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
Championing progress
Welcome to the autumn 2024 edition of The London Library Magazine. As we head into the winter months, we reflect on the Library’s progress by compiling our annual report and preparing for our Annual General Meeting (AGM). In this issue, you will find a summary of our financial situation by our Treasurer, Philip Broadley. November marks the end of Philip Broadley’s term as Treasurer; we are immensely grateful for his commitment and expertise over the past eight years. I hope you can join us at the AGM on 26 November to hear from our new Chair after his first year, receive a detailed report on the past year, ask questions and have your say.
We also bring you the wonderful news that Her Majesty The Queen has been confirmed as The London Library’s Patron, following her role as Vice-Patron since 2012. The Queen’s Reading Room, charity and book club are all symbols of her passionate promotion of literature, and we are delighted to have her continued support. We are similarly thrilled to announce the renaming of the Writers’ Room for Sir Tom Stoppard, who has been a longstanding and tireless champion of the Library. In particular, we are recognising Sir Tom’s contribution as President from 2002 to 2017, and as Vice President since.
EM Forster’s love for the Library is the focus of our From the archive piece, which reveals some of his book requests during the Second World War. We hear from celebrated author Philippa Gregory, a Library member since 1999, who has been writing non-fiction and Shakespearean theatre. Jacques Testard tells us about founding his independent publishing house Fitzcarraldo Editions, which is now celebrating its 10-year anniversary and has published four Nobel Prize winners in that time.
And in our final feature, historian and renowned writer on world religion Karen Armstrong talks about a lifetime of thinking about God, her writing process, and her use of the fifth-floor Religion collection. •
Philip Marshall, Director
CONTINUED ROYAL PATRONAGE
Her Majesty The Queen has taken on the Patronage of The London Library. As Vice-Patron since 2012, Her Majesty The Queen has hosted events and contributed to its success over many years.
This endorsement strengthens the Library’s efforts to inspire, support and promote the creation and sharing of knowledge and ideas through reading, writing and discussion. Her Majesty The Queen is a passionate promoter of literacy, both here in the UK and internationally, with particular focus on encouraging a love for reading and writing from an early age.
The Library is grateful for Her Majesty The Queen’s patronage, which will help to establish 14 St James’s Square as the home of literary inspiration, and looks forward to her continued support over the coming years. •
FOCUS ON ACQUISITIONS
In August, the Library bade a fond farewell to Gill Turner, Head of Acquisitions, who has left the Library after 30 years. Gill ensured the continuous development of print and online collections to meet our members’ evolving reading tastes and research interests, and we thank Gill for her ceaseless dedication to the Library.
Following a long handover from Gill, Matthew Brooke, Director of Collections and Services, has brought together the Bibliographic Services and Acquisitions teams to create a new team of Acquisitions and Discovery Librarians, led by Fay Harris.
The Acquisitions and Discovery Librarians, most of whom have worked at the Library for more than 20 years, will build on the existing strengths of the collection, as well as explore and extend into other areas of collection development based on member feedback. •
If you have a book suggestion or would like to donate items to the collection, please email suggestions@londonlibrary.co.uk or donations@londonlibrary.co.uk.
Above left: Her Majesty The Queen is the new Royal Patron of The London Library. Photo: Hugo Burnand. Above right: A new team of Acquisitions and Discovery Librarians will be developing the collection
BUILDING THE LIBRARY’S FUTURE
Following the member consultation on the proposed building improvement plans for The London Library, planning applications for Phase One have been submitted to Westminster City Council, with Phase Two to follow later this year.
The Building Connections project will deliver on the long-term vision to improve access to the unique collection of books and periodicals at St James’s Square, and create more spaces for reading, writing and connection. This will support the needs of a growing membership, ensuring long-term sustainability for the Library and increasing its public impact, while maintaining the unique and much-loved atmosphere and character of the building.
As part of the consultation, members were invited to share their views in a survey and at two member events. Responses showed a positive overall impression with members keenly supportive of Phase Two of the plans. The feedback that has been received will be a useful guide for the project over the next four to five years. We are very grateful to those who responded, and members will continue to be updated as the plans progress, including at the forthcoming AGM. •
→ To find out more about the building project, visit londonlibrarybuildingconnections.co.uk
ANNOUNCING THE NEXT ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING
The 183rd Annual General Meeting (AGM) will be held in the Library and online at 6pm on Tuesday 26 November 2024. The AGM will be led by Simon Godwin, the new Chair of Trustees. At the AGM, the Trustees are set to propose an increase to ordinary membership paid by annual Direct Debit, of 1.8% to £575 per annum, saving members £60 on the cost of membership by other methods. Full membership by other payment methods will increase by 3.3%, to £635. Paying by annual Direct Debit is mutually beneficial for members and the Library, members who switch to annual Direct Debit for 2025 will save £40 compared to their 2024 fee. Increases will be applicable from January 2025. A proportionate increase is proposed for all other forms of membership. •
To switch to annual Direct Debit for your next renewal, email directdebit@londonlibrary.co.uk
A NEW LEGACY
The Writers’ Room was officially renamed The Stoppard Room this September, in recognition of Sir Tom Stoppard’s outstanding contribution to, and impact on, the Library while serving as its President for 15 years (2002–17), and since then as Vice-President. New signage has been added to the glass doors and outer wall.
Sir Tom has given his time generously and has played a leading role in developing the Library for the next generation and beyond. Upon his retirement as President, the Library created the Tom Stoppard Innovation Fund, which, thanks to generous supporters, has played a crucial role in funding new initiatives. To date, it has enabled developments such as the accelerated completion of retrospective cataloguing of pre-1950 books , the RFID security tagging of the collection, membership management and finance system upgrades, and the creation of The Art Reading Room. Alongside fundraising and stakeholder engagement, Sir Tom has supported the Library publicly in the press and taken part in our literary festivals in 2016 and 2021.
The renaming is also a tribute to Sir Tom’s achievements as one of the country’s most distinguished writers. A reception was held on 25 September, attended by Sir Tom, his wife Sabrina, incumbent Library President Helena Bonham Carter, former President Sir Tim Rice (2017–22), and a small group of donors who contributed towards the Fund established in his name.
Sir Tom has been a member since 1970 and continues to support the Library as Vice-President. Sir Tom says: “The idea that my name might be attached to one of the spaces protected by the address 14 St James’s Square lends a substance to my romance with our Library. I can hardly imagine a nicer compliment and I am very proud of it.” •
Sir Tom Stoppard at The London Library. Photo: Dale Weeks
SEASONS GREETINGS
This year’s Christmas card is designed by Cat O’Neil, an award-winning freelance illustrator based in Edinburgh, who has previously worked with The New York Times , The Observer, Libération, The Quentin Blake Centre and The Wellcome Collection.
The illustration captures the peaceful atmosphere of the Library’s Back Stacks, where many a member has found themselves absorbed in thought. “I wanted to convey the warmth that can be found in solitary
reflection and exploration,” says O’Neil on designing the card. “And how magical it can feel when you look through the collection of completely unique books!”
A London Library Christmas card is a stylish way to wish your nearest and dearest a wonderful festive season. All proceeds will go towards supporting the Library. •
→ The Christmas card is on sale from 1 November from the Library or online at shop.londonlibrary.co.uk
The Library’s 2024 Christmas card, designed by Cat O’Neil
Autumn Highlights from Reaktion Books
The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages
Sara J. Charles
‘Charles conjures the feel, sounds and smells of manuscript-making in this jaunty book.’
Apollo Magazine
hb | £16.99 | 978 1 78914 916 6
Readers for Life: How Reading and Listening in Childhood Shapes Us
The English Table: Our Food through the Ages
Jill Norman
‘Packed with delicious details and expertly sourced examples . . . a rich culinary journey to tell the story of Britain through the lens of food.’
Polly Russell, food historian
hb | £17.95 | 978 1 78914 933 3
Edited by Sander L. Gilman and Heta Pyrhönen
‘A superb and dazzling collection of unusual and insightful memoirs concerning the value of reading.’
Jack Zipes, author of Speaking Out
hb | £16.95 | 978 1 78914 949 4
Behind the Privet Hedge: Richard Sudell, the Suburban Garden and the Beautification of Britain
Michael Gilson
‘In a fascinating new study of Sudell and suburban gardens . . . Michael Gilson dubs his subject “the patron saint of crazy paving”. He was also a radical, a democrat and a visionary.’ The Guardian
hb | £16.95 | 978 1 78914 860 2
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Correspondence from EM Forster reveals his wartime reading habits
In October 1940, a postcard arrived at The London Library requesting books. An everyday occurrence, perhaps even in wartime, until the postcard’s author is identified: EM Forster. An avid lover of the Library, having been a member since 190 4 , Forster likely conducted regular communications with the librarians; six similar examples of such correspondence are kept in the Library archive.
In this particular postcard, acquired by the Library in Ju ne 202 3 , the famed English author asks to be sent collected tales by 19th-century French Romantic writer Prosper Mérimée. He highlights Carmen and Columba
as two vital Mérimée novellas to include: written in the 1840s and set in Spain and France, respectively, these stories centred on themes of death, violence and love –with the former, of course, inspiring the 19th-century opera of the same name by Georges Bizet.
Forster clearly had an appetite for drama. As the postcard details, however, he also longed for the tonic of art. “I should also be glad of an illustrated ‘art’ book to look at,” he writes to the Librarian. “I remember a good Brueghel in the art room, but it may be too large to post. The ‘Phaidon’ series are good – eg the recent one on Michelangelo’s sculptures.”
A 1940 postcard from EM Forster to Charles Hagberg Wright, the Librarian (director) at the time. Photo: Amanda Ward
“The Library seems to be more than a collection of books. It is a symbol of civilisation”
It is unknown whether the author wanted these books for research or pleasure, but it seems evident that he was cultivating an appreciation of Renaissance painting and sculpture, and the Library was where he turned to for inspiration.
Forster sent the postcard from his West Hackhurst home in Abinger Hammer, Surrey – where he lived with his mother until her death in 1945, avoiding in these years the dangers of London in the Blitz. In 1940, he had recently written the pageant play England’s Pleasant Land, exploring the socio-political history of the English countryside – including the enclosure acts and the Swing Riots. This followed on from his non-fiction book Abinger Harvest (1936), reflecting on Englishness and named after his home village.
Beyond passionately consuming books from the collection, Forster had a rich, long-lasting relationship with The London Library, as a member for 6 6 years. He encouraged others to join , too, nominating a total of 14 people for membership – from Siegfried Sassoon in 1920 to the actor Robert Donat in 1943. He became a Committee Member of the Library during the 1930s, and Vice-President in 1961.
Shortly before taking up this important mantle, Forster donated the manuscript of his acclaimed novel A Passage to India (1924) to the Library, to raise funds at auction to help save the institution from bankruptcy. It sold for the handsome sum of £6,500. It was not the only text he gave to the Library, having donated his
contribution to The Hogarth Letters (1931) a decade earlier: a compendium of fictional letters commissioned by fellow Library members Virginia and Leonard Woolf. Forster’s anti-imperialist A letter to Madan Blanchard remains the most well-known, and was reprinted in his 1951 essay collection Two Cheers for Democracy
Seven months after Forster’s 1940 postcard to the Librarian, he wrote an essay for The New Statesman and Nation on the occasion of the Library’s centenary, setting forth his views of the institution he had long loved.
“It seems to be something more than a collection of books,” he wrote. “It is a symbol of civilisation. It is a reminder of sanity and a promise of sanity to come.”
Acknowledging the destruction and threat of the ongoing Second World War, he added: “Perhaps the Nazis will hit it, and it is an obvious target, for it represents the tolerance and the disinterested erudition which they so detest. But they have missed it so far.” The Library was indeed hit in 1944 – but not decimated, and subsequently repaired over 10 years.
In the essay, Forster continues to spell out the ways in which he sees the Library as exceptional: “It pays a homage to seriousness and to good sense which is rare in these islands and any-where […] The desire to know more, the desire to feel more, and, accompanying these but not strangling them, the desire to help others: here, briefly, is the human aim, and the Library exists to further it.” •
Words by Francesca Perry
EM Forster pictured in 1938. He gave the Library an original copy of his essay
A Letter to Madan Blanchard in 1931. Photo: Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo
COLLECTION STORY
Historian Charles Spicer on a controversial Second World War book, donated to the Library, which may have been suppressed by the Foreign Office
When I was digging into 1930s Anglo-German relations, my vital printed primary source proved to be one of the rarest books of the 20th century. Authored by TP Conwell-Evans, an enigmatic historian, political secretary and intelligence agent, None So Blind; a study of the crisis years, 1930–1939 is based on the private papers of his friend and collaborator, Group-Captain MG Christie, a former Air Attaché (military representative) at the Berlin embassy. It is a coruscating condemnation of the Foreign Office’s failure to heed the threat of National Socialism in the run-up to the Second World War, presented in intelligence passed to it by Christie and others.
The book was written in 1941 but the two friends agreed it would be unhelpful to raise such contentious issues during the war. Instead, they waited six years to have the book privately printed by Harrison & Sons, printers to the King. Better known for producing banknotes, passports and postage stamps, and for publishing heraldic guide Burke’s Peerage, Harrison & Sons, despite post-war shortages, elegantly typeset the book on watermarked laid paper and case-bound it in blue cloth with gilt lettering to the spine. Most unusually, and for reasons unclear, they limited the print run to 100 numbered and named copies, following which they distributed (or “dissed” in printer’s jargon) the type used to set it, so no reprint would ever be possible.
Again mysteriously, Conwell-Evans and Christie agreed that these few copies should only be released when both men were dead, and then apparently only to certain relatives and carefully selected libraries on both sides of the Atlantic. To date, 26 surviving copies have been identified. In addition to nine in private hands, in the UK, the British Library, the Imperial War Museum and the university libraries at Brunel, Cardiff, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds and Oxford each have a copy. There is one at Trinity College Dublin and at McGill University in Canada, while in the US the Library of Congress and Columbia, Harvard, Princeton and Yale universities each also received None So Blind
And after Christie’s death in 1971, aged 90, while his papers were deposited in the archives at Churchill College, Cambridge (where they have intrigued historians ever since), his devoted housekeeper donated his personal copy of the book to The London Library.
None So Blind is now, despite its rarity, well regarded and widely referenced by historians of appeasement. I benefited from its intelligence and analysis while writing my 2022 book, Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis. Between them, ConwellEvans and Christie had closer access to, and arguably better understanding of, the National Socialist leadership than any other Britons. Their book includes intriguing records of their private meetings with Hitler, Göring and
“Conwell-Evans and Christie agreed that these few copies should only be released when both men were dead”
Ribbentrop, whose frankness about their ambitions should have shocked the appeasing British government into action earlier. Christie refused to be bullied by Hitler, whom he condemned as a “vain and vacillating demagogue” with the “weakness of one suffering from an inferiority complex” and a “small mouth with tight lips which express petulance, meanness and cruelty”.
We can only speculate as to why these two friends, having had None So Blind printed by the King’s printer, kept the copies languishing in the vaults of the Midland Bank for a quarter of a century. Christie’s concerns about his surviving German informants suffering recriminations may partly explain the delay but not the limited distribution. Writing nearly 30 years ago in The Unnecessary War, historian Patricia Meehan recognised that None So Blind must have “filled the Foreign Office with horror”, leading to an embargo. But any legal basis for that is unclear –Christie, a former diplomat, scrupulously observed The Official Secrets Act. So, despite my best efforts, including tracing Christie’s and Conwell-Evans’s families in England, Switzerland and Australia, a host of questions still remain unanswered – not least the location of the other 74 copies. •
Charles Spicer’s first book, Coffee with Hitler: The British Amateurs Who Tried to Civilise the Nazis was published in 2022
Thank You
We are grateful to the following donors who made a generous contribution to The London Library during 2023/24, and to those who wish to remain anonymous.
UK Founders’ Circle Patrons
Dickens Patrons
John Colenutt · Howard Davies · Simon Godwin ·
Sebastien Paraskevas · Basil Postan · Sir Timothy Rice ·
Ms Kim Samuel, Founder, Samuel Centre for Social Connectedness · Mark Storey · Philip Winston (with matching gift from Capital Group)
Thackeray Patrons
David & Molly Lowell Borthwick · Philip Broadley · Michael Cohen & Erin Bell · Eric Coutts ·
Harriet & Fabian Hielte · Andrew Hine ·
Simon King · Peter T G Phillips
Martineau Patrons
Mohammad Almojel · Alain Aubry · James Bartos ·
The Bisset Trust · Jenny Bourne Taylor · Nicola Braban ·
Sue Bradbury OBE · Marcia Brocklebank ·
Consuelo & Anthony Brooke · Anthony Cardew ·
Maria Beatrice Carrara · Nicola Coldstream ·
Sir John Gieve · Jakob Haesler · Philip Hooker ·
Dr Sarah Ingham · David Ireland · Margaret Jones · Humphrey Lloyd · Lorna Lowe · David Lubin ·
Kamalakshi Mehta · Simon Morris · Patrick Parrinder ·
Aurore Pasquet · David Reade · Peter Rosenthal ·
Sir John & Lady Gwenda Scarlett · Peter Stewart ·
Marjorie Stimmel · Paul Swain · Mrs Maundy Todd · John C Walton · Stephen Withnell
Major Donors
Alain Aubry
Bloomsbury Publishing
The Bryan Guinness Charitable Trust
The Clore Duffield Foundation
The John S Cohen Foundation
Howard Davies
The Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation
Dr Michael and Anna Brynberg Charitable Foundation
The Garrick Charitable Trust
The Godwin Family
John & Kiendl Gordon
Hannah Rothschild Trust
Hawthornden Foundation
The International Friends of The London Library
Helen Ireland in memory of Roy Charnock
The Jan Michalski Foundation
Gretchen & James Johnson
L E Collis Charitable Trust
Simon Lorne
Alexander John Lowry
David Lubin
Basil Postan
Reuben Foundation
Rothschild Foundation
Deborah Goodrich Royce
Sarah & Hank Slack
Mark Storey Unwin Charitable Trust
US Founders’ Circle Patrons
Via the International Friends of The London Library
Thackeray Patrons Peter & Millicent Bain · Gretchen & James Johnson · Linn & Ved Mehta RSL · David & Jennifer Risher ·
Deborah Goodrich Royce · Douglas Smith & Stephanie Ellis-Smith · Susan Jaffe Tane
Martineau Patrons
Elizabeth Belfer · J Christopher Flowers ·
Mrs Montague H Hackett, Jr · Elizabeth Bennett Herridge · Carey Adina Karmel · Thomas W Keesee III · Michael T & Helen B Kiesel · Patricia & Tom Lovejoy · Caroline S Nation · Sarah & David Stack · Gillian & Robert Steel · Cissy & Curt Viebranz · Paula Weideger · John Wilson
CORNER OF THE LIBRARY
Linger a while on this staircase to find portraits, busts and names of significant figures in the Library’s expansion
The staircase connecting TS Eliot House with the St James’s Building is, perhaps, less well-known than other areas of The London Library. Its significance, however, grew in 2021, when the portraits and names of major donors were grouped together there. These pictures show those who have bequeathed legacies of more than £25,000, and members of the UK and US Patrons’ programmes.
Central to the display is a portrait of Valerie Eliot, a member for more than 50 years, who regularly used the Library to edit the work of her late husband, and former Library President, TS Eliot. Valerie was a major benefactor, both personally and through Old Possum’s Practical Trust, a charity founded in 1990 to support the arts. She made a significant donation to the 21st Century Development Project, which transformed the building, enabling the refurbishment of existing rooms, the creation of the Foyle Lightwell Reading Room and the Times Room, and the purchase of Duchess House, which was renamed TS Eliot House in her honour.
Next to Valerie’s portrait is a bust of Drue Heinz, the British-born American philanthropist and arts patron. Publisher of the literary magazine The Paris Review and co-founder of Ecco Press, Drue was also a Library Vice-President. Her Drue Heinz Literary Fund has enabled the acquisition of nearly 10,000 books. The staircase also celebrates the impact of former President Sir Tom Stoppard and the generous donors to The Tom Stoppard Innovation Fund, which plays a crucial role in safeguarding the Library’s future.
Another notable member commemorated here is Sir Ian Anstruther, a biographer and social historian, who authored The Scandal of the Andover Workhouse (1973), a critique of the Victorian workhouse system. Sir Ian was a member for 56 years and Vice-President from
2004. His significant donations supported staff training and development, as well as funding construction of The Anstruther Wing, which protects 30,000 of the Library’s most precious books, a lasting benefit to both the collection and the membership.
Susan Batty, born in Palestine in 1927, was a life member for 50 years and a talented embroiderer. Susan made significant gifts to The London Library in her lifetime and chose to remember the Library as one of two charities in her will. Her generosity has helped conserve and care for the collections, archive and historic buildings for many years to come.
The staircase is a testament to the enduring generosity of those who have shaped The London Library. It is through such contributions that the Library can realise its mission to be the home of literary inspiration. •
Words by Kate Harding
The “Donor Staircase” connecting TS Eliot House with the St James’s Building. Photo: Dale Weeks
PROPELLED
BY THE PAST
Philippa Gregory speaks to Rohan Banerjee about the lyricism of theatre, why writers should never compete and what love means to her
by Jasper Fry
Photography
The bestselling author pictured in the Foyle Lightwell Reading Room
Above: Scarlett Johansson as Mary Boleyn (left) and Natalie Portman as Anne Boleyn in the 2008 film adaptation of The Other Boleyn Girl. Right: Rebecca Ferguson as protagonist Elizabeth Woodville in a BBC television adaption of The White Queen
Philippa Gregory is having a wonderful year. It is mid-July, the British summer seems to have finally arrived, and Gregory is looking relaxed and cheerful as she arrives at The London Library’s summer party. What is she drinking? “Yes,” she quips before the question is finished.
Gregory, 70, has been a member of the Library since 1999. She describes herself as an “incurable optimist” – a character trait she speculates must occasionally annoy those close to her. She’s not always happy, she clarifies, but she tries to limit her indulgence of sadness. “I’m sort of an emotional activist,” she says. “If something’s bad in my life, I don’t generally put up with it. I certainly don’t suffer in silence.”
Indeed, it seems, the Kenyan-born British journalist turned academic turned bestselling author, philosophises for sport. Life is short, she agrees, “but it’s long enough to get a lot done… you shouldn’t ever waste time.”
Gregory has conquered the world of historical fiction. Her 34 novels span the 14th to the 20th century, with several of these adapted for film and television, including The Other Boleyn Girl and The White Queen
She has since turned her attention to new projects. In 2023, she wrote Normal Women – 900 Years of Making History,
an expansive anthology published by Harper Collins, detailing the evolution of female class consciousness, political and professional emancipation, sexuality and more. Earlier this year, Gregory’s debut play, Richard, My Richard , directed by Katie Posner, ran at the Shakespeare North Playhouse. It aimed to portray a more nuanced version of the last Plantagenet monarch, she says, compared with the “pantomime villain” presented in Shakespeare’s Richard III. Naturally, as is Gregory’s hallmark, the women in Richard’s life, his wife Anne Neville and Elizabeth Woodville (the queen to his predecessor and brother Edward IV), were afforded more prominent and powerful roles, replete with cutting dialogue.
Writing a play for the first time, Gregory reflects, was a challenging, but also an edifying experience. “It was a new skill I had to learn,” she says. “I could be more lyrical in my language, a lot more evocative, yet at the same time I had to be very succinct. I couldn’t take three pages describing the weather, but I still needed to be vivid to help with the direction. Getting the right vocabulary to achieve the right effect… that was tough. It’s taught me a tonne about writing.”
Was it hard, as a writer, who had spent years working on the play, to let someone else direct it? “No,” says Gregory. “I didn’t know anything about directing a play. I can set a scene and tell a story, but there’s a lot more that goes into running a show. You’ve got to manage the actors and their chemistry. I trusted Katie implicitly. It was actually a really collaborative process, and I was really happy with the result.”
Gregory’s forays into non-fiction and Shakespearean theatre, she hopes, will expand her usual characterisation as a historical novelist. “I prefer to be thought of simply as a writer,” says Gregory. “That feels more freeing and more interesting. People seem to have this obsession with labels and putting everything into its own little box.”
She says she reads historical fiction “hardly at all” in her spare time, preferring non-fiction. Unbothered by any charge of cliché, she maintains that it’s impossible
to truly understand the present or the future, without first making sense of the past. Tickled by the recent news that Sir Keir Starmer’s Cabinet contains five history graduates, she says: “That bodes well then.”
If she does read historical fiction, Gregory says she risks remembering the fiction and not knowing if it is history – and she hates reading something that she wishes she had written herself. But she is quick to add, it is “dreadful” for writers to view each other as competition. “When I say I wish I’d thought of
“I value spontaneity and people just doing what they want, when they want”
Left: Kyle Rowe in Richard, My Richard at the Shakespeare North Playhouse.
Above: The play gives greater prominence to the women in King Richard III’s life than Shakespeare’s original. Photos: Patch Dolan
Philippa Gregory at home in London. Photo: Courtesy of Phillipa Gregory
“Love is something to sometimes be endured, as well as enjoyed”
something, it’s coming from a place of admiration, not envy. I think competition is bad for the industry and bad for the soul,” she says.
She recalls meeting the author Leslie Thomas at a party during the early 1990s: “He was a big star then. He’d written Tropic of Ruislip and The Virgin Soldiers, which were both very successful and adapted [into a TV series and film, respectively]. I’d just written a best-seller [Wildacre]. He came up to me and said: ‘Congratulations, well done.’ Then he told me one of the filthiest jokes I’ve ever heard, and which I can’t repeat here, but I remember thinking he was a very gracious man.”
Gregory prefers to view other authors of historical fiction as colleagues rather than rivals and supports others’ successes as simply part of the process to “grow the market”. So, what does she make of a writer being touted as the next Philippa Gregory? She chuckles. It is both “enormously flattering and a little irritating”, she says. “I don’t need replacing just yet!”
I wonder whether Gregory, who has been married three times, still believes in love? Are love and romance the same thing? There are different kinds of love, she points out. “Love is an emotion and a sensation, but it’s also an act. It’s something to sometimes be endured, as well as enjoyed,” she muses. “Some people can’t bear love, you know, the feeling of just caring so deeply for another person. It’s hard for them. I think we would all probably cope better with love if we accepted that it isn’t a universal experience and recognised the rarity of it.” But Gregory agrees that she is a romantic. “I like nature,” she says. “I see the beauty in small things. I really value spontaneity and people just doing what they want, when they want.”
As for her marriages, Gregory definitely isn’t bitter. Even in the disappointments of them ending, she can still identify highlights. “There was never a failure of love,” she stresses. “There was failure of other things, and the inability, I suppose, to live life the way we wanted to live.”
“Gregory encourages readers to get ‘lost’ in literature and to learn, laugh, cry, escape and be inspired at their own pace”
For all the changes in Gregory’s life, two things have remained constant: her passion for history and her proclivity for asking questions. Over the course of this interview, she has asked almost as many of me as I have of her.
Gregory is a firm supporter of libraries, believing that the world would be a better place if people spent more time in them. They are “just as important as food banks”, in her opinion. “They are outposts of safety for us all, cultural hubs that any government must take seriously.”
She encourages readers to get “lost” in literature and to learn, laugh, cry, escape and be inspired at their own pace. Tangents are often a treasure trove of ideas, Gregory adds. In fact, The Other Boleyn Girl, she reveals, was born out of some research she was doing into Tudor-era pirates at The London Library. “I wanted to do a novel about a woman pirate,” she explains. “I was looking at some old navy manifests and the name Mary Boleyn popped up. I thought, that’s crazy. I’d never heard of her. Because I was in the Library, I pulled down some huge histories and found her name in a few of the footnotes, and that she was Henry VIII’s mistress. It all just went from there.”
Here comes that chronic optimism again. According to Gregory, she has the best job in the world. If she wasn’t a professional author, she guesses she would still be trying to be. “I’m lucky enough to make a living from something I enjoy,” she says. “And it’s not hard work, not in physically demanding circumstances. I can do it from bed, with my morning cup of tea. Actually, I often do.”
In writing and in life, Gregory does not dwell on mistakes. She prefers, instead, to frame them as lessons. Chasing perfection will drive a person mad, she warns, whereas “mistakes can be fun”.
When she is writing, she doesn’t like to “agonise over every word… It’s better to just get things down on the page.” Gregory applies the same approach to life: she says she can’t be sure something is a mistake until she has all the other context around that decision available to her. “And that could take years,” she notes. •
Rohan Banerjee is a journalist based in London, covering arts, culture, business and politics
READING LIST
Four picks from Philippa Gregory’s bookshelf
DELUSIONS OF GENDER: THE REAL SCIENCE BEHIND SEX DIFFERENCES BY CORDELIA FINE (2010)
Gregory shuns any idea that there are intended ways for men and women to dress, act, live or love. Cordelia Fine’s treatise, she says, is “probably the book I recommend most for answering the nurture-nature questions” that appear to be cropping up more and more amid the modern culture wars that she says she finds so tedious.
Find it in: S.Psychology; Fine, Cordelia
SIMPLE GIFTS BY
JOANNE GREENBERG
(1986)
Joanne Greenberg’s novel – about a humble family on a Colorado ranch who are offered money by a government agent to turn their livelihood into a tourist attraction –is a favourite. “It’s a wonderful book that makes a social comedy out of the heritage business,” Gregory says.
Find it in: Fiction; Greenberg, Joanne
CLOSE TO HOME: A MATERIALIST ANALYSIS OF WOMEN’S OPPRESSION BY CHRISTINE DELPHY (1984)
“It takes a French philosopher to explain why men’s wages are higher than women’s,” jokes Gregory, who is a fan of leading feminist Christine Delphy’s analysis of gender relations and patriarchy under capitalism. Does having nice things let the sisterhood down? Gregory suspects not.
Find it in: Science & Miscellaneous
MINE OWN EXECUTIONER BY NIGEL
BALCHIN (1945)
After finding this novel in a secondhand bookshop, Gregory read Balchin’s entire output. Thanks to its “timeless honesty about relationships and professional boundaries,” this remains her favourite. “It is poignant, but with a redeeming sense of the goodness of people.”
Find it in: Fiction; Balchin, Nigel
“I
Jacques Testard:
feel quite strongly that the publisher’s role is to stay in the shadows.”
FOR 10 STARTER
A decade on from Fitzcarraldo Editions’ first book, founder Jacques Testard tells Seb Emina what he set out to do, why he backs “difficult” literature – and what comes next
Photography by Tori Ferenc
This year marks the 10th anniversary of the following: the podcast Serial , the musical Hamilton , the dating app Bumble, and the publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions. All have been successful in their relevant spheres. Some have made immense amounts of money. But only one has seen its founder summoned to the Nobel Prize award ceremony on four separate occasions. Fitzcarraldo Editions was founded by Jacques Testard when he was just 29 years old. The company is named after the 1982 Werner Herzog film, Fitzcarraldo, about an attempt to transport a steamship over a Peruvian mountain – a metaphor for the absurd folly of setting up a publishing company. Nonetheless, Fitzcarraldo Editions has dragged more than 100 books over the mountain, by 80 authors including Svetlana Alexievich, Olga Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse – winners of the 2015, 2018, 2022 and 2023 Nobel Prizes in Literature, respectively –
as well as other literary success stories such as Claire-Louise Bennett, Joshua Cohen, Sheila Heti, Ben Lerner, Ian Penman and Adania Shibli.
This has made Testard into an incredibly rare sort of person: a well-known figure from the publishing industry. “I feel quite strongly that the publisher’s role is to stay in the shadows,” he says. However, when I ask how he feels about this: “The reason I do interviews is not because of a desire for any personal acclaim, but because it helps the books and it helps the authors.”
A decade of Fitzcarraldo Editions means a decade since the publication of its first book, Zone, by the French author Mathias Énard. Translated into English by Charlotte Mandell, it has a set-up that, while fascinating, wouldn’t necessarily serve as a siren call to a casual reader; Testard describes it to me as “a 521-page stream of consciousness novel about violence in the 20th century, written in one
“I wanted the first book to be a mission statement. Fitzcarraldo was going to be a publisher that took risks on extraordinary books”
sentence”. But that refusal to be “easy”, even during the fragile outset of the Fitzcarraldo project, served as a calling card. “I wanted the first book to be a mission statement,” he says. “Fitzcarraldo was going to be a publisher that took risks on these extraordinary books that other publishers would think were maybe too commercially difficult.”
Zone ’s simple cover design, plain blue (specifically International Klein Blue, developed by the French postwar artist, Yves Klein) with the title and author written in white text, would be replicated in all of the publisher’s fiction releases. Nonfiction ones would be the same but reversed, so a white background and blue text. This hypnotic
uniformity was shaped by Fitzcarraldo Editions’ art director Ray O’Meara, but had its roots also in Testard’s background: he was born in Paris to French parents, who moved to London when he was five years old.
“I grew up with Gallimard and Minuit,” he says (these being iconic French publishing houses using similarly restrained jacket designs). “When Ray and I first talked about the design, it was immediately clear that we’d go with a continental minimalist aesthetic. It was partly a response to the Anglophone tendency to literally interpret the contents of the book on a cover, and partly because if you have a distinctive look that cuts across what everyone
“It felt as if translated literature in English was relegated to its own subgenre”
else is doing, and you publish books of a high literary quality, people might start to pick them up not necessarily knowing the author.”
He graduated in history from Trinity College, Dublin, before studying for a masters in the same subject at Oxford. It was during an internship in Paris, at the publisher Autrement, that Testard realised “books could be the thing”. There, he served as assistant to founder Henry Dougier, “a very peculiar guy, quite old school”, who would write emails in longhand for Testard to type up and send.
After spending time in New York and being impressed by the city’s magazine culture, he and Ben Eastham, a friend from Trinity, decided to set up a London equivalent. This was The White Review, which they founded in 2011. At the same time, Testard took on a range of “odd jobs and marginal book world stuff”, the most financially significant of which was a stint doing English-language editing for Monde, a journal about global diplomacy by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. His first solid publishing job was at Notting Hill Editions, a publisher of book-length essays founded by Tom Kremer, a one-time game entrepreneur whose successes included the popularisation of the Rubik’s Cube. As commissioning editor, Testard’s first two acquisitions were smart and well-timed:
Things I Don’t Want to Know by a soon-to-be-famous Deborah Levy, and Attention!: A Short History by Joshua Cohen (Cohen is now published by Fitzcarraldo).
In December 2013, Testard lost his job at Notting Hill Editions. It wasn’t personal: “Everyone got sacked.” Backed by a loan offer from a family member, Testard, along with publishing director Paul Keegan, tried and failed to purchase the company from Kremer. The hypothetical loan, which was for £70,000, morphed into an offer to support a new venture. “It was more money than I’d ever even imagined before, way more than I’d earned in my short career in publishing,” Testard recalls. “On the other hand, when you know about books and how much they cost to make, it really is not very much at all.”
Of the six books Fitzcarraldo Editions published in its first year, three were translated. That Testard reads in French and English indiscriminately was an important point of distinction in a myopic industry. “It always felt to me as if translated literature in English was relegated to its own subgenre,” he says.
Still, these past 10 years have seen an uptick in interest. “People under 35 are now the biggest proportion of readers of work in translation,” he says. “I feel like that’s quite telling with respect to our post-Brexit cultural moment,
Right: All Fitzcarraldo Editions books have a distinctive, uniform cover design, with blue for fiction and white for non-fiction. Photo: Courtesy of Fitzcarraldo Editions
“Fitzcarraldo is first and foremost an intellectual project”
Testard has edited books including Nobel winner Second-Hand Time by Svetlana Alexievich at the Library
and reflective of how older people voted for Brexit and young people overwhelmingly didn’t. There’s a sense maybe young people are interested in what is happening outside the borders of the UK. That’s quite a nice thing.”
Testard describes his move into translated literature as less ruthless business manoeuvre than happy accident. “I would not have been able to publish those writers had I set up a publishing house in almost any European country, because all of the authors we publish, from the Nobel winners to Mathias Énard and Maria Stepanova, have the best publishers in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and so on. My stroke of luck was to be interested in translation at a time when other Anglophone publishers weren’t interested in systematically publishing this kind of ambitious writing.” Lately, Fitzcarraldo publishes 20 books a year, still retaining a 50/50 philosophy: half fiction, half nonfiction, half work in English, half in translation.
Asked about other developments he’s been excited about this past decade, Testard speaks of the boom in independent publishers. Any favourites? “And Other Stories was a small indie start-up four or five years before us. Galley Beggar has obviously had great success, particularly with English language books. Then, more recently, there have been presses like Peninsula and Lolli.”
For this conversation, Testard – tousled hair, beardstubble hybrid – is on a sofa outside Fitzcarraldo Editions’ open-plan office in Deptford, south London. Given the eight full-time members of staff the company employs, the office isn’t conducive to editing manuscripts, for which he decamps to The London Library. His preferred chair?
“I usually go on the first floor of the stacks above the reading room, facing onto St James’s Square. If I get there early enough, I will always try to nab the far right seat, because you get more of a view of the trees,” he says.
The Fitzcarraldo translation of The Books of Jacob, the epic 2014 novel by Olga Tokarczuk, was edited in that seat, as was Second-Hand Time, Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of the collapse of the Soviet Union – which Testard acquired thanks to a lack of interest from other English-language
publishers, despite her towering stature in the rest of the world (she’d been hotly tipped for the Nobel Prize the year before she actually won). Last year, Fitzcarraldo launched a classics list, an upcoming title of which is Memories of a Catholic Girlhood, the celebrated memoir of the American writer and left-wing activist Mary McCarthy, originally published in 1957. Testard caught wind of it in the Library “while browsing through very old issues of the TLS [Times Literary Supplement]”.
To mark its first decade, Fitzcarraldo Editions is publishing a series of 10 limited-edition hardbacks that draws from its list so far. These include all the Nobel winners, plus titles such as You Have Not Yet Been Defeated , a collection of the work of Egyptian writer, activist and political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah. The publisher’s new poetry list will launch in January with the debut collection of Oluwaseun Olayiwola, a London-based poet.
Testard says that, more than anything, the move into classics and poetry is a way of expanding what’s possible. “Fitzcarraldo is first and foremost an intellectual project,” he says. “Obviously it has to be commercially viable but –to paraphrase Kurt Wolff, who was the founder of Pantheon books in the US – it’s always the word above the number. I think there was a sense that we could and wanted to publish more, but if we were to publish more contemporary books, we might reach a point where they start cannibalising each other, competing against each other, and that felt undesirable.”
Has he ever been tempted to sell up? Become an imprint in a bigger organisation? “Absolutely not. The model I’m interested in is that of the exclusively literary indie press.” He lists inspirations, such as New Directions in the US, which was founded in 1936; Graywolf Press, a not-for-profit based in Minneapolis; and European publishers like Adelphi in Italy and Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany. “I want to do this for as long as I’ll be able to read and run a business,” he says. •
Seb Emina is a writer and editor based in Paris
READING LIST
A flavour of Fitzcarraldo Editions in four books
An utterly unusual collection of short stories, all set in a coastal village and seemingly with the same narrator. “It’s been the gateway book for so many of our readers,” says Testard. “It’s become a cult book that has, I think, sold 25,000 copies in print. We’ve reprinted it 13 times.”
Find it in: Fiction; Bennett, Claire
THE YEARS BY ANNIE ERNAUX (2018)
If there is a subtle motif running through the Fitzcarraldo catalogue, says Testard, it is “an interest in memory, and the weight of history on the present”. Nowhere is that subtext more present than in Ernaux’s masterpiece (translated by Alison L Strayer) in which the Nobel winner “invents a form to write about the passing of time”. Find it in: Biography; Ernaux, Annie; and online
ESSAYISM BY BRIAN DILLON (2017)
Dillon’s book on essays covers their history and their possibilities, with reference to many practitioners: Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, William H Gass. Testard says it is “a manifesto for the essay form and also an example of what the essay can do”.
Find it in: L. Literature; Hist. of (Gen.), Dillon, Brian
DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD BY OLGA TOKARCZUK (2018)
Testard describes this novel by Polish Nobel Laureate Tokarczuk (translated by Antonia Lloyd Jones) as “a pastiche of the murder mystery done in a very unusual and playful way”. Having sold more than 150,000 copies in print so far, it is “the other major gateway drug into the Fitzcarraldo catalogue”.
Find it in: Fiction; Tokarczuk, Olga
POND BY CLAIRE-LOUISE BENNETT (2015)
Karen Armstrong pictured in St James’s Square
LEAPS FAITH
Nun, academic, anti-Catholic controversialist, broadcaster, campaigner and religious historian – Karen Armstrong has had many roles. Alex McFadyen finds out about her lifelong dance with God
Photography by Jasper Fry
Karen Armstrong has a knack for reinvention. Born in the West Midlands in 1944 to Irish Catholic parents, at the age of 17 she entered the religious order the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus and lived as a nun for seven years. The convent was a place out of time – one governed by the Victorian morals of its founders. News from the outside world was scarce (a rare exception was made for the Cuban Missile Crisis). “It was tough,” says Armstrong, who says she was a “sensitive little soul” – though few could have coped well with the harsh discipline and loneliness. “Even though we were sleeping in dormitories, we were not allowed to have friendships,” she says. “We were in silence for most of the time.”
Thankfully, for those who have found her books so instructive, Armstrong would not spend the rest of her life being silenced. Gradually, the order’s uncompromising regime began to chafe against a newly liberalising Catholic Church. Between 1962 and 1965, the Second Vatican Council instituted reforms that were radical for an organisation that prides itself on millennia of continuity. They touched on religious practice (in 1965, for the first time, Mass was partially conducted in vernacular languages, as opposed to Latin, with priests facing towards the congregation) and religious training.
By the late 1960s, Armstrong was studying English literature at Oxford University at St Anne’s, which was an all-women’s college at the time. But she was still living within the psychological and physical confines of the order, lodging at its Oxford convent. Armstrong longed for human connection. There was “a great deal of tension” caused by the Vatican reforms, she says, and as the order struggled to adapt to its new paradigm, she came to the decision to leave. Rome granted her dispensation from her vows in 1969 and suddenly she was free, if completely unprepared for her new life. She began her first reinvention.
“There I was in this habit, with no friends and no clothes,” she says. “I knew that Catholics had tea together
in one of the college rooms and I thought, well, they’re Catholics, at least they’d know something about this. We all raced off to Marks & Spencer and bought some clothes for me. I had been dreading it but they made it fun. It was what had been missing in my life, which had been a loving, supportive class of women.”
Armstrong graduated with a Congratulatory First, a rare honour bestowed on only the most exceptional students, and decided her new vocation was academia. Then she was dealt a “complete blow” when her PhD thesis on Alfred Tennyson was failed on a technicality. Dame Helen Louise Gardner, at the time the Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, one of the university’s most senior members of staff, described the situation as an “injustice”, but once again Armstrong had found herself the victim of an ancient, unbending institution. Another reinvention was due.
She moved to London, and took up a teaching post at James Allen’s Girls’ School in Dulwich. Meanwhile, she was writing her first book, Through the Narrow Gate, a memoir about her time as a nun. It sold well and was quickly followed by Beginning the World, about her transition to life outside the order. The success of the books – including the details she had shared about the most draconian aspects of convent life – created a new, controversial identity for Armstrong: as a strident critic of the Catholic Church and organised religion. Nowadays, she regards both her second memoir and her 1986 book, The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity Creation of the Sex War in the West, as “superficial, but clever. Of course, a lot of the British particularly liked that, that cleverness and spitefulness.”
Perhaps it was this quality in her writing that led the newly launched Channel 4 to come knocking in 1984, to commission a six-part documentary series based on her book from the previous year, The First Christian: Saint Paul’s Impact on Christianity. Armstrong’s unusual background as a highly educated former nun was a good fit for a channel that wanted to cast a secular eye at the topic. Armstrong the television presenter emerged.
“It was what had been missing in my life, which had been a loving, supportive class of women”
More than 700,000 copies of Armstrong’s seminal 1993 work, A History of God, have been sold worldwide
“If I was going to write about religion, I had to do it wholeheartedly and seriously”
Sacred Nature, from 2022, Armstrong’s most recent book, examines the causes of the current climate crisis
Making the documentary proved to be a decisive experience. She travelled to the Middle East to visit the Holy Lands, warming to her “tough, rude” Israeli production team and to the Palestinians she met with (to the “astonishment” of her handlers). Visiting the region and seeing first hand the “vast gulf” between the two sides of the conflict planted a seed of doubt about her writing style. It would germinate in the early 1990s, when she was taken on by literary agent Felicity Bryan, who had just set up her business. “Felicity had not the slightest bit of religion in her body,” says Armstrong. “But I knew I couldn’t be doing this cheap and nasty thing, being clever and snide, with her. She had integrity.” Armstrong’s seminal 1993 work, A History of God, soon followed – a sweeping survey of every major religion, since translated into 40 languages.
Bryan died in 2020. At the funeral, Armstrong was reminded that A History of God was the agency’s first international bestseller. But “what Felicity gave me was far more important: if I was going to write about religion, I had to do it wholeheartedly and seriously.” And so came her final reinvention – for the past three decades Armstrong has been regarded as one of the most diligent historians of religion and a thoughtful, independent commentator on contemporary religious affairs. The New York Times described her work as “magisterial”. In 2008, she won the $100,000 TED prize, which she used to bring together faith leaders to craft an international Charter for Compassion
Her most recent book, 2022’s Sacred Nature , is a history of the natural world in religion. Described by The Wall Street Journal as “a lamentation in the key of Greta Thunberg, with undertones of Carl Jung”, it argues that the root cause of the climate crisis is not just the global economic reliance on fossil fuels. That is a symptom: a consequence of the Enlightenment-era reframing of God as separate from Earth, which exists for human exploitation.
The belief that the natural world is, itself, divine is a powerful antidote to industrialisation at all costs, argues Armstrong. Astonishingly, she says that she had to do very little new research for the book – she had been immersed in the topics for decades. “I just wrote it off the top of my head, frankly,” she says, and her publisher requested minimal revisions. The Guardian called it a book “filled with a timeless wisdom and deep humanity”.
While writing, Armstrong lives an almost hermitlike existence at her home in Islington, north London, not even visiting The London Library, which she joined in the 1980s at the start of her career. The richness of the collection is a gift and a curse, she explains – when she is working on a book, she stays away, “otherwise I’d go off on a little tangent. You’re going to look at something about the Trinity, for example, and there is a whole range of books that makes you see how complex the whole thing is. I love wandering around those shelves, I always feel at home there.” Indeed, she rarely strays beyond the fifthfloor Religion collection – preferring to “zoom up and come back with another pile of books”.
Though she turns 80 in November, there is no sign of her slowing down: she is now working on a book that explores the concept of equality in every world religion. She has “just about finished the Chinese [religions], the Confucians and the Daoists”, and is moving on to Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. Using religion as a lens to examine contemporary concerns is a powerful way to increase its relevance for a secular audience. But, Armstrong argues, for the faithful, religion is a response to another issue at the heart of modern society – a way for humanity to “avoid falling into despair”. In the wake of the Covid19 pandemic, which the World Health Organization reported led to a 25% increase in the prevalence of anxiety and depression worldwide, there is no doubt that people are looking for solace.
That is not to say Armstrong has returned to the Catholic Church. She says she is “not really” religious at all these days. Art and literature, she points out, also give life meaning, though she admires some teachings. “What all religions are trying to do is make us not be egoistic,” she says. “All of them are about kenosis, emptying yourself, getting beyond that selfishness that makes us harm other people or that simply cocoons us in an ego.”
As for her own ego – that is kept in check by a close, mostly atheist, social circle. “My friends think I’m insane to be writing about religion,” she says with a chuckle. “They never read my books.” Thankfully, there are millions of us who do. •
Alex McFadyen is the editor of this magazine
EVENTS
Discover the essential short story ingredients, enjoy a jazz-themed poetry night and celebrate Christmas with your fellow members
17
October
DUETS
Duets is the new anthology from groundbreaking short story publisher Scratch Books, created by eight pairs of writers who have penned highly original stories that subvert the short story form. Contributing authors Jon McGregor, Gurnaik Johal, Ruby Cowling and Anna Wood join author and short story aficionado Chris Power to read excerpts, dissect the strange and exciting process of writing together, and delve into the intricacies of crafting a short story.
7pm – 8pm, in person
18 October
WRITE AND SHINE: WAYS OF SEEING –CECIL BEATON
Start your day with a burst of creativity and join Write and Shine, live from The Reading Room, for a 90-minute virtual writing workshop that takes inspiration from the fashion photographer and costume designer Cecil Beaton, who joined
the Library as a member in the 1940s. You will spend the morning writing in response to images by Beaton, exploring his love of theatre and distinctive visual style. You will not be expected to share your writing, which offers great freedom and encourages all kinds of fascinating ideas to emerge.
7.45am – 9.15am, online
Above left: The cover of short story anthology Duets
Above: Society photographer Cecil Beaton pictured in his London studio in 1967. Photo: Roger Bamber / Alamy Stock Photo
7 November
THE R.A.P. PARTY @ THE LONDON LIBRARY: JAZZ
Poet and playwright Inua Ellams brings his exhilarating live literature phenomenon, The R.A.P Party, back to 14 St James’s Square for a nostalgic, no-clutter, no-fuss evening of music and words in partnership with the Royal Society of Literature. This time, as London gears up for its annual jazz festival, the Library gets in on the act by bringing you a line-up of jazz-loving writers, including: Jumoké Fashola, Soweto Kinch, Hannah Lowe, André Marmot, Katie Melua, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Ami Rao, Miryam Solomon, Jack Underwood, Derek Owusu and Varaidzo, with R.A.P Party regular, DJ Tone, playing their favourite jazz tunes.
7pm – 9.30pm, in person
14 November THE INTERNATIONAL LIBRARY: QUEER MIGRATIONS
The series of conversations across time, place and language returns, in partnership with global colleagues at the American Library in Paris, the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco and The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. Authors Gaar Adams and Sulaiman Addonia join Isabelle Dupuy to discuss their new books, both of which consider the complex intersections of queerness and migration, subversion and assimilation, and ask what constitutes a home.
7.30pm – 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
11 December
SAVE THE DATE: THE LONDON LIBRARY MEMBERS’ PARTY
Raise a glass to the festive season with your fellow Library members and staff. Booking is essential. More details to be announced soon.
6.30pm – 8.30pm, in person
24 January
CURATOR’S TOUR: MICHELANGELO, LEONARDO, RAPHAEL
The London Library is delighted to offer its Patrons an exclusive tour of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Flore nce, c 1504 , the Royal Academy’s flagship exhibition of its winter season. At the turn of the 16th century, three titans of the Italian Renaissance briefly crossed paths, competing for the attention of the most powerful patrons in Florence. The exhibition explores the rivalry between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and the influence both had on the young Raphael.
Join us for expert-led access to some of the finest examples of Italian Renaissance drawing, including da Vinci’s The Burlington House Cartoon
This is a London Library Patrons event. If you would like to become a Patron, contact patrons@londonlibrary.co.uk.
8am – 10am, in person
Inua Ellams hosting a previous edition of The R.A.P Party in the Reading Room in 2022
Author,
Robert McKee Author, 'Story'
BENEFITING FROM A GROWING AND GENEROUS MEMBERSHIP
The Library’s Treasurer, Philip Broadley, reviews the 2023–24 financial year: a second year achieving an operating surplus
The Library’s annual report, covering the year to 31 March 2024, is now available for members to read on the Library’s website. The performance is summarised in this article.
The Library has benefited once again from many generous donations that, together with the substantial legacy income recognised last year, has allowed significant renovation of the Library’s estate and investment in the technology to support its operations, notably in adding new records to Catalyst and placing 820,000 security tags throughout the collection.
Membership and usage
For the sixth successive year we saw growth in net membership. The year ended with 7,540 members. We welcomed more than 1,200 new members in all categories. This was offset by 1,147 members leaving the Library: our retention rate of 85% showed a small but welcome improvement of two percentage points. Membership has slipped back a little in the first five months of the current financial year. The trustees are aware of the continuing pressures on everyone’s income. We believe it is important to do everything we can to retain members by maintaining service levels while keeping membership
fees as low as possible. At the AGM in November, trustees will be proposing fee increases averaging 3%, reflecting the expected increase in the Library’s costs over the coming year. I draw attention to the discounts offered to members paying by annual Direct Debit. If you do not already use this method, switching to it more than offsets the proposed increase.
Members borrowed almost 60,000 books in the year, an increase of 5% on the previous year. We increased expenditure on acquisitions of printed and digital material by 19% this year to £328,000. Almost 4,300 printed items were added to the catalogue.
Financial review
The table on page 49 summarises the results of the past three years and shows that this year the Library’s total funds increased by £120,000. Membership and trading income increased by 5% as the number of members grew and in-person events and external hires increased. The total operating costs of running the Library increased by 15%, mainly due to repairs and project expenditure funded by current and recent donations.
Net fundraising income of almost £1.1m was less than half
that of the previous year, but this was as expected. Our exceptional income from legacies in 2023 was not repeated this year, but donations to restricted funds increased almost threefold.
Each year-end, the Library’s financial investments are reported at their market value. There was an increase of 7.5% in the value of the investment portfolio to £7.9m. We also recognise a small decrease of £42,000 in the accounting surplus of the Staff Superannuation Fund (SSF). A surplus of £760,000 is reported in the accounts but the trustees do not consider this to be available to the Library.
At year-end the Library held total funds of £31.8m, of which endowment funds represent £6.2m and restricted income funds £1.65m.
The trustees appointed the Library’s current investment managers eight years ago. Since then, the value of the Library’s endowment and restricted funds have increased 2.5 times, thanks to some significant legacies. The increased value of these funds allows a wider choice of investment opportunities and portfolio construction.
The trustees have decided to conduct a competitive tender involving several fund managers and I expect to report on the outcome at the AGM.
The value of donations
We have once again received substantial support from members and supporters, all of whom are listed over three pages in the annual report. Such support is vital for an organisation that receives no regular public funding. The trustees thank everyone who has supported the Library in this or previous years.
Membership income currently covers only two-thirds of the operating costs of the Library. Our remaining costs must be met from investment income and donations. The generous legacies of recent years from Drue Heinz and Christopher Smith support our acquisitions and collection care budgets. Last year’s legacies from Gweslan Lloyd and Susan Batty
allowed us to augment the Tom Stoppard Innovation Fund and establish a Repair and Renovation Fund to improve the Library’s fabric over several years. The future development of the Library set out in the Building Connections plans can only be achieved through fundraising.
Operating results since 2018
+£17k Surplus
Operating results
A return to operating surplus
A key objective of our strategic plan was the elimination of the operating deficit by 2023–24. This target was achieved last year and a small surplus of £17,000 was achieved this year. Progress since 2018 is shown in the graph on page 48. The trustees expect to report a small surplus for the year to March 2025.
After eight years as Treasurer, I will retire at the AGM. It has been a privilege to serve the Library and its members. I wish my successor John Colenutt, with whom I have worked for the past four years, every success and look forward to supporting the Library in the future.
MEET A MEMBER
Writer and prison educator DD Armstrong on the power of storytelling
In 2019, Jacaranda Books approached me for its TwentyIn2020: Black Writers, British Voices project, suggesting I write a sequel to my debut novel, Lynch’s Road, a fictional autobiography of an ex-drug dealer. I had another idea: during a school writing workshop I led in Harlesden, London, the head of English said that a lot of the boys couldn’t relate to the curriculum – that was the spark for Ugly Dogs Don’t Cry, my modern, west London-set retelling of Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice and Men, which Michael Gove removed from the GCSE curriculum in 2014.
But I had writer’s block. Then, The London Library offered the TwentyIn2020 authors a two-year membership. It became a sanctuary where everything flowed. Two years later, I wasn’t sure I could afford to continue, until I learned about Supported Membership, which is testament to the Library’s commitment to inclusion.
I’ve got a colourful background but, through writing, I transformed and reinvented myself. I was expelled from school and, through association, I was arrested. During my year on remand, a cell mate gave me Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was the first book I read from front to back outside of school. I started writing short stories to express myself and when I got a verdict of not guilty, I came home and brought that passion with me.
In 2007, I was a script consultant on Noel Clarke’s Adulthood, which enabled me to get work experience with the BBC Writers’ scheme. Lynch’s Road was published in 2009 and I went on to study for a Master’s degree in writing for stage and screen at Regent’s University London. In 2013, I wrote my first play – You Know What You Are, about racism in football – with the Talawa Theatre Company.
For 11 years, I’ve also been volunteering at schools and teaching self-development through creative writing in prisons. We use characters to discuss sensitive issues, identify triggers and challenge decision-making. I’ve met guys who’ve been successful after leaving prison – it started with them envisioning it. Storytelling is our most powerful tool.
I’ve definitely seen a younger and more diverse cohort of writers coming to the Library. I invited a friend to visit and as we were looking at pictures on the central staircase, I realised there was one of the 20 Jacaranda writers –there’s a picture of me. That was a real wow moment.
The irony that I should find myself in the same institution where Stoker researched his novel is not lost on me. We are from different worlds but writing brought us to the same place. Supported membership kept me there. •
Interview by Deniz Nazim-Englund
Above: The Bubbles Rug Left to right: Shoal of Fish Wall Hanging, The Sonia and Sonya Runner and The After Matisse Rug. Bespoke
‘A riveting tale of a flamboyant character, thoughtfully and vividly evoked’
ALICE LOXTON, THE TELEGRAPH
The story of William Waters, Black street performer in Regency London, and how his huge celebrity took on a life of its own
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‘Detailed, illuminating, accessible and engagingly partisan’
MATTHEW DENNISON, COUNTRY LIFE
A spirited and essential companion to Orwell and his works, covering all the novels and major essays
