house has been built for the show. The exhibition includes lovely private-press books, revealing Walker’s revolutionary book-printing techniques. He was one of the first printers to create plates from photographs, rather than using the laborious handcarving processes that dated back to the 15th century. Highlights of the show include a double-page spread from The Kelmscott Chaucer and pages from The Odyssey, translated by Lawrence of Arabia, a close friend of the Walker family. The Odyssey was Walker’s final achievement, printed just a year before his death. Lawrence worked on his translation of The Odyssey from 1928 to 1931, while serving with the RAF. He continued working on it wherever he served – first in a mud-brick fort in Afghanistan, then in a flying-boat station at Cattewater in Plymouth.
Lawrence of Arabia – also Lawrence of Ancient Greece
He never got any closer to cracking the Homeric question – whether there was a single Homer or lots of different composers of The Odyssey and The Iliad. ‘He is baffling,’ Lawrence said of Homer. ‘Not simple, in education; not primitive, socially. Rather a William Morris of his day, I fancy.’ William Morris was, incidentally, a great friend of Emery Walker’s. Lord Byron is back! Not the wild, romantic, early-19th-century poet but his descendant, the 13th Lord Byron.
prue leith
Bliss on Toast
Quick, easy, comforting and delicious suppers Lord Byron in Albanian dress by Thomas Phillips, 1813
Robin Byron, 71, a lawyer, has written Echoes of a Life, a novel about assisted dying. He says, ‘It is the first time that a Lord Byron has published anything since the poet Lord Byron died at Missolonghi, Greece, nearly 200 years ago.’ Good for Robin Byron for following in his ancestor’s footsteps. As the poet wrote: But words are things, and a small drop of ink, Falling, like dew, upon a thought produces That which makes thousands, perhaps millions think. In his item about Ernest Hemingway (July issue), the Old Un cast doubt on the author’s ‘hairy-chested machismo’. This was also exposed by the British novelist and travel writer Norman Lewis. In 1957, he was commissioned to interview Hemingway at his Cuban finca by Ian Fleming, then editing the Atticus column in the Sunday Times. Lewis knew that Hemingway had been challenged to a duel by the editor of the Havana Post, a pugnacious New Zealander called Edward Scott. It was after an incident at a British
Avocado with toasted pine nuts, spring onion, chopped tomatoes, olive oil and basil on grilled sundried-tomato bread
Embassy party when Hemingway’s companion, Ava Gardner, the worse for drink, had removed her knickers and waved them at her fellow guests. Lewis asked Hemingway, a lumbering figure dressed in pyjamas and gulping down
tumblers of neat Dubonnet, what he proposed to do. By way of reply, Hemingway showed Lewis the letter he’d written to the Havana Post, declining Scott’s challenge ‘in the belief that he owed it to his readers not to jeopardise his life’.
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‘He won by a nose’
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The Oldie August 2021 7
