelist and Ian Fleming the spy.

Elsewhere in this issue, we unveil the most borrowed ebooks of 2023, celebrate new writing with a special extract from former Emerging Writer Miriam Gold and revisit the work of past Library member Stella Gibbons. Finally, I would like to thank everyone who has supported our Library Fund appeal to refresh and restore the collection. Thanks to your generous donations, we have raised more than £100,000. We look forward to acquiring lots of wonderful new books and returning some of our most enthusiastically read items to their former glory. •

Philip Marshall, Director

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?

The labyrinth of book stacks and atmospheric rooms at 14 St James’s Square have been on screen many times over the years (see Screen time, issue 55), from news broadcasts to television programmes such as Top Boy, and even music videos.

Being used as a backdrop for a feature film is a much rarer occurrence. The most famous is the 2002 Hollywood adaptation of AS Byatt’s Possession, but the Library is in cinemas once more, as a location for Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, which came out in March. The film follows the veteran ghost-hunting crew as they join forces with a new generation of recruits to battle a supernatural force.

Members will spot various spaces, including the stacks and reading rooms, being used as a stand-in for the New York Public Library. A crew of almost 150 (excluding the Library’s own staff) worked on-site across three days of set-up, filming and “tear-down” time to create the scenes. While the Library’s main purpose has been as a working lending library for nearly 200 years, filming and venue hire provides essential revenue-generating opportunities to support the Library’s charitable activities. •

→ Members qualify for 10% off all venue hire. Find out more at londonlibrary.co.uk/venuehire

Ghosts roam the Back Stacks in the latest Ghostbusters film.

Photo: Landmark Media/Alamy Stock Photo

THE MOST BORROWED

EBOOKS OF 20 23

The one million physical books in the collection make the Library a proud bastion of the printed word, but a diverse, ever-expanding selection of more than 1,500 ebooks is also available. In 2023, these were the most borrowed titles:

1. Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang (borrowed 30 times)

2. The Library: a fragile history by Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen (26 times)

3. The Story of Russia by Orlando Figes (25 times)

4. What Writers Read: 35 writers on their favourite book edited by Pandora Sykes (23 times)

5. Really Good, Actually by Monica Heisey and A Spell of Good Things by Ayobami Adebayo (19 times each) •

→ Members can access the ebook collection through OverDrive or the Libby app. To find out more, visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ebooks, or browse the collection at londonlibrary.overdrive.com

REFRESH AND RESTORE

More than £100,000 was raised this financial year for the Library Fund appeal, the stated goal of which was to “refresh and restore” the collection.

Thanks to the support of donors, the Library will develop new areas of the collection, including extending the global representation of works on our shelves, and carry out repair work on damaged and special collection items. The first piece of work has already begun – specialist conservation of one of the Library’s most rare volumes, Defence of the Seven Sacraments, written by King Henry VIII in 1521.

Spending will be phased over three years, testing and evaluating different approaches to developing new subject areas and working through priority conservation work.

Thank you to everyone who donated. Members will be updated on the allocation of the funds and the progress made toward the “refresh and restore” goal over the coming months. •

→ Read more about how the Library Fund is being used on page 10, or visit londonlibrary.co.uk/library-fund

Above: Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang was 2023’s most borrowed ebook. Top right: More than £100,000 has been raised for collection repairs and acquisitions. Photo: Simon Brown

COULD YOU BE A LIBRARY TRUSTEE?

TRUSTEE PLACEMENTS FOR MEMBERS AGED 18–30

We are seeking up to three enthusiastic and committed people to join The London Library Board as trustees. Trusteeship involves helping with the Library’s overall governance, monitoring our strategic goals and supporting the Executive team. Our trustees are volunteers but the role can be highly rewarding in terms of personal development and the enjoyment that comes with working collectively in the best interests of the Library.

The Board meets five times a year and trustees will usually also sit on two committees, covering areas such as buildings, collections, fundraising, finance, membership and marketing.

This year, we are particularly interested in hearing from candidates who have experience of fundraising (especially in connection with major building projects) or finance. However, we also look forward to hearing how members might feel they could use their own particular skills and experiences to benefit the Library and its governance in other ways.

We are keen to ensure a diverse and inclusive Board and encourage applications from all backgrounds. However, trustees must also be members of the Library throughout their term in post. •

We are also seeking two young members to become trustee placements on the Board. This is a two-year role, which is open to members aged between 18 and 30 and designed to encourage participation by younger members at Board level. We value the insights and contributions of younger members very highly and we aim to ensure that our trustee placements receive a positive experience of charity governance.

The closing date for applications for trustees and trustee placements is Monday 6 May by midnight. •

→ Find out more about these roles and how to apply at londonlibrary.co.uk/trustee-recruitment

Current trustees of The London Library. From left: Simon Godwin, Stephanie Hall, Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Patrick Fleming and Rosalynn Try-Hane

BECOME A FOUNDERS’ CIRCLE PATRON

The Founders’ Circle Patrons’ Programme brings together a group of supporters who regularly give to The London Library and – through access to Library experts, behind the scenes updates and events – gain a deeper involvement with our work.

In thanks for their support, Patrons enjoy bespoke events inside The London Library and gain private access to collections and exhibitions. Patron supporters are also first on the guest list to our President’s summer party, hosted by Library President Helena Bonham Carter.

Patrons play a vital role in sustaining the Library as a home for literary inspiration for years to come. Below are some of our upcoming events, open to Patrons of all levels. •

16 May A HISTORY OF CHAMPAGNE IN SEVEN BOTTLES

Enjoy a guided tasting of seven champagnes, from Pommery to Pérignon, with Graham Harding, wine historian and former President of the Oxford Wine Club.

6.30pm – 8pm, in person, ticketed event

30 May WADDESDON MANOR: A LONDON LIBRARY DAY TRIP

Patrons will enjoy a private tour of the manor, including special access to Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild’s collection of rare 18th-century French books, followed by lunch and an exploration of its 19th-century gardens in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire.

6

June DIRECTOR’S

DRINKS

Hear from the Library’s Director, Philip Marshall, about the Library’s plans, priorities and vision for the future over a relaxed glass or two.

6.30pm – 8pm, in person

26 June HIGH TIMES WITH HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

Author and Library supporter Hannah Rothschild joins us to discuss her enduring love affair with writing and her comic novel, High Time, set in the world of high art and high finance.

6.30pm – 8pm, in person, The Reading Room

→ Browse our upcoming events, exclusive to Founders’ Circle members, or learn more at londonlibrary.co.uk/patrons

Above: Waddesdon Manor near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, which members of the Founders’ Circle will visit in May. Photo: Susie Kearley/Alamy Stock Photo

COLLECTION STORY

Physical marks reveal famous authors’ research and tumultuous moments in the Library’s history

In 1841, when the Library first opened its doors, the collection consisted of just 3,000 books. Today it stands close to one million, developed over 180 years by generations of librarians.

The collection bears the scars of this longevity. Bram Stoker famously defaced around 25 books with his notes and underlines while researching Dracula. Other books have been marred with drawings and doodles.

Some books even contain shrapnel from the Second World War, such as Isagoge Historico-Theolologica ad

Theologiam Universam, a worn and warped 18th-century theological volume by Francisco Buddei, which was discovered during a 2023 audit of the collection completed for the Library’s digital tagging project. It was damaged by rubble when the building suffered a devastating bombing during an air raid in 1944.

Its repair was enabled by the most recent Library Fund campaign, which raised more than £100,000 to refresh and restore the collection. As well as the embedded shrapnel, it was suffering from dysfunctional

binding. The text block was no longer supported or protected, and the condition of the original leather and sewing was extremely poor.

The book was sent off-site to be cleaned, rebound and repaired. A papier-mache spine was used to recreate the original and its rare decorative end bands were restored. The rubble found inside the text block was preserved in the archives as an artefact from the Library’s history.

While the collection contains many old and valuable books, it is also constantly evolving. Approximately 6,000 titles are added to the collection every year (25% of which come from member suggestions). As well as repairs, the Library Fund is supporting a project to broaden the collection’s cultural representation in art, history and literature and increase the number of contemporary and diverse voices in fiction, drama and poetry. •

→ To find out more about the Library Fund, visit londonlibrary.co.uk/library-fund

Before (far left) and after (left): The spine of an 18th-century book, damaged in the Second World War, was recreated using papier-mache. Top: Annotations in books borrowed by Bram Stoker while writing Dracula. Above: The Art Room was heavily damaged in the bombing.

Photos: Andrew Kimber; The London Library

thamesandhudson.com The

‘Wonderfully rich’ Alexandra Harris

‘A powerful and important corrective to historical accounts’ Times Literary Supplement

DISCOVER thE phOtO gRaphER whOSE ImagES DEfInED an ERa a bEautIful phOtO gRaphIC ODySSEy Spann Ing faShIOn, hOllywOOD anD tRaVEl, thIS IS thE fIRSt publICatIOn In almOSt 40 yEaRS On thE wORk Of gEORgE hOyn IngEn-hu EnE

FROM THE ARCHIVE

The success of Cold Comfort Farm defined Stella Gibbons’ career – and caused jealousy among some prominent Library members

Stella Gibbons (1902–89) was a prolific writer. As a novelist, journalist and poet, she authored three volumes of short stories, four volumes of poetry and 25 novels –15 of which were written during her time as a member of The London Library. But it was her first novel, 1932’s Cold Comfort Farm, that was her greatest literary success.

Gibbons began writing Cold Comfort Farm while working as a journalist at The Lady, scribbling down a few pages at a time in a small side room of the magazine’s Covent Garden offices. The novel parodies the rural melodrama of Thomas Hardy or Wuthering Heights : its heroine, Flora Poste – an urbane but destitute 20-yearold orphan – throws herself upon her provincial relatives, the Starkadders, and hilarity ensues. It was an immediate

success. Readers and critics adored it. One reviewer was even convinced that Gibbons was a pseudonym for Evelyn Waugh. It won the prix étranger (foreign prize) in the prestigious Prix Femina literary awards run by the French magazine La Vie heureuse the following year – a rare feat for a comic novel.

The win infuriated Library member Virginia Woolf. In a 1933 letter to Elizabeth Bowen (a fellow member), Woolf wrote: “I was enraged to see they gave the £40 to Gibbons […] Still, now you and Rosamond [Lehmann] can join in blaming her. Who is she? What is this book?” Perhaps luckily for Gibbons, she did not join the Library herself until 1942, 10 years after the novel was published.

editions of many of Stella Gibbons’ books. Photo: Andrew Kimber

“This book” was hailed by The Sunday Times as “very probably the funniest book ever written”. But Gibbons came to resent its enduring success, which overshadowed her later works. She referred to her debut as “some unignorable old uncle, to whom you have to be grateful because he makes you a handsome allowance, but is often an embarrassment and a bore”.

By the time of her death, most of Gibbons’ other novels were out of print. It took around 20 years for Vintage Classics to reprint 14 of her works, including Westwood and Nightingale Wood, in 2012. Gibbons’ reputation has enjoyed a resurgence as a result.

The collection includes early editions of titles such as the semi-autobiographical Enbury Heath (1935), White Sand and Grey Sand (1958) and Starlight (1967), as well as anthologies of short stories and poems.

The Library also owns an early edition of Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, a 1940 sequel that revisits the world of Flora and her riotous family. It is held in the safes, inside a bespoke box, handmade from acid-free archival card (these boxes are created for all rare and delicate objects in the collection).

In the introduction to a reprint of Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm, Alexander McCall Smith describes Gibbons as “one of those writers who had the misfortune to write one wonderful book”. Perhaps that is true in the world of publishing, but the Library’s collection has always been geared towards discovery. Over the years, members who have gone looking for Cold Comfort Farm will surely have found not just one wonderful book, but a shelfful. •

Elaine Stabler is a contributing editor of this magazine

“Gibbons referred to her debut as ‘some unignorable old uncle who is often an embarrassment and a bore’”

Above: Gibbons photographed in 1932, the year that Cold Comfort Farm was published.

Left: Gibbons’ joining form, using her married name, Stella Webb.

Photos: Andrew Kimber; Chronicle/Alamy Stock Photo

Keep the story going…

…with a gift in your Will

Remembering The London Library in your Will can help build a significant and lasting legacy for the writers, readers and thinkers of the future.

The London Library is an independently funded charity and relies on your support. Free of inheritance tax, a gift in your Will is an efficient and effective way of donating to The London Library that costs nothing in your lifetime and leaves a lasting impact. Ask your solicitor about how charitable gifts in Wills above 10% of the value of your estate can reduce inheritance tax to 36%.

“The London Library collects the books of each generation and hands them down as an heirloom to the next. What could be a more fitting purpose for a legacy?” David Lough, member

If you would like to find out more about how a gift in your Will can help the Library, or if you would be interested in attending one of our events, please contact us at legacy@londonlibrary.co.uk or 020 7766 4731.

CORNER OF THE LIBRARY

The toilets have a story to tell

Ask any staff member at The London Library, “what does the name Martin Creed mean to you?” and you might be surprised when they send you to the TS Eliot House loos.

British artist Martin Creed was born in 1968 and raised in Glasgow. He studied at London’s Slade School of Fine Art from 1986 to 1990, and is known for poetic, sometimes absurd and often beautiful conceptual interventions in a range of media. They include a giant rotating neon sign reading “MOTHERS”, a balled-up piece of A4 paper, and the installation that made his name, Work No. 227, The lights going on and off, 2000, for which he won the 2001 Turner Prize – controversy stirred up by the tabloid press culminated in another artist egging the work, but the jury praised its “audacity”.

In the mid 2000s, he became the artist behind The London Library’s toilet floors.

With the purchase of Duchess House in 2004 (now named TS Eliot House at the request of a donor), the Library embarked on a redevelopment project to expand the capacity of the building by 30%.

Architects Haworth Tompkins collaborated with Creed for a site-specific commission for the facilities in TS Eliot House. The concept was for every fixture, fitting and floor tile to be different, rather than any uniformity. Each 10cm by 10cm tile, sourced from around the world in a range of materials and finishes, has a different design. Speaking at the time, Creed said he was “delighted to share the spirit of such a deliciously eccentric building. I’m incredibly aware of the Library’s main function and didn’t want to self-consciously draw attention to one particular object.”

His floors reflect ideas of indecision that are a staple of his work. Discussing the project with designer Sam Hecht in 2009, Creed said : “People like to think that there can be one solution to put their minds at rest. And I don’t think there is.” •

Artist Martin Creed’s floor design for the Library’s TS Eliot House bathrooms. Photo: Andrew Kimber

A MORTAL WITH POTENTIAL

An extract from Emerging Writer Miriam Gold’s illustrated memoir Water Music: A Swimming Playlist

My father’s finger wags in my face. To my nine-year-old self his hand is enormous, as if pointing down from the heavens. This is NOT HOW THINGS WORK; he is shouting, you CANNOT vandalise things and EXPECT THEM TO BE YOURS. You will CLEAN IT OFF. You HAVE a room already which is MORE than can be said for MILLIONS OF CHILDREN AROUND THE WORLD.

But I think this is exactly HOW THINGS WORK. Like a tiny colonial settler, I hoped my land grab would get me a bigger bedroom. Dad picks up the offending weapon – a permanent marker – in disgust. He shakes his head wearily. It will need sandpapering or something, he sighs, not being much of a DIY sort of dad. We look again at the scene of the crime from several angles, like a father and daughter team of carpenters pricing up the job.

I have written – and I honestly can’t feel too much remorse as it turned out so well – Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars all over a chest of drawers in the room in our flat I want for my own. I do not like the narrow slice of bedroom I currently have, carved out from my brother’s (bigger, nicer) bedroom. But surprisingly, my campaign has run into early difficulties with the locals. What Dad does not understand is that I do not want this space out of greed, I need it. Poised elegantly at the front of our flat, flooded with natural light, it has aspect. I need it for the friends I intend to make and invite round. Some cushions here and there, bowls of Hula Hoops, some top of the range speakers, maybe some incense.

In this room, my cool new friends will watch Top of the Pops and listen to David Bowie records with me. Maybe even David himself will come over wearing his amazing yellow suit with his beautiful, mismatched eyes and his high cheekbones. Through the haze of the incense and flickering candlelight, our eyes will meet. He will fall in love with me and wait seven years until I am 16 and allowed to marry. No time at all when you find a love

as pure and true as ours. I know deep down it is a bit weird considering he is about the same age as my parents, but the heart wants what it wants.

A few months later I get the Serious Moonlight Tour book for my birthday. It is full of sumptuous photographs of David performing on this global tour. In the pictures, he is holding up skulls and wearing dramatic capes. What is he doing? I do not really know, but it looks incredible. The massive crowds in the Milton Keynes Bowl stretching out as far as the eye can see, like hundreds and thousands. There are double spreads of him floating dreamily in pointy wooden boats in Java (I look up Java in the atlas). He is being chased by fans and falling out of taxis in a lovely camel-coloured trench mac in Tokyo. Oh, to be in Japan with David. Perhaps we would visit a temple. I am sure he speaks fluent Japanese.

But it is the last page in the book I keep returning to. A photograph of a handwritten fan letter captioned “Love Letter from A 13 year Old Fan”. It is signed by a girl called Sabrina. In the letter, this Sabrina – I hate her so much – declares her love for David and asks him for a signed picture. WHO EVEN IS SHE? She doesn’t use nice writing paper, just a torn-out page from a spiral notepad. How did my own, better love note. I would never do anything as tacky as asking for a signed picture. Oh David. Will you ever come to my shrine room? Will I ever be allowed that shrine room?

up the rock, past all the tourist shops, I spot a box of 7in singles. On the cover of one a man is dressed like a Pierrot clown. Around the border are what look like postage stamps. Scrawled in black felt tip are the words: Bowie – Ashes to Ashes not looking like this. The cool older kids at my brother’s school wear his T-shirts. I am sure there’s been an article about him in my it on my dad’s turntable back at home, and it blows my little mind. What is HAPPENING? Who are these creatures of the night with a message for the action man? I think I know what a junkie is, but why is Major Tom one? I have many questions but no answers, all I know is that I love this dry funk from outer space, and I intend to get me some more.

out my dad has one Bowie single in amongst his Beatles and Stones records. I play it over and over. Five Years and again the effect on my world is powerful. By the end of the two minutes and 58 seconds of side B I have complete clarity that everything I know is wrong. If time can take a

cigarette, then absolutely anything could happen, and I very much want it to. Give me your hands/Wonderful David sings. I gladly give him my hands, my heart, and my pocket money. I go to Our Price on Kilburn High Road and buy all his back catalogue I can afford.

My education begins. I read books on David Bowie and learn about his unhappy childhood, his school days with his mate George Underwood and how his eye changed colour after their playground scrap. I learn about how only Mr Frampton, his art teacher, truly accepted and encouraged him. Imagine being in David Bowie’s art class. Perhaps he would let me borrow his pencil sharpener. He would always be in trouble for his long hair. I read about places called Beckenham and Bromley. I think Bromley must be very exotic and look up which buses would take me there.

Let’s Dance is in the charts. It gets heavy airtime in my tiny room (the invasion was quickly crushed but, on the upside, I got a record player for my birthday). The video has David in some kind of Australian outback bar. He is in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his trousers are held up with dapper braces. Wearing a hat and leaning against a wall, he looks hot, tired, and bruised. There is a crack in his voice as he throws back his beautiful head, looks straight into the camera and sings. No longer an intergalactic here is a man who looks like he just so many feelings I don’t understand, but I know I love him so much.

I watch this video many times. I imagine I am the Indigenous girl wearing the magic red shoes, holding hands with David, and we are running through the dusty land. Past Sydney Harbour, past the mushroom cloud, past the redneck bar and far, far away, out of the one-horse town that cannot hold our love, and off, far away into the vivid orange sunset. Together forever. •

This extract first appeared in New Voices Rise Vol IV, an anthology of work by the 2022–23 Emerging Writers. Miriam Gold’s debut graphic novel Elena: A Hand Made Life is out in August. You can find her on Instagram @miriamgold

The London Library Emerging Writers Programme is open to unpublished or unproduced writers over the age of 16, working in any genre or form. It is designed to support them at the outset of their careers: they receive one year’s free membership of the Library, alongside writing development masterclasses, networking opportunities and peer support. Applicants from any background are encouraged to apply, and participation in the programme is funded by philanthropic donations.

Learn more at londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us/ll-emerging-writers

Richard Ayoade sits at a desk on the top floor of Science & Miscellaneous

MISTER MISCELLANEOUS

Ahead of the publication of his second children’s book, Richard Ayoade talks to Alex O’Connell about Roald Dahl on screen, his filmmaking heroes and working with George Saunders

Photography by Sarah Weal

Have you played the parlour game

“Which building are you?” Perhaps a tall friend with a passion for art deco is the Empire State, a spartan uncle a Brutalist block, your beloved teacher a rose-covered cottage. Well, Richard Ayoade, the comedian, actor, director and writer – clever, funny, with a love of the obscure – is almost certainly a library, probably the “miscellany” section of The London Library.

Ayoade, 46, has been a member for more than 10 years with his wife Lydia Fox, 44, a writer and actor. He rose to fame playing socially awkward technician Maurice Moss in the TV series The IT Crowd , and has adapted and directed the feature films Submarine and The Double. Most recently, he played the Great Yogi in the Oscar-winning The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar and The Editor in The Rat Catcher, Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptations for Netflix.

He has just biked into St James’s Square in Westminster from his home in southeast London, a trip that he tends to do early, allowing him to leave the Library by 3pm to do the school run. As we settle into one of the private rooms in the building’s nether regions, he is polite, softly spoken, at home – far from the sometimes arch persona capable of brilliantly liquidising interviewers such as Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy (look on YouTube; cringe), or the barbed Bafta host. Who got him hooked on this home from home? “The novelist Joe Dunthorne, who wrote Submarine [the source novel for the film] recommended it,” Ayoade says, smoothing down his stripy shirt. “It is such a great place to work and I feel very fortunate.”

It is here that Ayoade writes and blows the dust off tracts by auteurs. As well as a trio of satirical non-fiction

“Ayoade has developed a reputation as a person of precision”

Ayoade in Wes Anderson’s 2023 adaptation of The Rat Catcher by Roald Dahl.

Above left: Ayoade as “The Great Yogi” in Anderson’s 2023 adaptation of The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar Photos: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy Stock Photo; Collection Christophel/Alamy Stock Photo

books – Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey, The Grip of Film and Ayoade on Top – it was at 14 St James’s Square that he wrote his terrific children’s story The Book That No One Wanted to Read , told from the perspective of an unloved book. It’s the first in a trilogy. He has already written the second, The Fairy Tale Fan Club: Legendary Letters collected by C.C. Cecily, to be published in September. A third, set around Christmas, will take the form of a letter about the carol The Twelve Days of Christmas, out in 2025.

From his days in the TV horror satire Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, to his time fronting Channel 4’s Gadget Man, Ayoade has developed a reputation as a person of precision, who might like to know where he’s sitting from one day to the next. I presume he has a regular desk, but he says such thinking can only end badly. “You can come in and your seat isn’t there and you have to have a major internal recalibration,” he says, deadpan. As for a favourite spot? “It would seem tempting fate to reveal it. Not because there would be a stampede, but you feel that you jinx it.”

The first project for which he used the Library was the writing of the screenplay of Submarine, adapted from Dunthorne’s Adrian Mole-ish story. “There was the internet then [2009] but it didn’t seem as resourced as it is now. There were certain writers or directors who it still felt quite hard to get information on.” It was Ayoade’s feature debut as a director, so he was hungry for insights from his heroes. As a huge admirer of the film director Mike Nichols, who made 1968’s The Graduate – like Submarine, an adaptation of a novel about a young man’s sexual coming of age –he was delighted to find Charles Webb’s source novel. He also devoured A ‘Catch-22’ Casebook, edited by Frederick Kiley and Walter McDonald, a rather ancient collection of articles offering nerdish insights into Nichols’ 1970 adaptation of Joseph Heller’s satirical war story, including an interview with the director about the production process.

Now Ayoade has a new project on the go, a film of George Saunders’ alarming, futuristic short story The Semplica-Girl Diaries. Saunders wrote the screenplay during lockdown; Ayoade will direct and has hopes that he and

Fox will play the on-screen husband and wife. Ben Stiller is also up for a part. But progress is typically slow. There is a producer on board, but Ayoade considers it hubristic to talk about a thing that doesn’t yet exist. It sounds as though the lockdown collaboration – with Saunders in Syracuse and California, and Ayoade in London – was almost enough. “We had lots of phone conversations. He is such a great teacher of writing, very generous, kind and rigorous,” Ayoade says of the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo. “He is a very lean writer.”

Ayoade has also spent the past year in the Library working on a book for adults about the little-known writer Harold Hughes. (No, me neither, and Google is little help; of course, this being Ayoade, that’s rather the point.) How did he discover Hughes? “That’s a good question. Just an interest in obscurantism,” he says, cryptically. He writes in the Library more than he borrows from it. “I just don’t trust myself not to lose books. Also, I have taken, of late, to marking my own books.” Really?

In The Book That No One Wanted to Read , the titular book objects to being scribbled on. “It has taken me a long time to get over the personal statement of underlining,” Ayoade explains. “Part of getting over it is Clive James and [his 2007 book of essays] Cultural Amnesia. If he says it’s OK, it’s OK.” He assures me he only uses a pencil.

The Library itself has been an inspiration in his work, as it was to Charles Dickens, Kazuo Ishiguro and AS Byatt. In The Book That No One Wanted to Read , there is a beautiful library map, illustrated by Tor Freeman, which resembles the building we are in. Ayoade says the illustrations were all Freeman’s, and he can’t speak for her, but the descriptions of the Library in the book are “probably The London Library. It was in my mind. And certainly writing this, a lot of it was in the children’s section.” He borrowed Michael Rosen’s Alphabetical and Edward Ardizzone’s Simon and Sarah and No Red Paint

Those classics were not old favourites, however. Ayoade grew up in a village outside Ipswich, with a Norwegian mother and a Nigerian father, and didn’t read

“In The Book That No One Wanted to Read, there is a beautiful library map, illustrated by Tor Freeman, which resembles the building we are in”

A map of the fictional library where Ayoade’s first children’s book is set.

Photo: The Book That No One Wanted to Read © 2022 Tor Freeman

“Writing is a bit like being underwater and in a trance. There are moments of relief where you think, ‘Oh, OK!’ – but it feels more tense than enjoyable”

many of the usual books as a child. “The books of my childhood weren’t really English. They wouldn’t have read me Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – or anything like that,” Ayoade says. Did he consume Scandi novels? He laughs.

“No, I didn’t read Heidi! I read Oscar Wilde, Hans Christian Andersen – but not Enid Blyton. The main thing was Roald Dahl. And because he was Norwegian, that was exciting.”

There was no local library, but his parents bought a big set of encyclopedias and the Ayoades would find other books in charity shops, especially those in Woodbridge in Suffolk where his mother – very Dahl – had a chocolate shop.

Nowadays he is a voracious and eclectic reader, but when Ayoade went on from his college in Ipswich to read law at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge, he rarely used that city’s libraries and had little time for fiction. “There was always such a huge bunch of cases to read. Clive James, who is a very consoling writer, said that he only started reading when he stopped his degree.”

He is relieved that his wife Lydia is now the chief curator of their children’s reading and insists that he didn’t set out to follow comedians David Walliams, Ben Miller and Adam Hills and bash out bestselling (he prefers the term “more-selling”) books for kids.

“Because our children were young at that time and we were reading to them, it was in the air.”

Like many writers, he doesn’t find the process a breeze. “Writing is a bit like being underwater and in a trance; you do lose track of time. Writing feels like a continual low-level problem and there are moments of relief where you think, ‘Oh, OK!’ – but it feels more tense than enjoyable.”

I wonder if he changed his writing style for the middle-grade market. He claims not. “I think children

aren’t worried if they don’t understand one word if it’s easy enough to understand [the context].” Hear, hear.

As someone with a tidy mind, I imagine the ordering of his books at home is, well, logical – perhaps inspired by the Library’s system? “It’s alphabetical,” he smiles. In our house, poetry is in the loo, I say. “In ours it’s on the bottom shelf because it feels more accessible,” he says. “Probably history is getting the least regular airing, that’s the high stuff.” And, lucky him, he has space enough to not need a “one in, one out” policy. Cheerfully, we discuss the comparatively little time we have to read. He sighs. “Jonathan Franzen said that sometimes he does a rough calculation of how many books he can read in a year, times by how long he feels he has left. The resultant low three-figure sum is depressing.”

One title that he has struck off his to-read list is Middlemarch, which he “finally” got around to this year, together with Fox, the daughter of actor James, granddaughter of theatre director Robin. Well, at the start. Fox, a theologian with a passion for Dante, is a faster reader. “Often it will be her second reading and I’ll be coming in the slipstream. I think simply because I wear glasses people assume I’m better read.” Untrue, he insists, and confesses to not having opened War and Peace or Remembrance of Things Past. Rather, he likes being able to whizz through a play in a day.

For Ayoade, as you might guess of a man who has turned awkwardness into a career motif, the Library is not a place to be sociable. “Writing is a kind of withdrawal,” he says with relish. “You see a lot of people slightly dazed in libraries, trying to do what they are trying to do.”

Alex O’Connell is a literary critic and former arts editor of The Times

READING LIST

Four of Richard Ayoade’s favourite short stories

BY JD SALINGER (1961)

Ayoade has said he wishes he’d written this book –made up of a short story and novella about the bickering Glass siblings – which crams in a lot of big thoughts about the human condition into its 157 pages. “I don’t know anyone who has made speech come alive as well as Salinger has. It’s natural, but compressed. Funny without feeling it’s pushing for laughs,” says Ayoade. No wonder this is considered by many to be Salinger’s true masterpiece.

Find it in: Fiction; Salinger, JD

THE WONDERFUL STORY OF HENRY SUGAR BY ROALD DAHL (1977)

“The main thing [I read] when I was young was Roald Dahl. And because he was Norwegian that was exciting as well,” says Ayoade, whose mother is from Norway. This story – about a man who is obsessed with a stage performer with X-ray vision, thanks to his time studying with a yogi – is part of a collection that sits between Dahl’s children’s books and his sinister tales for adults. Ayoade was terrific as said yogi in Wes Anderson’s Netflix adaptation. Find it in: Fiction; Dahl, Roald (in The Complete Short Stories)

PIGEON FEATHERS BY JOHN UPDIKE (1962)

Ayoade loves John Updike, having recently read the Bech tetralogy and the Rabbit books. He is particularly taken by Updike’s short story about a teenager’s crisis of belief. The boy, who has moved with his mother to a rural farm, discovers HG Wells’ faith-busting The Outline of History leading him to question Jesus’ divinity. A shooting spree, as he culls pigeons from his grandmother’s rafters (very Updike), helps him clear his thoughts.

Find it in: Fiction; Updike, John

THE DOUBLE: A PETERSBURG POEM BY FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY (1846)

A psychiatric thriller about a down-at-heel, socially awkward government worker who meets his infinitely more sociable and charming doppelganger, leading to his ruin. “His books feel completely contemporary, the concerns feel contemporary. The humour feels contemporary,” Ayoade has said of the Russian writer. Ayoade loved it so much, it became the basis of his 2013 film The Double, starring Jesse Eisenberg as both men.

Find it in: Fiction; Dostoevskiĭ, F. M.

FRANNY AND ZOOEY

KEEPING THE FLAME ALIVE

Halik Kochanski discusses Europeans’ non-violent resistance to the Nazis and her own father’s exile under Soviet occupation with Lara Feigel

Halik Kochanski, winner of the 2023 Wolfson History Prize, pictured in The Study.

Photo: Sarah Weal

Halik Kochanski’s mother Teresa didn’t want her to be a military historian. Aged seven, Teresa was abandoned by her father on account of his soldierly obsessions. In early 1930s Poland – a country whose hard-won independence remained threatened on every side – Teresa’s father amassed hundreds of tin soldiers and replayed the Napoleonic battles that had promised to restore greatness to the Poles. He had no job and no money; eventually his exasperated wife, Teresa’s mother, gathered up his books and soldiers and threw them in the cesspool. On discovering this, he left. Decades later, after Poland had been destroyed by yet another war, Teresa looked on, horrified, as her daughter began a PhD on the British imperialist military hero Garnet Wolseley. “She was totally hostile to me being a military historian,” Kochanski tells me. But, she says, shrugging, she had no choice; “blood will out” – battles had “drifted down in the genetics”. Teresa wasn’t alive to see her daughter writing her two magisterial histories of the Second World War: The Eagle Unbowed: Poland and the Poles in the Second World War in 2012, then in 2022, Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939–45 (winner of the 2023 Wolfson History Prize). Perhaps reading these, Teresa would have forgiven her daughter, who had stopped chronicling imperialist battles and faced the almost unfaceable reality of a people starved and bombed into destitution and then, when finally victorious, presented with a new occupier. In Resistance, the Poles emerge as beleaguered heroes of a kind; they are, after all, the only nation that resisted from day one of the war to the end. And what about Kochanski’s father Stanisław, who met Teresa in London at the end of the war? He’d been deported to Kazakhstan in 1940 after the Soviet takeover, then fought for the Polish army in Italy before being shipped to Britain. Kochanski is confident he’d have been proud of her books on Poland, but that he would have found the chapter on Kazakhstan too unbearable to read.

Facing me over Zoom from her booklined study while her dog barks in the background, Kochanski presents as a very English figure; her plummy deep voice is the product of the English boarding schools where her

parents, convinced that Poland could never be free again and that full assimilation was the answer, sent her from the age of nine. It was at these boarding schools that her fascination with military history developed. She only picked up a little of what her parents were saying when they talked in their mother tongue (she didn’t learn Polish as a child) but away from home, she discovered books that took her back to the years her father still had nightmares about. Bored by the girls around her, she read for hours night after night in her narrow bed at school. There was The Silver Sword , Ian Serraillier’s harrowing tale of a Polish

“It was at boarding school that Kochanski’s fascination with military history developed”

Above: French troops and Maquis resistance fighters battle to liberate the city of Belfort, France in 1944.

Left: Kochanski’s prize-winning book Resistance: The Underground War in Europe, 1939–45

Photo: Shawshots/Alamy Stock Photo

“In the [early] days, Kochanski was using the card catalogues that she remains nostalgic for, and working on a laptop that could only hold its charge for two hours”

man sent to a prison camp by German soldiers and of a group of Polish children crossing wartorn Europe from Poland. And there were tales about Wojtek, the Polish army bear who accompanied her father’s section of the army, performing tasks in exchange for cigarettes. Previously she’d been reading pony stories; now her imagination was most captured by war. It was obvious that Kochanski was going to study history, which she did at Oxford in the 1980s, where it became obvious that the Second World War was too recent to count as history. When it came to choosing a PhD subject, Garnet Wolseley, the general satirised by Gilbert and Sullivan as “the very model of a modern major-general” appealed. She funded her doctorate by working for her family’s computer firm, then embarked on a series of piecemeal academic jobs of a kind all too familiar in academia today. There’s a 13-year gap between her eventual Wolseley book in 1999, and The Eagle Unbowed. It was only after her parents died and she inherited her share of the family home that she could afford to devote herself to writing. And perhaps it was only after their deaths that her subject matter presented itself with full urgency. She wanted to read about the war in Poland and, when she found there was no book that answered all her questions, she set out to write one. There is not much that connects the colonial campaigns of Wolseley with the resistance in Poland, but there has been one constant throughout Kochanski’s research life: The London Library. In the Wolseley days, she

was using the card catalogues that she remains nostalgic for, and working on a laptop that could only hold its charge for two hours. Things have changed now but the classifications remain the same, and History European War Two has been her shelf of choice for many years. Resistance took her seven years to research and write. She did all the research first, amassing details on every country under German occupation, grateful that the Library has so much in French in particular. Then she wrote, dividing her days into thinking and writing time, though she’s always aware that the thinking time doesn’t appear to count for much, however essential it may be. “You go to bed at night and you think: What did I do today?” she says, laughing.

The result is an extraordinarily compendious work, in which Kochanski moves with ease between the very different occupations and forms of resistance in the east and west. She shows how much of the resistance was unarmed, in the early years of clandestine newspapers and forged identity papers. And she shows how crucial a role women played in the resistance because, after forced labour was introduced, they were a lot freer to move around than the men, who had to carry documents, providing they weren’t eligible for forced labour. “A mother might take her baby out in the pram and under the baby’s mattress could be some explosives or a pile of newspapers to be distributed.”

I ask if it has left her with unanswered questions. The issue of who resisted is still very patchy, she says; we don’t really know this for Belgium or the Netherlands

Above right: Victorian general Sir Garnet Wolseley, the subject of Kochanski’s first book. Photo: Iconographic Archive/Alamy Stock Photo

or Denmark or Norway. In Eastern European countries such as Romania, a new generation of historians is studying the war years before they joined sides with the Russians for the first time, so there’s considerable research still to emerge.

And what about reading for pleasure, if we can make this distinction, when she’s obviously found such pleasure in her historical research? When she needs a break from history, she reads crime fiction. This enlivens her evenings, especially while she’s cooking. “My limit of cooking is: shove it in the oven and put the timer on, read, take food out and carry on reading while eating.” And sometimes, at The London Library, she’ll chance upon a novel. Recently, perhaps half-intentionally, she found herself in the children’s section and there she came across her old favourite, The Silver Sword. On the red leather armchairs of her adulthood, she sat and once again devoured that novel that, for good or ill, ignited her horrified fascination with her parents’ war. •

Lara Feigel is professor of modern culture at King’s College London. She is the author of five works of non-fiction, including The Bitter Taste of Victory: In the Ruins of the Reich (2016) and Look! We Have Come Through! – Living with D.H. Lawrence (2022) and of one novel, The Group (2020). She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and reviews regularly in The Guardian

Essential military histories

Recommended by Halik Kochanski. Find all three titles in H. European War II

Noah’s Ark: Story of the Alliance Intelligence Service in Occupied France by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

London Calling North Pole: The True Revelations of a German Spy by Hermann J Giskes

Histoire de la Résistance en France 1940–1945 in five volumes by Henri Noguères

Biographer Andrew Lycett pictured outside the Reading Room

AWRITER’S

LIFE

Andrew Lycett tells Alex McFadyen about leaving behind reporting on Libya to write biographies of unorthodox Victorians and the world’s most famous detective

Photography by Andrew Kimber

In February 2022, German chancellor Olaf Scholz gave his “Zeitenwende” speech, arguing for Germans to adopt a new self-image and project a tougher military and diplomatic posture in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As with so many of the German language’s best compound nouns, no direct translation exists; but Scholz described it in English as an “epochal shift”.

More than a century before, Europe was in a similar state of transition, says biographer Andrew Lycett. Sigmund Freud’s theories of the mind, challenges to the British empire’s dominance and developments in fields such as theoretical physics were giving people a “new way of looking at the world”. Many of Lycett’s subjects are drawn from this period or shortly after: imperial nostalgist Rudyard Kipling, poetic prodigy Dylan Thomas, Wilkie Collins, who stirred social anxieties with the sensation fiction genre, and Arthur Conan Doyle, whose character Sherlock Holmes captured the public’s imagination like no other before (in 2012, he beat Hamlet to claim the Guinness World Record for the most-portrayed human literary character in film and television history).

Lycett’s latest book, The Worlds of Sherlock Holmes, maps elements of Conan Doyle’s personality and background onto Holmes, including support for the monarchy and unionism, and his scientific training. As a medical student, Conan Doyle’s teacher Joseph Bell “taught him to look closely at patients and to discover clinical details about them from their appearance” says Lycett. “He incorporated that into the way that Holmes operates.” The book goes on to examine where they diverge, too: Conan Doyle was a great cricketer and lover of team sports, Holmes prefers boxing. The author enjoyed theatre; Holmes loves classical music.

Contrary to the popular view of the Victorian era as “rather repressed”, Lycett regards it as a time of “great interest and great excitement”, epitomised by Conan Doyle. “He loved new things; he was an innovator. Sherlock Holmes [stories] appeared in what was then the cutting edge of publishing. The Strand Magazine wasn’t a traditional Victorian serial: it was well produced and well illustrated, using the latest printing techniques.” The book also grapples with Conan Doyle’s embrace in later life of spiritualism – a movement that suggested the living could contact the dead. “I’ve tried to explain how the great proponent of science came to adopt spiritualism,” Lycett says. “Of course, he decked it out with scientific rationale. There was clearly something going on in the post-First

A copy of The Illustrated London News from the 1880s, held in the Library’s periodicals collection, which Lycett regularly draws from

Lycett among the periodicals collection

“I wasn’t really cut out for being on the front lines dodging bullets as a foreign correspondent”

World War period. People needed something, they’d lost their loved ones, and they were looking for answers.”

The book was commissioned by Frances Lincoln following Lycett’s 2007 biography of Conan Doyle, praised by The New York Times as “a scrupulous, authoritative account of how an undistinguished doctor from Portsmouth climbed to the pinnacle of late-Victorian literary fame”. This perhaps underplays the Sherlock creator’s sense of adventure: while still a 20-year-old student, he served as the ship’s surgeon on a whaling expedition to the Arctic Circle. Lycett’s own route into book-writing took him overseas. Raised first in Tanganyika (a British colonial territory that now forms part of Tanzania), after the Second World War he attended English boarding school before studying history at Oxford. He then returned to Africa to work as a freelance foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times.

“In the mid-1970s I found myself drawn to the Middle East,” Lycett says of his early career. “It was coming ‘online’ as it were, because of oil price rises, so there was a lot of work as a journalist. I wrote about Egypt, Sudan and Libya.” In 1987, he collaborated with a Sunday Times colleague on a book about the military overthrow of the Libyan monarchy by Muammar Gaddafi and the dictator’s regime at the time. He realised he had “found his metier”, as he puts it; that he “wasn’t really cut out for being on the front lines dodging bullets as a foreign correspondent”. He enjoyed the deep research involved in writing non-fiction books, which suited his training as a historian.

It was during this time that freedom of information became part of the political agenda. Under pressure from opposition politicians, in 1989 the Conservative government repealed section 2 of the Official Secrets Act, narrowing its scope. A few years later, the Labour Party announced it would pass a Freedom of Information Act if it won the next election (it was eventually introduced in 2000) and, in 1994, the Public Record Office Library, previously exclusively for use by staff of the National Archives, opened to the public.

Lycett took advantage to research a subject that had interested him for some time: Ian Fleming. He knew it would be “sellable” and trawled the National Archives for letters and other documents to piece together the Bond author’s Second World War service. “I was able to flesh out the story considerably,” he says, discovering that Fleming had been at the heart of naval intelligence, as the personal assistant to the director, Rear Admiral John Godfrey. A memo from Fleming to his superior detailed a Bond-esque plan – “Operation Ruthless” – to steal

a Nazi Enigma machine (used to encode communications) by crashing a German plane into the English Channel and attacking its rescuers. It was never carried out.

After the war, Fleming – like Conan Doyle, Kipling and, since 1988, Lycett himself – became a member of the Library, during which time he wrote his Bond books. He even made the secret agent a member: Bond borrows Burke’s General Armory – a book on heraldic symbols – while posing as a genealogist in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Similarly, Conan Doyle sent Watson to St James’s Square to research Chinese pottery in An Illustrious Client. Lycett also enjoys writing in the Library, but has made use of the more esoteric corners of the collection. In the Periodicals archive, copies of literary journal The Cornhill Magazine, are a “wonderful resource”, he says: it serialised Collins’ novel Armadale and Conan Doyle’s Western Wanderings, a travelogue of his time in Canada and the US in 1914. Other finds include Shane McCorristine’s Spectres of the Self, “an exploration of the changing ways of looking at ghosts over the seemingly rational 19th century” and the “memorable” Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England, by Sarah Wise, which “nailed the ‘lunacy panic’ of the era”. These books give his biographies depth

– reviews praise them as “exhaustive” and “full of bright new hard-won details” – as Lycett pans out from his subject to illuminate the less familiar contours of the cultural moment. Wilkie Collins, who he profiled in the 2013 biography A Life of Sensation, was, “the antithesis of the conventional Victorian character – he had two women in his life and wasn’t married to either of them. He was also a laudanum addict.” Collins became one of the era’s most famous writers of sensation novels – combining mystery and romance with adultery, forgery and insanity – and is credited with launching the detective fiction genre in English. At the Library, Lycett was able to find Victorian editions of Collins’ novels as well as the memoir of his lifelong friend, the painter John Everett Millais. It “peddled a lengthy but now discredited theory about how Anne Catherick, the ‘Woman in White’ [the titular character in a Collins novel], was based on Collins’ first mistress Caroline Graves.”

Going down these rabbit holes is crucial to Lycett’s work. So while he won’t reveal his next subject, whoever it is, you’ll likely find the author – like Watson and Bond before him – among the stacks, conducting his latest investigation. •

Alex McFadyen is the editor of this magazine

READING LIST

Four compelling biographies recommended by Andrew Lycett

TOM STOPPARD: A LIFE BY HERMIONE LEE (2020)

“A biography of a living person is tricky on many levels,” says Lycett of this book about the acclaimed playwright and former Library President. “But this succeeds, bringing into focus a notably coruscating writer.” The story begins in Czechoslovakia, before the family flee to Singapore, India and England. Find it in: Biography; Biog. Stoppard, Tom

DISRAELI BY ROBERT BLAKE (1966)

This account of the life of Britain’s only Jewish-born prime minister – elected to the role twice and known as the father of “One Nation” conservatism – was “the first proper big biography” that Lycett read. “It encouraged me in my love of history, and proved how even politician’s lives can be engaging.”

Find it in: Biography; Biog. Disraeli

THE WIFE’S TALE BY AIDA EDEMARIAM (2018)

Lycett describes this book by Ethiopian-born journalist Aida Edemariam as “a sensitive evocation of the life of the author’s grandmother who, despite her illiteracy, endured the turbulent transition from the Abyssinian Empire, through Italian invasion to repressive Marxism, with her spirit undaunted.”

Find it in: Biography; Biog. Yetemegnu Mekonnen

AUGUSTUS JOHN BY

MICHAEL HOLROYD (1976)

Lycett read this while researching his biography of Ian Fleming, “in whose life John played a significant role (as he did in Dylan Thomas’, about whom I later wrote). Holroyd helped me understand how to seamlessly incorporate social history, psychological insight and beautiful description into biographies.”

Find it in: Biography; Biog. John

Santtu-Matias Rouvali Masaaki Suzuki Soumik Datta

Isabelle Faust Sol Gabetta

Coming up at the Royal Festival Hall

Masaaki Suzuki conducts Schumann & Dvořak

Enjoy Schumann’s lyrical Cello Concerto

Sunday 28 April, 7.30pm

Sunwook Kim plays Brahms

Plus Schumann’s Rhenish Symphony

Thursday 2 May, 7.30pm

Alexandre Kantorow plays Liszt

Plus Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9

Thursday 9 May, 7.30pm

Soumik Datta: Artist in Residence

The culmination of a year-long collaboration

Saturday 11 May, 7.30pm

The Bach Choir: The Dream of Gerontius

Hear the premiere of Roderick Williams’s Cusp, ahead of Elgar’s choral masterpiece

Thursday 16 May, 7.30pm

Brahms & Beethoven with Isabelle Faust

Beethoven’s sublime Violin Concerto and Brahms’s Fourth Symphony

Sunday 2 June, 7.30pm

Santtu conducts Elgar’s Enigma Variations

Cellist Sol Gabetta plays Shostakovich

Thursday 6 June, 7.30pm

EVENTS

See Sylvia Pankhurst’s lost play, hear art critics in conversation and celebrate Pride Month with a dive into the archives

9 – 12 May

BETWEEN TWO FIRES : A PLAY BY

SYLVIA PANKHURST

In 2023, The London Library hosted the first performance in history of Between Two Fires, a play written by the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst while she was imprisoned in HMP Holloway. This poignant play returns to The Reading Room with four performances this spring – and newly discovered material.

Using wartime legislation that had not been repealed, the government imprisoned Pankhurst for sedition during 1920 and 1921 due to her position as a prominent communist activist and organiser of protests against poverty and unemployment. She was placed in solitary confinement, where she used a contraband pencil to write her script on prison-issue toilet paper and smuggle it out in scraps.

The play dramatises her life and experience in left-wing and suffragette political movements, telling the story of her grassroots activism, her relationship with the Labour Party’s founding leader, and her lover, Keir Hardie, and her role in the suffragette movement.

Pankhurst’s biographer Rachel Holmes discovered the play nearly 100 years after it was written by piecing together fragments

of the script that were jumbled together in brown envelopes, held in the archives of the British Library. It was edited by Holmes and published by Bloomsbury in 2022.

Incorporating new fragments of the play that have come to light within the past year, this script-inhand production is directed by Roxana Silbert, the former artistic director of Hampstead Theatre, and is produced by Amy Powell Yeates,

who was selected for the 2020–21 Emerging Writers Programme and has since worked at the Royal Court Theatre. Each performance will be followed by a discussion. Speakers will include Helen Pankhurst, Shami Chakrabati, Rachel Holmes, Chris Bryant, Lemn Sissay and Natalie Belkin, with more to be announced.

9 – 11 May from 7pm, 12 May from 3pm, in person

25 April

ART/LIT SALON: THE BODY AND THE SPIRIT

Join fellow Library members for a thought-provoking discussion at Art/Lit, the regular salon exploring the intersections between art and literature.

This time, the guest speakers are two acclaimed art historians and cultural critics: Lauren Elkin and Jennifer Higgie, whose latest books both radically reappraise the work of women artists. Elkin’s 2023 book Art Monsters looks at feminist art through the prism of

the body, including portraits by Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, and the work of innovative Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. The Other Side by Higgie surveys investigations of spiritualism and the supernatural by women artists including 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides, and British occultist Ithell Colquhoun. They will be in

conversation with each other and with salon host Dominique Heyse-Moore, senior curator of Contemporary British Art at Tate Britain. Together they will discuss the routes women have taken to challenge historical gender exclusion in the art world.

Elkin’s Art Monsters and Higgie’s The Other Side will both be available to buy at the event .

6.45pm – 8.45pm, in person

From left: Lauren Elkin and Jennifer Higgie’s 2023 books about women artists

3 May WRITE & SHINE: WAYS OF SEEING – IRIS MURDOCH

Start your day with a burst of creativity: a 90-minute writing workshop inspired by Iris Murdoch, author of Under the Net (1954) and The Sea, The Sea (1978), who had a close association with the Library until her death in 1999. Murdoch’s work is richly visual and, in this session, you’ll consider the role that imagery and colour play in her writing – and your own. Led by author Gemma Seltzer, Write & Shine workshops take place in the early morning light – the best time to think, dream and imagine.

7.45am – 9.15am, online

11 June HIDDEN HISTORIES: THE LONDON LIBRARY ARCHIVES – LGBTQ+ PRIDE MONTH

Join Library archivist Nathalie Belkin as she shares material about LGBTQ+ members and their contributions to the Library over the years to celebrate Pride Month. The evening will shine a light on some of the most notable LGBTQ+ authors who were past members, including EM Forster and Vita SackvilleWest. Attendees will have a rare chance to view physical artefacts from the Library’s archives, from Forster’s membership form to the personal letters of Virgina Woolf.

6.30pm – 7.30pm, in person

27 June SAVE THE DATE: MEMBERS SUMMER PARTY

Make the most of a long summer night and join fellow members and staff for an evening of drinks and nibbles in the Library’s stunning and atmospheric Reading Room. More details to be announced soon.

6.30pm – 8.30pm, in person

For more information, and to be the first to hear about events at the Library, refer to the fortnightly newsletter, scan this QR code or visit londonlibrary.co.uk/whats-on

Above: Booker Prize-winning author Iris Murdoch in 1992. Photo: Brian Harris/Alamy Stock Photo

MEET A MEMBER

Elvira Sanchez Almeida, a Kilburn school librarian, discusses her students’ literary discoveries at 14 St James’s Square

I’m in my seventh year as a librarian and I’ve worked in three different schools; I’m now the L earning Resources M anager at St Augustine’s High School in Kilburn. I source reading materials with our teachers and manage the library budget. I also run media literacy programmes on conducting research and navigating copyright law – and acknowledging your sources – for students.

I’ve only ever been a London Library member through my school, both where I’m working now and for three years in my previous job. The London Library Subsidised Schools Membership Scheme is invaluable for our sixth-form students. It is life-changing, because they realise the power in knowledge and in books. The scheme includes access to the Library: we have sent some students to study there on their own. We are given 25 book loans at a time, which can be delivered, and three logins to the online catalogue. It also gives us access to a room at the Library for workshops. Going to the Library in person stimulates the students’ intellectual thirst , and some even reconsider what they’re going to study after they visit . The collection is especially suited to politics, history and philosophy students, but even for those learning sciences, it’s nice to read more widely. History affects everything and there’s no better

place than The London Library to find out about the history of science. There are also niche and expensive reference books at the Library that we wouldn’t be able to afford to buy for school. The main Reading Roo m that looks onto St James’s Square is my favourite because you really feel the cerebral atmosphere there.

I’m originally from Spain and my background is in law. I stepped off the career ladder when I moved here and had children. Then I took on a librarianship at my children’s school. I started working at St Augustine’s this academic year and I’m keen to increase the diversity of the books we offer. A library needs to reflect the community it serves; our school is very multicultural. I’m working on an LGBTQ+ section and another where students can source works by Black authors such as Benjamin Zephaniah.

Of the schools that I’ve worked in, this is the one where the children most like reading. I have a suggestion box on my desk , which is hugely popular. It’s important to have books that students really want as it gets them into your library, then they can discover unfamiliar authors. Anything competing with their phones is good. •

Interview by Deniz Nazim-Englund

OPEN FRIDAYS

Come and explore over 300 years of collecting history as part of Open Fridays for our project Sensing History.

We are now open on certain Fridays throughout the year and would like to welcome visitors to our Burlington House premises.

During these Open Fridays, you will be able to enjoy a visit to the lower ground floor of our London premises and learn about our history, the rooms and collections within.

Check our website for the specific Fridays we’re open. Entries work on a drop-in basis and are free. Admission is from 10am - 3.30pm (closing 4pm).

For our full list of events: sal.org.uk/events.