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Jessie Burton Tom Holland Victoria Hislop
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June 2020
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CO N T EN T S DISPATCHES
D. Welcome
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D. News
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D. Collection Story
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D. From the Archive
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D. Corner of the Library
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Keeping Members Posted Uncommon Person Together in Isolation Lifting Lockdown Celebrating EM Forster Have You Written a Book?
FEATURES
F. In it for the Books
Jessie Burton, author of The Confession, describes how the Library helps her bring myriad settings to life
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F. Enlightened Thinking
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F. Home from Home
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How Tom Holland became the author of a book on the history of Christianity, via dinosaurs
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Why Victoria Hislop considers the Library a community as much as a resource for her fiction
LAST WORDS
L. Events
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L. Meet a Member
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Sports journalist, author and broadcaster Mihir Bose
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FOR THE LONDON LIBRARY Julian Lloyd Head of Communications Felicity Nelson Membership Director The London Library 14 St James’s Square London SW1Y 4LG (020) 7766 4700 magazine@londonlibrary.co.uk
W EL CO M E We’re looking forward to welcoming you back to St James’s Square soon
EDITORIAL: CULTURESHOCK Contributors Edward Behrens, Rachel Potts, Alexander Morrison Photography Lara Downie (cover) Art Director Alfonso Iacurci Designer Luke Smith Production Editor Suzie McCracken 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 © 2020. All rights reserved. Charity No. 312175. Cultureshock 27b Tradescant Road London SW8 1XD (020) 7735 9263 cultureshockmedia.co.uk @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 to The London Library Magazine. I very much hope you enjoy our latest articles and, in particular, the happy news that we are planning to reopen to members in July. We will need to put in place some measures to ensure that members and staff can use the building and collection safely and we are in the process of working out those details as this goes to print (see page 7). However, I am certain that, whatever the limitations, we will be able to take a major step towards resuming normal service. The last few months have, of course, been hugely challenging and I am very proud of how the Library staff has pulled together. We have managed to continue running our postal loans service, deliver new online events and keep working hard behind the scenes to ensure that the Library is in the best position to reopen soon. I am extremely grateful for the many messages of support we have received. This has been a lovely reminder of the special sense of community that exists at the Library. Members’ enthusiastic use of the Library from afar has also underlined just how important our collection is. In these exceptional times, we might turn to books to help place what is happening in its wider human context, or to take us on a welcome diversion. We are delighted to be able to provide you with plenty of reading material. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has continued to support us either by renewing their subscriptions or making a donation (or both!). The current situation presents a very serious financial challenge but with your ongoing support we can be more hopeful about the future. Reopening in July will be a very special moment and I am looking forward to welcoming you all back to the Library as soon you feel able to join us. Philip Marshall, Director
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26 SEPTEMBER - 4 OCTOBER 2020 HENLEYLITERARYFESTIVAL.CO.UK
NEWS
KEEPING MEMBERS POSTED The Library’s successful postal loans system has been keeping its members well-read in this time of lockdown. When the Library closed its doors on 17 March, it faced the possibility that for almost the only time in its history, its books would no longer be available to borrow. Thomas Carlyle’s adage – “My books are friends that never fail me” – was at risk of being proved wrong. But postal loans have proved the hero of the hour. Through the outstanding efforts of staff, book lending has continued during the coronavirus lockdown, giving members anywhere in the world access to the collection. After an initial trial, a system was designed that has enabled a handful of staff to access the Library on two days per week in order to fulfil orders submitted online. The dedicated team – participating entirely of their own volition – have all been travelling independently to the Library rather than via public transport (and many over considerable distances). Carefully coordinated routines enable appropriate social distancing, and work spaces are sanitised daily. Maximum book allowances were increased for all members and postage charges waived. Within days of the service starting, nearly 1,000 books were dispatched and the Issue Hall began to resemble a logistics warehouse. One member described the initiative as “a literary Berlin airlift”.
It marks a further chapter in the history of the Library’s postal loans – or “Country Orders” service – offered from the day it opened in 1841. Thomas Carlyle assisted Charles Dickens’s research for A Tale of Two Cities, 1859, by personally selecting the best books on the French Revolution from the shelves and sending them to Dickens’s house in a cart. Many of those books are almost certainly still on the Library’s shelves. Christabel Pankhurst joined in 1913 while living in Paris and increased her borrowing limit twice in her first year of membership. Sebastian Faulks was reliant on the postal service when writing Charlotte Gray, 1998. With the Bibliothèque Nationale unable to provide the books he needed, The London Library responded to an urgent fax from Paris with a shipment of books that arrived within days. Countless other members have benefited from having books posted to them during the Library’s 179-year history, but perhaps at no other time has the service been such a lifeline.
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For more information visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ postal-loans-service
Books awaiting dispatch
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NEWS
UNCOMMON PERSON Musician Jarvis Cocker has revealed the five books that have most influenced him on The London Library’s latest podcast. Beginning with the tales that the Brothers Grimm “found in the wild”, Cocker also discussed Richard Brautigan’s surreal comic novel Sombrero Fallout, southern gothic masterpiece The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, the apocalyptic Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari and The Book of the Secrets, a book on meditation by the controversial Indian guru Bhagwan Shri Rajneesh. Cocker, who is also a broadcaster and editor, has enjoyed a music career spanning three decades with the band Pulp and most recently as part of his Jarv Is collective.
In recent years he has also been involved with publishing house Faber & Faber, and books have always been part of his life. Through reading, he said, “for a moment you are inhabiting someone’s consciousness. That’s amazing, it’s like a magic trick.” On the Library, he said: “I like that you can wander through these canyons with books on either side of you and see what leaps out of the shadows to catch your interest.” To hear Cocker talk about his choices, download the latest podcast on the Library’s website. New episodes are released each month.
T O G E T H ER I N I S O L AT I O N
LI F T I N G L O C K D OW N
Members have been forming virtual groups, sustaining the Library’s sense of community during the enforced closure of its building due to the coronavirus pandemic. A Non-Fiction Group, History Group, and PhD Group have recently formed, following in the footsteps of the venerable Philosophy Group which has been meeting regularly for several years. For many members, the spirit of shared endeavour and the proximity of like-minded contacts with whom to directly discuss their ideas is a real motivator for their work. Membership can also bring with it a sense of association – however diffuse and intangible – with a community of creative people, collectively seeking knowledge, information and ideas. It is hoped that new groups will go from strength to strength when normal access to the Library returns.
The Library is looking to reopen its building in early July as the national restrictions caused by Covid-19 ease. The entire borrowing collection will be accessible, and around 60% of desk capacity available in the first stage of opening, enabling members to socially distance while working. To limit numbers inside the building, members will also be required to book in advance and special routines will be in place for handling, issuing and returning books. Wherever possible, members will also be encouraged to browse and order books online. The lockers and sixth-floor members’ area will be closed and a one-way route will be in place through the Issue Hall (entering via the St James’s Square front entrance and exiting via the Mason’s Yard members’ door). While not yet business as usual, after months of lockdown this is a huge step towards returning the Library to normal operations. As reopening preparations are finalised, the Library would like to thank its members who have provided such wonderful support and encouragement during the recent closure.
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To find out more or to join any of these groups, please contact communications@londonlibrary.co.uk
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londonlibrary.co.uk/about-us/podcast
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Details of new opening arrangements can be found at londonlibrary.co.uk/reopening Jarvis Cocker in the Stacks. Photo: Alasdair McLellan
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NEWS
C E L E B R AT I N G E M F O R S T E R This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of EM Forster, a longtime member and former London Library Vice-President. The writer’s aunt gave him life membership in 1906, a year after he published his first book, Where Angels Fear to Tread. Forster’s reputation as a literary figure was enormous. A novelist, frequent commentator, essayist, short-story writer, librettist and broadcaster, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature on 16 occasions. The Longest Journey, 1907, A Room with a View, 1908, and Howards End, 1910, established Forster as an author of international renown in his early 30s. His greatest success came with A Passage to India, the last novel published in his lifetime, in 1924 (Maurice was published posthumously in 1971). A highly involved member of The London Library, Forster actively brought new members in – including Siegfried Sassoon – and was a Committee Member throughout the war. He played a significant part in saving the Library from bankruptcy in 1960 (see p12), before becoming Vice-President in 1961.
Commemorating its centenary in 1941, he wrote in the New Statesman and Nation: “Safe still among the reefs of rubbish, [the Library] seems to be something more than a collection of books. It is a symbol of civilisation. It is a reminder of sanity and a promise of sanity to come.” He saw it as a redoubt in a troubled word. The Library, he said, “has cherished the things of the mind, it has insisted on including all points of view. It caters... for creatures who are trying to be human. 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.” Author Susan Hill was among the last to see him in the Stacks. Her 2009 book Howards End is on the Landing records an encounter with an elderly Forster in the late 1960s, when Hill was an undergraduate. He dropped the book he was gathering on Hill’s foot. Forster died on 7 June 1970, at the age of 91. He had been a Library member for 64 years.
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H AV E YO U W R I T T EN A B O O K ? The Library is seeking to celebrate the range of works that are published by its members and demonstrate how its impact extends far beyond the confines of St James’s Square. Although the display window in Mason’s Yard profiles new books written by members that have entered the collection, it is a limited space. The Library would like to do more to showcase its members’ work and show how the collection is helping inform a huge range of published output. If you have a new book being published in the second half of 2020, please let the Library know, especially if the research has drawn on its resources. The Library aims to publish regular updates on the website about what’s
coming up and would be delighted to hear more about what you’re working on. And if you or your publisher would consider donating a copy of your new book, it would make a big difference in helping our acquisition resources stretch further. Space constraints and the need to ensure new books “fit” with our collection mean the Library must be selective about the books it can acquire, but donations can be a real help. The Library looks forward to hearing what its members are working on, and enjoying the impressive and diverse fruits of all their labours.
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To inform the Library of your new publications, email communications@londonlibrary.co.uk
Portrait of EM Forster by Dora Carrington, c.1924–25
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D
uring the recent lockdown and building closure, the Library’s extensive online resources have been more useful than ever. Included with all forms of Library membership, the eLibrary gives access to more than 25,000 online sources, meaning millions of pages from articles and database collections are accessible to members anywhere in the world. The Library’s subscription to the major online archive JSTOR alone gives access to more than 1,700 academic journals, books, primary sources and periodicals. Members can explore millions of digitised articles in the British Newspaper Archive, plus full digital archives of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian and The Observer, the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
Burney Newspapers Collection and more. British History Online provides another huge resource and offers primary sources organised using subject guides such as religion or biography. Other major history research collections include The Bibliography of British and Irish History, the Survey of London, and the Proceedings of the Old Bailey 1674–1913 (described as “the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published”). The Illustrated London News and Country Life archives both provide additional research material, much of it beautifully illustrated, that is ideal for both work and pleasure. Literary journals and collections include Early English Books Online, a full-text database containing digital page images of virtually every work printed in Britain and North
“The eLibrary gives access to over 25,000 online sources”
CO LLE C T I O N S T O RY
America from 1473 to 1700. Members may also access the complete archive of the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, English Poetry (an almost complete anthology of poetry written in English up to 1900) and The Complete Prose of TS Eliot. Our online art resources include the art journals available through JSTOR, in addition to the International Bibliography of Art, Oxford Art Online and more. The eLibrary also has an increasingly important role in enabling the Library to accommodate new books. As explored in Issue 47, the Library’s shelves are now effectively full and it is having to manage the collection to accommodate new material. Online resources can help ease the pressure on space, and in many cases the Library has opted to subscribe to the online rather than print versions of journals and periodicals, saving on shelf space and binding costs. The eLibrary has come into its own during a time of crisis, but its value extends far beyond that. As a major resource, it deserves to be considered in its own right as a fundamental part of the Library's collection.
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Ranging from poetry to criminal trials, the material on offer online is a major library in its own right
(From left) A library at your fingertips; Accessing The Illustrated London News
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F RO M T H E A RC H I V E
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n a June morning in 1960, readers of The Times’ letters page woke up to find Winston Churchill adding his voice to calls to save The London Library from bankruptcy: “The debt of those who have benefited over the years from the services of this famous institution is great. The closing of this most worthy foundation would be a tragedy. I earnestly hope that the appeal will be generously answered.” His letter formed part of a campaign to raise funds as the Library battled with debts of £20,000. It culminated that summer with one of the most memorable outpourings of support the Library had ever witnessed, as members (and non-members including the Queen and Queen Mother) donated items for auction. As the Library negotiates the coronavirus pandemic, this catalogue is a timely reminder that challenges have been faced throughout its history, and the support of members has been essential to its ability to meet them.
“TS Eliot donated a manuscript of The Waste Land that he had personally transcribed”
This auction catalogue tells the story of an extraordinary sale to save The London Library
The story of the auction really begins in 1958, when Westminster Council removed the Library’s exemption from business rates. On appeal the High Court ruled against the Library, and the following day a sympathetic Times reported the verdict under the headline “Philistines Rejoice”. There followed a remarkable rescue operation. JB Priestley offered the typescript of his play Eden End, Edith Sitwell gifted A Song of the Cold and W Somerset Maugham provided the manuscript of his novel Up at the Villa. Aldous Huxley, LP Hartley, Graham Greene, Raymond Mortimer, HE Bates, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman and Evelyn Waugh also offered manuscripts. Henry Moore donated a bronze and there were also paintings by Augustus John, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Vanessa Bell. The Queen donated a book on Cellini from Queen Victoria’s library; the Queen Mother a silver wine cooler.
But the star lots came from the Library’s President and Vice-President. TS Eliot donated a manuscript of The Waste Land that he had personally transcribed, having never kept the original. EM Forster donated a manuscript of A Passage to India, its heavily annotated pages bearing witness to his decade-long, on-off battle to write it. As Forster himself noted: “Scribbles surge up from the margin, they extend tentacles, they interbreed.” His manuscript, acquired for the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, fetched £6,500 – at the time the highest price paid for the work of a living writer. In total, the auction raised more than £25,000, comfortably clearing the debt and releasing funds for future investment. The London Library had lived to fight another day.
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(From left) The auction catalogue; TS Eliot, photographed one Sunday afternoon in 1923. Photo: Lady Ottoline Morrell
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“The new Reading Room made a significant statement about the institution’s place in the world”
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CO R N ER O F T H E LI B R A RY The Library’s Reading Room has been its heart since its 1898 opening
It was 10 in the morning one day in September 1986. Roland had the small table he liked best, behind a square pillar... To his right was a high sunny window, through which you could see the high green leaves of St James’s Square. The London Library was Roland’s favourite place. It was shabby but civilised, alive with history but inhabited also by living poets and thinkers who could be found squatting on the slotted metal floors of the stacks, or arguing pleasantly at the turning of the stair. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves.” So begins AS Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel Possession, in which Roland Mitchell makes a remarkable find inside a book in the Reading Room. This elegant space is often viewed as the Library’s heartland and has inspired many authors. George Smiley has a favourite desk there in John le Carré’s Smiley’s People, 1979. John Julius Norwich claimed that “every sentence” of his books were written there, while, for Tom Holland, “you could go to sleep there and wake up better educated”. The Reading Room was formally opened in December 1898 by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf ’s father and London Library President. Along with the Issue Hall and the famous metal grille Backstacks and St James’s Stacks, it comprised one of the first steel-framed buildings in London, designed by architect George Osborne Smith, erected as the Library gutted the old Georgian building it had occupied since 1845.
The new high-ceilinged Reading Room with generous windows and decorative ceiling and pillars made a significant statement about the institution’s place in the world. It replaced two cramped study rooms at the front of the building. The fireplace still in the Reading Room appears to be the only Georgian feature to have survived the complete transformation of the Library's main working spaces. The Reading Room became L-shaped in the 1930s after being extended when the Library acquired adjacent properties to build the Central Stacks. More recent refurbishment has restored it to its original dimensions, with the Writers' Room screened off to form the two spaces we know today. Now the Library’s largest space, the Reading Room offers a unique environment for quiet study, and its armchairs are famous as places for cerebral repose. But as a space, it works hard: by night (lockdown excepted) hosting events, receptions, theatre, venue hire and filming – earning vital funds and bringing in new audiences. Photos from 1902, shortly after it opened, depict Edwardian ladies and gentlemen studying in a setting that looks very familiar today, particularly the furniture. Some pieces are still in use, as individual desks and chairs dotted around in the Stacks. Who can tell which of the thousands of writers who have worked here would have sat at them?
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(From left) The Reading Room today, and in 1902. Photo: Simon Brown; Photo: GR Sims from the book Living London
§ 17
In it for
the Books
From 1980s Los Angeles to Amsterdam in its Golden Age, Jessie Burton’s novels are full of knowledge gleaned from the Library’s shelves Photo: Ben Turner
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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essie Burton is the author of three highly acclaimed novels for adults and one book for children. Her first novel, The Miniaturist, the tale of Nella and her family in 17th-century Holland, was an international bestseller and marked Burton out as a name to watch. The BBC pounced on it with the same alacrity as other readers and adapted it for television – having trained as an actor, Burton has always known how to create compelling characters. She followed this with The Muse, set in 1960s London and Civil-War Spain, and a feminist updating of the fairytale of The Twelve Dancing Princesses. Her most recent novel, set in 1980s London and Los Angeles, is The Confession. LONDON LIBRARY Where do you most like to write? JESSIE BURTON The most common place you’ll find me
is in my writing shed at the end of the garden. I designed it myself and I had it built in November. The difference from writing inside my house is immediate – it’s like a commute down the garden path. Sometimes I write in bed, because actually I find that quite good on my back. And then I do occasionally write in the Library, if I can find one of the solitary desks. I find it quite hard to write in any communal space, so I would never be able to write in a café.
LL Your books have a fairly hefty chunk of research behind them. How do you like to do your research? Is it on the internet? Is it going through books? JB It’s both. With The Miniaturist it was more focused. There were three or four books that were extremely useful and that really provided me with not just the bones, but some of the flesh of the book in terms of the social detail and the kinds of things that you can’t just find on the internet very easily – like the cost of things, how people grieved, the kind of food they eat in December in Holland. But I did learn that I wasn’t writing a history book. I was writing a novel. So I try and not let the research dominate or show too much in the narrative; it’s people – characters – living historically. They are living very modernly to themselves. I also find that the research runs parallel throughout the whole of the writing because the process will throw up something you haven’t dealt with. You can casually write “she wore a skirt”, but it’s not detailed enough, so then you
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have to go back to the books. And I often end up just going down rabbit holes, both on the internet and in books. But I try to remember that it’s a novel and it’s a kind of impressionist take on a historical period rather than a bona fide replica of history. But it is an enormous comfort, I suppose, to have that research because it’s like a liferaft when you don’t know what to write next. There’ll be something that you’ll read and you’ll think, “That’s a cool thing to slot in,” and then from that, more grows. LL
You brilliantly conjure up the periods in which your books are set, but not through lectures on what was going on at the time. How do you find that pertinent detail that brings everything to life? JB Yeah, it’s a tricky one that. It sounds facile to say I close my eyes and imagine very hard. In my opinion, a character living in 1686 isn’t going to wake up and have her 1686-version of tea. It’s got to be subtler than that. It’s got to be internalised in the characters. I think sometimes less is more in terms of historical detail. You know, if you were writing a contemporary-set novel, you wouldn’t be heavy on all the details because it bogs down the flow of the story, and so I think sometimes it can come across as a very convincing sense of place because you’re inhabiting the character’s minds and they are not hyper-conscious of their setting. So I don’t want to make the reader detach themselves from that character’s experience. I synthesise myself into those characters, into that time. And I suppose through sight and sound and touch and smell and description, you can create a convincing landscape and an imaginative world that feels palpable. LL JB
How do your books come to you? How does it begin? It’s so inchoate for a lot of the time. The easiest one to answer for in concrete terms is The Miniaturist, because I had an experience of seeing a cabinet house. So, there I was, looking at a solid decorative object. Handmade. Full of detail. Full of history. Full of untold stories. Full of unexplained purpose. And then I made that as the symbol of the society in which it was constructed. Then I imagined who the person who owned that would be. Why would she own it? And questions spiralled out. The themes of that book – finding a sense of autonomy in one’s life, the
(Opposite) Petronella Oortman's dolls' house, c.1686-1710. Photo: Rijksmuseum
RUNNING HEAD
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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IN IT FOR THE BOOKS
“I think all writers, in some way or another, are fragmenting themselves into their books” importance of creativity or imagination in one’s life, or finding connection in unorthodox places – they’re always there. It’s looking for a place to hook those onto, and in that case it was the doll’s house and Golden-Age Amsterdam. With The Muse, I think it was probably more experiential, having lived in Spain and having observed first-hand how, at times, awkwardly the country has dealt with its Civil-War past. I also had a personal interest in the immigration of ex-colonists, from the Caribbean to London particularly, and making a portrait of a London that I know. I think all writers, in some way or another, are fragmenting themselves into their books, or they are writing because of an absence or desire or a presence that they need to work out in their lives. It just comes out differently every time. LL Before you were an author, you were an actor. Was it that experience that drew you to 1980s LA for The Confession? JB No. But it’s interesting, for me at least, that I spent four days in LA once, and yet it was like going into this mythical land that I’d heard of for so long and seen so often on the telly. And the reality was obviously so much more congested, literally and metaphorically, and paradoxical and tricky – but it was beautiful as well. And I thought it would be such a great backdrop for a novel about people trying to make themselves up and trying to either escape or to create a new life. LL The female protagonists of your novels are really important, but historians tend to overlook female experience. So how do you address this? JB Yes. Some people criticise The Miniaturist; they feel that it was absolutely improbable, that a woman could be Burton’s current Library loans. Photo: Jessie Burton
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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IN IT FOR THE BOOKS
“In The Muse, the architecture of the Library was the building I used in my mind”
living in a society that would permit those thoughts of liberty or autonomy to be formed. But it’s a question of who wrote the history, who had the dominant voice, who was deciding what was important to chronicle. And I suppose when you are wanting to find out about women’s lives in periods of history where they’ve not been documented in the traditional way, you have to look between the lines or look at what was being written and work out why those things were being written. Actually, when I got my first slice of money from The Miniaturist, the first thing I bought was my membership to The London Library. LL JB
What has it meant to you since then? It felt very momentous to be able to become a member because it was such a long list of very illustrious people that were members in the past and still are. And I loved its location and I also loved the speed with which books appeared when you ordered them. There’s a cosiness to it, but also there’s a sense of industry and purpose. And you feel like you have a right to be there. It felt like a kind of marker that I wanted to make in my writing career, to become a member there. The setting of the Skelton Gallery, the art institute where they work in The Muse, was The London Library. The architecture of the Library was the building I used in my mind. LL JB
How do you engage with the Library? I’m very much there just to find the good books. I go there in quite a solitary frame of mind.
LL
Have you been ordering books from the Library during the lockdown? JB I’ve got a lot of books right now from it. I appreciate what they’re doing: they send messages, saying that they can make this possible for you and all of that, but luckily I’ve garnered everything I need for what I’m doing. LL JB
What are you working on next? I’m writing a fourth novel and I’m about halfway through it. I never really talk about what it’s about until I’ve finished it. Until someone else has read it and reassured me that yes, indeed, this is a novel. And I’ve got Medusa coming out next year. LL JB
Can you tell us more about that? It’s the second of my illustrated books for younger readers and it’s a retelling from Medusa’s point of view in a slightly epic style, but epic-cum-conversational. It’s about what it might be like to be objectified by Poseidon and then punished for it by Athena and then turned into a Gorgon, and our ideas about beauty and ugliness and finding a place to belong. There are paintings being made by Olivia Lomenech Gill for it – I’ve seen a few and they are really wild. They’re amazing. So, yeah, there’s lots going on, but at the moment it’s mainly that slow bubble of writing.
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Jessie Burton’s The Confession is published in paperback on 3 September by Picador. Medusa will be out in 2021
Inspirational architecture. Photo: James Tye
§ 25
Enlightened Thinking
You couldn’t have had the Age of Reason without the beliefs it rejected, argues historian Tom Holland, and we wouldn’t have had his new book exploring the influence of Christianity without The London Library Photo: Charlie Hopkinson
THE LONDON LIBRARY
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ENLIGHTENED RUNNING THINKING HEAD
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ardoning the pun, Tom Holland is an embodiment of catholic tastes. His most recent book on the history of Christianity, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, follows celebrated popular histories of the Romans and Persians, but he also recently tweeted a retracing of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds through a deserted London, and says the best book about lockdown that he’s read is Moominland Midwinter by Tove Jansson. Wide reading was important for a key figure in Dominion, a book that looks at the debt that Western liberal secularism owes to two and a half millennia of Christian thought. Origen was a third-century theologian, Alexandria’s most brilliant scholar, and his writings are "haunted by the idea of libraries”, Holland says – appropriate considering he lived in a city with a very famous one. Origen called the Bible “a mansion with an immense number of locked rooms, and an equal number of keys, all of which lay scattered about the house…” Broad study provided these keys – of Jewish teachings, Greek philosophy and more. When Origen set up a school after leaving Alexandria and its Roman oppressors (his Christian father had been beheaded), he took his learning with him. Holland records that one student remembered they were encouraged to study “every doctrine – Greek or not... all the good things of the mind were ours to enjoy”. In Dominion, Holland uses Origen’s story to help dispel a great myth: that Christianity destroyed our shared classical inheritance in the pursuit of superstition. “I think Freud would have a field day with it,” Holland says. “The whole idea of Christians toppling idols and burning things that they don’t approve of is exactly what enthusiasts for the Enlightenment were to do. Christians destroying the Library of Alexandria is itself a very Christian myth.” The truth about Alexandria is much less catchy: the great library slowly dwindled. Before Holland began his history writing, including an explosively received inquisition into the origins of Islam called In the Shadow of the Sword, he wrote a series of vampire novels. Before that he studied literature, and calls history “a form of literary criticism”. It’s not the “series of commandments or diktats” that makes Christianity interesting to him, he says. “It’s not even really the theology. It’s the stories.” Exodus is one that recurs, he says, and this great story of liberation is ultimately “the reason we think slavery is wrong”. Though vampires were not a particular passion (the novels came from an interest in Byron, who was among the first to write about vampires and is credited as the inspiration for their archetypal aesthetic), Holland says he is drawn to, “I suppose, the intersection of the weird shit people believe and how that’s evolved over time, and therefore how it is often the best way of understanding them.” History has been a lifelong interest. While this conversation taking place over video conference software is a sign that we are in the middle of a global pandemic, it does enable Holland to hold up the cover of a treasured object: the 1975 picture book The Roman Army by Peter Connolly. “As a child I moved seamlessly from dinosaurs to Romans,” he says, “basically because the appeal was the same.” In Dominion, he likens the brutal ancients to apex predators and says that the more he researched them, the more he felt his worldview was radically different and Christian in origin. But he hasn’t grown out of the Romans. The Great Library of Alexandria, Egypt. From Ward and Lock’s Illustrated History of the World, c.1882. Photo: Classic Image / Alamy Stock Photo
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“The great thing about the Library is the opportunity for serendipity that it offers – just the joy of all the unexpected categories” “To realise that people, or indeed creatures, are alien doesn’t lessen how fascinating they are,” he says. A completely different morality “actually makes them more interesting”. During the pandemic, Holland has also been thinking and writing about past plagues, particularly what was likely a form of Ebola that raged through the Roman Empire for 15 years in the third century. It coincided with a viruslike spread in Christianity. The Christians’ assumption, he says, “that one’s life is worth laying down to care for one’s brothers and sisters, is pretty much the spirit that’s animating the NHS now”. (From left) An early influence; Lord Byron by Richard Westall, 1813
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ENLIGHTENED THINKING
Along with Michael Wood’s new history of China that reaches up to Covid-19 – and which is “wonderfully written, learned, humane” – Holland has been enjoying Tove Jansson’s illustrated book, her fifth about Moominland. A creature wakes up while his family is still hibernating to an “entirely different world” that’s covered in snow, Holland says. “The resemblances to the old world only makes him miss it more. It’s about how things that you assume are stable aren’t, and landscapes that you recognise can suddenly be totally transformed. And what it’s like when you’re absent from the people who define them for you.” At least the online nature of life in spring 2020 is not a problem. He has always used the Library’s digital resources an “enormous” amount. Now working on a translation of Suetonius for Penguin Classics, and soon its introduction, he will be using “JSTOR and all the classics journals, so The London Library will be coming into its own”. He also already sees social media as a watercooler substitute. Before In the Shadow of the Sword was published in 2012, he “was advised to go on Twitter as a way of defending myself against accusations that it was Islamophobic or racist”. Months of arguing followed, which he found “a massive waste of my time and energy”. (Dominion, however, was an answer to criticism that he would never put his own beliefs under the scrutiny that he had put Muslims’). He also realised that Twitter is “a bit like The London Library – there are an infinite number of rooms”, and therefore it is “perfectly suited” to many interests, including dinosaurs. Through connections he’s made online, he has been on real archaeological digs in Wyoming and at the famous fossil mecca, the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada. In preparation for a return to the real world after lockdown, a cycling instructor neighbour is teaching Holland “the safest and most scenic cycle route” from his house in Brixton to The London Library, because “it has just always been a part of my psychogeography, part of the mental furniture of London in my head. It’s probably the place I go to most of all, day to day.” Reaching from Xerxes to Angela Merkel to Pulp Fiction, Dominion is “insanely ambitious”, says Holland. “And I don’t think I could have done it without a library like The London Library.” Origen’s image of the locked mansion felt pertinent while he was holed up in the theology section on the top floor. “I would find that the key to something lay in French literature or palaeontology, or popular music, or art. And I knew that I could go down and the key would be there.” A member for as long as he can remember being in London, since the early 1990s, Holland says “the great thing about the Library is the opportunity for serendipity that it offers – the finding stuff on open shelves, just the joy of all the unexpected categories”. “People always mention the Flagellation section,” he adds, “but I think England’s Jewish Origin is my favourite.” For someone so well versed in deep time, and inclined to find the beginnings of our contemporary thought processes there, it’s no surprise that Holland takes a long view on the Library’s importance. “Every time I go in, I think of it as part of a continuum reaching back to Alexandria,” he says.
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Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind is published in paperback on 6 August by Little, Brown
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Home from Home
Victoria Hislop’s bestselling novels are created between Greece, Kent and, of course, the Library. We discover how she has been coping without her hours at St James’s Square Photo: Bill Waters
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I’ll be interested to see whether people hug each other; I think they probably will,” says Victoria Hislop. The best-selling British author is discussing the anticipated reopening of The London Library, of which she has been a member for nearly a decade. Having worked from her home in Kent since the pandemic forced the Library to close its building in March, she is among the many of its esteemed members adjusting to life outside of an institution that they have made, in her words, “a home from home”. She has another favoured place, slightly further afield. Beginning with her debut novel in 2005, The Island, and continuing through to last year’s Those Who Are Loved, Hislop’s award-winning novels have forged a deep connection with Greece. Her work has also extended to Cyprus and Civil-War-ravaged Spain, and has been translated into more than 35 languages. In the case of The Island, about a woman’s family connection to an island used as a leper colony in the 20th century, it has also become a popular television series in the country. Hislop first went to Greece at the age of 18, and its “mix of culture and a bit of hedonism” kept her returning. It was her discovery of the former leper colony of Spinalonga while working as a travel writer in her early 40s that first led her down a literary path. She now owns a house in Crete and has taken readers to the streets of Athens through the multicultural past of the northern city Thessaloniki, which she calls “intoxicating”, and into small towns and villages across the country. Four of these Mediterranean novels were written back at The London Library. Her connection with the institution began when a friend and library member invited her to a party held there. Hislop had long used the British Library for her work, but discovering this new intimate setting “was a revelation,” she says. “The day after that drinks event, I joined, and just started going there pretty much every day.” From bumping into her literary heroes such as Kazuo Ishiguro, to viewing members’ talks and embracing immersive theatre productions (“I went to Dracula, it was amazing; when they stay open late, it can be quite a spooky place”), Hislop’s view is that it is “more than a building
What draws her back to Greece as a writer is “an endless mine of stories”
(Opposite) Guerilla fighters of the communist-controlled Greek People’s Liberation Army, which sprung, like the Greek civil war, from Nazi occupation
HOME FROM HOME
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with books – it’s a community”. It is what makes it, for a novelist interested in the lives of others, such a “physically and emotionally warm” place. One of the things that many writers struggle to find is routine. “I am not very good at writing in my home,” she says, “I prefer to be somewhere else.” Usually arriving on the Library’s steps by 9.30am, she tends to pick a new room for each book so that she develops an “incredibly strict pattern and habit” – it was in the Sackler Study that she wrote 2011’s The Thread; a rich, Thessaloniki-set tale of love, identity and war. The anchoring character of the Library, she says, makes it feel like she has an “ordinary job”. “I absolutely love it.” While modern Greek history is not “a massively wellendowed area”, she adds that “it’s as though all of that is still being written”. What the Library has about it will often be on her desk (at the moment, delivered by post, are A History of Greek-Owned Shipping by Gelina Harlaftis and Greece: A Biography of a Modern Nation by Roderick Beaton, among others). Just as useful is The Times archive, which she says provides her favourite part of the research. “It just takes you back to the moment when a story actually happens, literally day by day, before it becomes history. And I love that room: there’s usually nobody in there, and you sit up and you perch these huge things on those lecterns and… God, it’s just marvellous.” While Hislop’s stories place human experience at the forefront, they are never about “any one person’s story”, she says. “I take my own character and I think: what could she have lived through?” To answer this, Hislop, who is now fluent in Greek, undertakes extensive research in the country, including wandering in small museums such as the Ai Stratis Political Exiles Museum in Athens and the Municipal Museum of the Kalavritan Holocaust in Kalavryta – the unpredictable hours of which mean that “sometimes you have to go to a place two or three times and then by magic one day it’s open”. This is where she finds “extremely valuable material, a lot of photographs”, often with the help of curators. Equally important, however, is “observing what is not there as much as what is”, Hislop says. What draws her
HOME FROM HOME
back to Greece as a writer is “an endless mine of stories” relating to the 20th century, including those that have long remained taboo and underexplored. They include that of Spinalonga, and the civil war of 1946–49, “a very dark period that really nobody, even now, likes to talk about”, which also serves as part of the backdrop for Those Who Are Loved. The book follows the story of Themis, whose family embodies the national divisions that arise during German occupation in the Second World War. She joins the communist army and experiences the civil war that followed first hand. Writing in detail about another nation’s history comes with its challenges, Hislop acknowledges. “I sometimes think: why do I lick my fingers and put them into an electric socket?” But the truths she seeks to tell, such as that “civil war destroys everything and everybody; there are no winners”, are, for her, worth treading delicate ground for. To do so accurately, she has recently enlisted the help of her translator, Fotini Pipi – “a very clever, well-educated and unbiased” Greek historian, to assist. “She steps in at the very, very end and just fact-checks some things about Greek history that I would have difficulty accessing,” the author explains. In the context of a global lockdown, Hislop has attempted to replicate her life in Greece at home – “plugging into old Greek music that takes me there” – and utilises online resources such as JSTOR, as well as making do with cafetière coffee (“I look at it and I think: I know you’re not going to be the same but I’ll pretend”). She has also been engaging her nearly 8,000 Twitter followers with A to Zs of her favourite songs and places to visit in Greece, and has accepted a commission to write a novella by the end of June. “It’s set in Greece,” she laughs. “It’s so obvious.” On her mind throughout, however, are her friends from the Library: her “London Library sort of best buddy” – an eminent author in her 80s currently in isolation – plus others whom she would otherwise be meeting up with for tea. “I really care about these people,” she says. “They’re who I stand on the steps with every morning.”
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Those Who Are Loved is published in paperback on 30 August by Headline Review
Ruins on the uninhabited island of Spinalonga, a leper colony until 1957. Photo: Alexandru Stoian
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EVENTS A wealth of talks are available to attend online
The sudden closure of the Library building earlier this year meant a “mad” March that required a “total reimagining of how our events could be delivered”, says Programme Manager Claire Berliner. But the result has been an innovative and varied spring events programme, which has attracted an even wider audience than might normally be able to attend live events in the Reading Room. All are still available online to Library members, and a range of exciting online events is being organised for the summer. The full autumn programme of events – which will, hopefully, take place in the physical realm – is to be unveiled shortly and will include the two September events (p38) that we are looking to hold in the Reading Room. Keep an eye on the website and newsletter for more details.
Tim Rice and Daniel Hahn
The London Library teamed up with the BBC for its Big Book Weekend in May, a three-day virtual literary festival bringing together the best of the British literary festivals cancelled during the coronavirus pandemic. The London Library event features its President, Sir Tim Rice, talking with author and translator Daniel Hahn. In this highly entertaining interview, Sir Tim discusses his life and career, the inspiration for his award-winning musicals, the partnerships that have underpinned his work and the process of creating some of the best-known lyrics ever written.
Invisible Music with Polly Paulusma
Acclaimed English songwriter Polly Paulusma presents a taste of her latest album, Invisible Music, which celebrates musicality in the prose of Angela Carter, one of the 20th century’s finest novelists and a former member of The London Library. Alongside performances of her own music, Paulusma is joined for readings by singer-songwriter Kathryn Williams and author Kirsty Logan. On what would have been her 80th birthday, they explore how Carter – herself a singer during the 1960s folk revival – absorbed the themes, images and rhythms of folksong into her remarkable prose.
AVA I L A B L E T O V I E W O N L I N E The Ratline: On the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive Philippe Sands, award-winning author of the bestselling East West Street, introduces his remarkable new book, The Ratline, in a special live Q&A presented by The London Library in partnership with Jewish Book Week. The Ratline tells the story of Otto von Wächter and his wife Charlotte. As Nazi Governor of Galicia, von Wächter presided over a territory in which hundreds of thousands of Jews and Poles were
killed. Indicted for “mass murder” at the end of the war, he went on the run, and the resulting story is a fascinating tale of intrigue, espionage and Cold War politics. Philippe’s online Q&A was recorded on 22 April. The Library event originally scheduled for May with Philippe in conversation with bestselling writer Elif Shafak is now lined up for 2 September.
(From top) Tim Rice. Photo: Charles Francis; Polly Paulusma. Photo: Annie Dressner
EVENTS
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Undocumented
This captivating online event features Kamila Shamsie talking with fellow authors Nikita Lalwani and Abi Daré about their stunning new novels: Lalwani’s You People and Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice. Asking difficult moral questions, these novels cast light on the people who live in the shadows: from asylum seekers and illegal immigrants to the enslaved, the disenfranchised and the undocumented who silently and thanklessly underpin economies and maintain lifestyles from London to Lagos and everywhere in between.
Announcing a new partnership with The London Library for 2020
8-18 October 2020 For more information visit www.wimbledonbookfest.org WBF20 London Library ad 190x122.indd 1
LIVE EVENTS COMING UP IN SEPTEMBER 2 September
Philippe Sands in conversation with Elif Shafak
A great way to launch the autumn events season with what promises to be a spellbinding evening with bestselling authors Philippe Sands and Elif Shafak. They will discuss Sands’s latest book, The Ratline, and its remarkable investigation of a Nazi war criminal on the run. The event, held in partnership with Jewish Book Week and rescheduled from May, is already a sellout, but you can still book a slot on the waiting list, and if you’re unable to make it to the event, a full recording of the evening will be available on the Library website in due course.
24 September
A Theatre for Dreamers
Novelist and lyricist Polly Samson discusses her new novel in conversation with critically-acclaimed author Edward Docx. A Theatre for Dreamers looks at the tangled lives of the circle of poets, painters and musicians brought together on the Greek island of Hydra in 1960, with the world dancing on the edge of revolution. Alongside readings and music, the evening promises a fascinating look at utopian dreams, innocence lost, and the wars waged between men and women on the battlegrounds of genius.
(From top) Abi Daré. Photo: Gazmadu Studios; Polly Samson. Photo: Harry Borden
To book tickets and to watch videos of previous events visit londonlibrary.co.uk/ whats-on
01/06/2020 13:46
The Found Season
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M EE T A M EM B ER Sports journalist, author and broadcaster Mihir Bose has had a good innings with nearly 40 years as a Library member
I first became a member of The London Library in the early 1980s, after telling the sports editor of The Sunday Times, John Lovesey, the story of the Aga Khans – and he commissioned me to write a book. I discovered this amazing treasure trove of books and marvellous reports going back to the days of the East India Company that I could take home with me, and I couldn't believe it. The collection isn’t British centric, or even Eurocentric; it has a global outlook. Opposite where I’d grown up in Bombay was a library inside the British deputy high commissioner's offices, and there, from the age of 14 or so, I would go and read the English papers. I’d never read such quality of writing: the great football writer Brian Glanville, Anthony Howard’s political commentaries in the New Statesman and writers of that class. I also loved doing cricket commentaries and my father would get me to perform an England-Australia match I had listened to on the World Service for guests. After working in India as an accountant and a freelance journalist, in 1978 I gave up accountancy completely, along with a very cushy lifestyle, and moved into a bedsit in Maida Vale and decided to write full time. My main job was financial journalism, but at the weekend I wrote about football or cricket. I began to discover that there were stories about finance and sport that nobody really
wanted to cover. Men in suits decide what and how the men in shorts and the men in whites play, because they decide the framework of the game and its wider financial and legal situation. So I went from, if you like, being a match reporter, to writing on the politics and business of sport, and I like to think I was the first to write about sports as news. Today, I write for The Financial Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Irish Times and a magazine called Asian Lite, and I still broadcast and write books. The London Library is wonderful because you can always find a book, and if they don’t have it, they’ll think of ordering it. Now I’m writing about an Indian footballer who came to the UK in the 1930s and played in bare feet for Celtic. A future big project would be a memoir called Do It for England. Growing up I played cricket with a guy called Edwin. In 1961, The Guns of Navarone was released. In the film, Gregory Peck’s girlfriend turns out to be a German spy, and David Niven wants Peck to kill her so he says: “Do it for England.” Every now and again, Edwin and I would meet in the middle of the wicket and either he or I would say: “Do it for England.”
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Find out more at mihirbose.com
is being filmed NOW on our stage in Surrey: 45+ artists are coming to perform. Fifteen new performances are FREE to view online – released over six weeks from 4 June 2020
Fifteen treats include . . .
Voix Humaine POULENC SCHUMANN Liederkreis with Roderick Williams Pavel Kolesnikov PIANO plays CHOPIN & BEETHOVEN
Bryn Terfel, Joseph Calleja, Simon Keenlyside and The Go Compare man see more at grangeparkopera.co.uk