My year in books, 2011

There’s a good story – probably apocryphal, as all good stories are – about an Oxford professor who reached retirement. At his send-off party, he was asked how he planned to spend his retirement. He replied, ‘Read all the books I’ve reviewed.’ I’ve been engaged in the task of reviewing a fair few books recently, but unlike our professor I did read them all, which means I’ve had less time for other bibliophilic delights. However, I thought that now might be a good time to provide a sort of whistle-stop tour of some of the stand-out books from the crop I’ve read this year, complete with a brief review of each book and my reasons for recommending it. I’ll roughly treat this by subject –biographies, science, drama, and so on – just to give the thing at least a show of order.

Without doubt the outstanding work of biography I managed to get my peepers in this year was John Haffenden’s heroic two-volume biography of the poet-critic William Empson (1906-1984). Over 1,000 pages and two vast tomes, Haffenden charts Empson’s life and career, from his time as a student at Cambridge to his sudden expulsion from the university (when condoms were found in his possession), to his time in Japan, China, and then Sheffield (well, where else?), where he was Professor of English for eighteen years. Empson is a very colourful figure and many academics (and non-academics, of course) value him highly. He once stated that any literary criticism he wrote that bored him when he read it back ended up in the bin; it wasn’t right if it didn’t amuse him. (To make sure his work flowed freely and was more readable, he used to imbibe several pints of beer before writing; this helped get it ‘loose’, as he called it.)

Haffenden’s book(s) may be a tour de force in terms of biography, but The QI Book of the Dead is a marvellous work of biothanatography, focusing on famous and not-so-famous names of the past and bringing their dead or deadened stories to life. In this tome can be found the truth behind the ‘lady of the lamp’ who was Florence Nightingale, the ambition of the ‘other’ Victorian nurse Mary Seacole, the sex life of H. G. Wells, and a whole kaleidoscopic array of other luminaries and ... er, liminaries (a coinage I have reached for because I like the idea of being on the threshold, being liminal). I’d also strongly recommend The Second Book of General Ignorance, which kept me company during a cold, dark train journey and B&B night back in January. Talking of biography and thanatography and QI, I squoze in an autobiography as well, Stephen Fry’s autobiog part two, otherwise known as The Fry Chronicles. It’s a gripping read if you’re a pathetic devotee of 80s comedy and the 80s in general in fact (which I am), and Fry spins a yarn, or an anecdote, very well, as has oft been noted. I also read Fry’s Paperweight, a collection of his writings from the late 80s and early 90s, mostly bits and pieces he wrote for various newspapers. Also included are all the charmingly mad ‘Donald Trefusis’ monologues he wrote for Loose Ends back in the mid-1980s. Oh, and Latin!, the play he wrote at Cambridge, the story of whose composition can be found in the autobiography. I was a little thin on science this year, but I managed a corker or two. The best, for me, was Stephen Jay Gould’s collection of essays, Bully for Brontosaurus, which managed to be popular and accessible without being patronising or over-simplistic. Among the highlights are the considerable design faults behind the standard QWERTY keyboard we all use (and which my fingers are currently gliding across as I pen, or type, this, dear reader). These faults were deliberate, in order to force people to type more slowly; the typists were going too quickly with the previous, more ergonomic, keyboards, and as a result the typewriters were prone to continual jamming. There is also an illuminating little piece on the popularity of dinosaurs among children (written in the days before Jurassic Park, or at least before the film), and essays on the Voyager pictures sent back from Uranus. Gould was a great populariser of science, and this book demonstrates why repeatedly. In the field of language, I came across a charming little book in a bookshop (sorry, the bookshop, for there is only one) in St Davids, Wales: History of the English Language by Lincoln Barnett. Although published a while back (1962), the book doesn’t suffer from too much fustiness (though the pages, I’m pleased to say, are awash with the stuff), and there is a fund of fascinating facts. For instance, Sir Thomas Elyot, he whom his descendant T. S. Eliot was to name-check in his 1940 poem ‘East Coker’, coined the words ‘democracy’,‘encyclopedia’, and even ‘education’. It’s not quite so engagingly written as other books of its kind on the market – it has little of the eye for a witty story or humorous personality that Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue has, for instance – but it’s still got a fair few corking facts in there.

Talking of history, as I half-was there, and of Bryson, which I fully was, I found time to read At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bryson himself. A great read – 650 pages of quirky personalities, fascinating lives, and little gold nuggets of trivia, all woven onto the compelling narrative tapestry which Bryson has become so adept at embroidering (okay, so I know tapestries and embroideries are two different things, but you get the general needlework metaphor I’m going for here). People never married younger in the ‘olden days’, as is commonly believed – the stories of everyone being married by fifteen and dead by thirty are largely a misunderstanding, caused by Romeo and Juliet in the case of the former and by a misinterpretation of how mean averages work in the case of the latter. As with A Short History of Nearly Everything Bryson sings the praises of a few unsung or undersung heroes – John Snow, for instance, the man who worked out what caused cholera epidemics (which is putatively the origin of the tradition of saying ‘Good health’ when we raise a glass of booze, though Bryson doesn’t mention this).

What of my own metier, literary criticism? Well, I visited a few old friends again, and reread both The Force of Poetry and Essays in Appreciation, two Christopher Ricks works I would not be without. He is without doubt the greatest living critic. I also read his most recent book, True Friendship, which lacked some of his old magic, but still sparkled more brightly than everyone else. Parts of it read more like notes for an annotated edition of Geoffrey Hill’s poems, but then at least Ricks has the self-awareness and wit to point this out. I’m now reading his Allusion to the Poets, which glitters with the old magic. I also read The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar’s vast work in which, over 700 pages, they show how women writers of the nineteenth century worked with, within, and against male forms of writing which they inherited. It’s overlong and needed a good bit of editing in parts, but it stands as a monument of feminist literary criticism, immensely influential and endlessly readable, despite its occasional waffle.

I also read a fine book by John Sutherland, called Curiosities of Literature. This fun and hugely readable book is a great ‘dipping’ book, into which one can plunge for five minutes of interestingness whenever one has the time. Sutherland is the author of the three-books-in-one known as The Literary Detective, which is also a fantastic work – all about the little puzzles in fiction, particularly nineteenth-century novels, which we may have encountered but may not necessarily have stopped to think about. Curiosities is - curiously - organised by subject and contains some fine facts about the literary world – the authors of the longest and shortest ever plays, or writers who have had food named after them, and a host of other fine facts. A smorgasbord of delights, to be sure.

Another tome I read this year (which could double up as a weapon should the need arise) was Michael Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets, a positively ridiculous 1,100 pages of dense biography covering as many poets who have written in English since Chaucer and Gower as Schmidt can fit in. He sifts out a fair few names from pre-1900 – Edward Lear only gets mentioned in a note to acknowledge that he’s been left out, if you see what I mean – yet nearly half the book is taken up by poets of the last 100 years or so. There are only so many Beat poets I can read about before I wish to beat somebody with a copy of Allen Ginsberg’s complete works, but if you can get through these dull and overlong chapters, it’s certainly worth reading. Schmidt has a habit, to which he falls prey continually, of quoting somebody’s opinion and then stating, ‘This is wrong.’ This in itself I find wrong, but again, it’s only a minor criticism.

Last Thursday the world lost the great and incomparable Christopher Hitchens. If you don’t know his work, go on Youtube after you’ve read this and search for one of the many videos of him uploaded there. (His appearance on Question Time defending his friend Salman Rushdie a few years ago has him arguably - another in-joke there, I fear - at his best and most clear-thinking and eloquent.) I read his fine polemical work, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything back on Hitch’s birthday (which he shared with Thomas Jefferson), 13 April this year. Again, a train journey was the excuse. I think I attracted a fair few funny looks from fellow passengers, but then given the choice between a book and a bomb, I know which I’d rather see someone carrying on a train. This book offers a cogently presented argument in which Hitchens deconstructs various religions and the arguments put forward by believers, arguing that reason and science are far nobler things to worship (although that is not the right word) than Bronze Age texts and deities for whom there is no evidence. His death last week robbed the world of one of the most powerful writers and speakers we have seen in recent years. As Pound said of T. S. Eliot, I have nothing to say except: read him.

Religion may not be a subject that’s packed with laughs (though there are many laughable aspects to it, undoubtedly), but two books I read this year treated lighter, more ‘fun’ subjects. The Naked Jape, by stand-up comic and ‘space hopper in a suit’ Jimmy Carr (and his friend Lucy Greeves), is a marvellous study of jokes, their meaning, their purpose, and their role in social interaction. Carr and Greeves pull off a masterstroke by including a joke literally on every page – in fact, at the bottom of every page. Intelligent, serious in its approach yet funny and entertaining to read, this book was one of the highlights of a cold winter for me. Oh, and the other great standout in the field of humorous works was Pop Goes the Weasel by Albert Jacks, which looked at the historical origins of all our favourite nursery rhymes, from Humpty Dumpty to Three Blind Mice and everything in between. I was disappointed in the lack of concrete evidence that materialised for just about everytheory Jacks put forward; the book is fascinating in terms of the light it sheds on various theories about the origins of nursery rhymes, but ultimately we’re left scratching our heads and feeling much as we did before, suspecting that we know nothing for sure about these funny little rhymes. Oh well. Still a nice enough read.

As for drama, well I well-nigh read my eyes out with that. Between January and May this year, I lectured at the University of Warwick (which, as every schoolchild knows, is not in Warwick at all, but Coventry), and on the train journeys between Loughborough and Godivaland I would read plays by any dramatist I could get my hands on. Aristophanes, Beckett, Bond, Brecht, Chekhov, Churchill, Ibsen, Lorca, Marlowe, Pirandello, Shaw, Terence, Wedekind... All were pretty much required reading for me. This is not least because that is what I was supposed to be teaching at Warwick (though inevitably poetry, art, science, religion, philosophy, graffiti, Come Dine with Me and other concerns all made an appearance at some time or another in seminars). Mostly I read Beckett from beginning to end, including all the short radio pieces and mini-masterpieces like ‘Breath’. I also enjoyed some of the plays I taught: I still have absolutely no idea what The Skriker by Churchill is about, but it all sounds impressive enough. Wedekind is a wonderful playwright, dark and different. Chekhov’s The Seagull is a little-known masterpiece. Hedda Gabler by Ibsen is stunningly good, his best after A Doll's House. If you can forgive Strindberg his misogynistic trespasses (and the matter is far from simple), then I’d recommend Miss Julie, which has some of the finest dialogue written for women in the whole naturalist movement. Brecht still leaves me cold. But then that’s what he wants, after all...

Novels were largely confined to the work arena. I read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, and loved that. Many people, Anne’s sister Charlotte included, thought the novel not worth remembering, but I thought it a finely written book about a difficult subject (alcoholism, parenthood, domestic abuse, all are treated here with frankness and skill). I had to reread Wuthering Heights, a book I always have mixed feelings about, but the book does have a raw energy to it and the dialogue is practically unrivalled among nineteenth-century novels (Dickens’s eccentrics excepted, perhaps). I did find time to read a bit of non-work novelage. I also revisited David Gemmell’s Rigante quartet, something I started doing last year – I reread Stormrider, the finale to the tetralogy, and whatever criticisms people might throw at the late Gemmell, being a poor storyteller is certainly not one of them. If you’re looking for a fantasy author to read in the New Year, and you haven’t yet read Gemmell, seek out his books, beginning with Legend, his first and most popular novel.

Poetry largely eluded me this year, except for the occasional dip into old favourites like Larkin and Housman. I did, however, manage to do what I had never done before, and sit down and go through all of T. S. Eliot's Collected Poems, 1909-62 in one sitting (well, two sittings really), when I had to travel on the train from Loughborough to Coventry on academic business. When I did so, I saw that Ricks was right when he said that when you read Eliot’s published poetry in order, you notice the way proper names disappear from the text. The poet who begins by offering us Prufrock, Sweeney, Phlebas, Madame Sosostris and all the rest leaves us with the Four Quartets, where people are seldom named. I also went through all of Auden’s Collected Poems. He was a damn sight more prolific than Eliot, and his complete works amounts to over 900 pages, and there’s a lot of weak stuff in there. He got rid of ‘September 1st, 1939’ but left The Age of Anxiety in? He pretty much lost it when he went to America, which isn’t saying anything new, just saying it again. There is the odd gem among the later work, though. ‘On the Circuit’ and ‘Doggerel by a Senior Citizen’ will always make me smile. I’d also recommend Simon Armitage’s most recent volume, Seeing Stars, a most considerable and considering volume (a joke for the star-gazers, or Latin scholars, there, I fear). This is a collection of tableaux written in a style which blurs the boundaries between poetry and prose.

And that’s about it! What joys await me in 2012, the annus olympus? I have two books to write (plus another two which are at the drawing-board stage at present), so I’ll be reading a fair bit of research for those. Plus I have articles planned on Aylmer Vance, Dickens, and Philip Larkin. All recommendations are welcome in the little box left for comments below – particularly when it comes to non-fiction writers in the fields of science or history. I have stacks of everything else still left on my shelves. So I will trundle off to read my Christmas choice for this year: it’s a Dickens book, of course. And it’s his earliest work, collected together in Sketches by Boz. So, a Merry Christmas one and all, and Godot bless us, everyone!

New book on critical-creative writing published

Forgive me the shameless self-publicising, but I have a new book out, as of last month. I say 'I' have a new book out, but really the book is by everyone - it's an omnibook, if you like. I co-edited it with John Schad, who is at the forefront of the critical-creative crossover or interface, and has produced numerous works of experimental criticism, including the excellent novelistic work, Someone Called Derrida - a book all about memories, whether misremembered, remembered by someone else, or remembered by a self you no longer inhabit. (Sounds complicated? Well, the book cannot easily be paraphrased, so I'll merely echo Ezra Pound's injunction to people concerning T. S. Eliot: READ HIM.)

Anyway, the book we have edited together is called Crrritic! - though that is not its full title, which would occupy two whole lines were I to repeat it here. The book contains lots of pieces, some short, some long, some poetry, some prose - but all poetic. It includes a 'manifesto' of sorts by myself, among other pieces. It's also available in paperback, so it's cheap, as academic books go. If you have an interest in writing that pushes boundaries, or that shakes up literary criticism and questions and explores the role or identity of the modern university, then you should find some substantial morsels of food for thought. There are also some fine poems, too.

Here is a link to the paperback edition of the book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crrritic-Outbursts-Disasters-Resignation-Inventions/dp/1845193822

Enjoy.

Seven books of literary criticism everyone should read

Sometimes, when nobody better qualified is about for them to ask, students of mine ask me how they can get better marks for their essays, and how they can learn to sharpen their essay-writing skills. My answer is always the same – ‘How did you get in here?’ Then, when I've recovered my aplomb, ‘Go and read these great people.’ And I send them off armed with one or more of the names listed below. This is, of course, an utterly perverse, wilful, and personal list; there are no women on it, for instance. This is not a reflection on female literary critics, but on my own personal ‘career trajectory’ thus far, and the books that have shaped my own writing. Critics such as Diane Elam, as well as Gilbert and Gubar, should be on this list as well; but that would have made it ‘nine books’ rather than seven, and anyway, I want to go and have a beer. So these seven will have to do, and feel free to leave disagreements and mildly abusive comments in the box provided underneath.


1. William Empson, Argufying Jonathan Bate, soon-to-be Master of Worcester College, Oxford, said that the three greatest critics of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were, respectively, Dr Johnson, William Hazlitt, and William Empson. These are the greatest, he says, ‘not least because they are the funniest.’ Empson is frequently funny. Humour is a rare thing in literary criticism, with many modern academics confounding moral seriousness with stylistic po-facery: a terrible confusion, if ever there was one. Though Empson is best-known for his first book, Seven Types of Ambiguity (published in 1930 when he was 23, and completed after he was banished from Cambridge following the discovery of condoms in his college rooms), this collection of essays, published posthumously in 1987, are the best place to find the great man at work – whether it’s taking his colleagues to task over their critical blindnesses, or his marvellous suggestion that the slave-trade is an important ‘presence’ in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. A ‘rag-bag’ of delights that is well worth a read.


2. Nicholas Royle, The Uncanny A large work of critical theory and literary criticism, this book, published in 2003 and frequently 'Derridean' in its approach, is essentially a collection of essays inspired by Freud’s celebrated essay on the ‘unheimlich’ or uncanny. Subjects range from being buried alive to such outré considerations as darkness, the double, sex, and the modern university. Funny, poetic, and a real page-turner.


3. Christopher Ricks, Essays in Appreciation Sir Christopher Ricks is undoubtedly the greatest living successor to Empson. This collection from 1996 contains some of his best and most important work, whether it’s his suggestion that plague is an important context for Doctor Faustus (a reading itself partly inspired by Empson’s reading of the slave-trade and Coleridge), or his taking-to-task of literary theorists (Ricks reportedly left Cambridge in the 1980s following a series of disagreements with teachers of theory there). Ricks is a wonderfully close and acute reader of all sorts of ‘texts’ (a word he himself would hate being used of literature), and writes beautifully too. A must-read.


4. H. Coombes, Literature and Criticism While a little dated now, this little book fuses close readings of poetry with broader considerations of the importance of such things as tone, rhyme, and imagery in poems and how we should approach them when reading English poetry. A sort of 'introductory' book but one that every critic of poetry should at least have a look at. Heavily influenced by Leavis and Empson, Coombes is good at reading people like Hopkins and T. S. Eliot, and knows what he likes (and is vocal about what he doesn’t like, much as Leavis was).


5. Frederic Crews, The Pooh Perplex This 1960s book, along with its ‘sequel’, the 2000 work Postmodern Pooh, is a collection of hugely entertaining spoofs of popular schools of literary criticism, all presented as being genuine essays written by completely made-up literary critics. I’ve selected the earlier volume here – being a rather perverse so-and-so – which contains gentle (and not-so-gentle) piss-takes of (among others) psychoanalytic criticism, Marxist criticism, and F. R. Leavis himself (who is present in this collection of mock essays as the fictional critic, Simon Lacerous). Perhaps the highlight is ‘A Complete Analysis of Winnie-the-Pooh’. Pants-pissingly funny (if you’re a geek).


6. John Carey, The Violent Effigy First published in 1973, this book – subtitled ‘a study of Dickens’ imagination’ – has been more or less in print ever since. (Not sure if it still is, but in these days of Amazon, ebay, and AbeBooks, it'll be available somewhere for the price of a pint.) Carey looks at a number of aspects of Dickens’s writing and relates them to the novelist’s childhood, as well as the broader Victorian culture of which Dickens was a part. Carey is one of the most incisive readers of Dickens, as this book will clearly demonstrate.


7. John Schad, Victorians in Theory An utterly ‘mad’ idea – take five Victorian poets and pair each of them with one of five Francophone post-structuralists, showing how the two thinkers' works overlap and, in the process, demonstrating how problematic our ideas about history, zeitgeists, and even ‘the Victorians’ really are. Browning partners off with Derrida, Arnold with Foucault, Hopkins with Lacan … the results are often surprising and Schad’s distinctive writing style and skills at close reading point up some interesting connections between these ‘writers’. This is a bold book, but a very rewarding one.


And, as I said, it is now time for me to have a beer in the sun. Happy reading and all that...

Five facts about sweets you probably didn't know

To redress the lack of bloggage and bloggery for a while, I thought I'd write briefly about something utterly trivial and silly. (Not that I find sweets particularly trivial or silly: they are incredibly important, of course.) I know some of you will know one or some or all of these facts, but I'm sure you'll forgive me the brazenly offensive blog title, just this once.

1. J. M. Barrie gave Quality Street chocolates their name
The author of Peter Pan wrote rather a few plays, and one of them has been somewhat confined to the rubbish-bin of history. Or has it? The name endures. The playwright's 1901 play Quality Street was the inspiration for the brand of chocolates launched by Mackintosh's in 1936 - or at least the name was. The older readers of this blog (by which I actually mean anyone over eighteen) may even remember, as I do, the 'Major' and 'Miss' characters who appeared on the tins of Quality Street until 2000. These figures were based on characters from Barrie's play. Contrary to popular belief, Barrie never 'invented' the name Wendy: the name existed before Peter Pan, both as a surname and as a girls' name (a diminutive or 'pet' form of Gwendolyn). Barrie's 'Wendy' was coined as a clipping of the expression 'fwendy-wendy'. (That's enough to make you vomit up your Quality Streets by itself.)

2. Smarties don't contain crushed beetles. Or insects of any kind.
Until recently, the red Smarties were dyed red by using a food colouring called E120 (better known as cochineal). Cochineal is made from crushing bugs (which are, in entomological terms, insects which are capable of sucking things) rather than beetles. However, to make Smarties both kosher and suitable for vegetarians, red Smarties are now dyed using vegetable dyes rather than 'animal' ones. (Some sites claim that is was violet Smarties which were dyed using cochineal - this blogger has been unable to settle the matter either way as yet.) So now you know.... Don't you feel like a smartarse Smartie-pants?

3. Snickers bars were originally called Snickers, not Marathon.
While it is true that Snickers were formerly known as Marathon bars (or monkey shit, depending on whether you like peanuts or not) when they were originally marketed in the United Kingdom, the chocolate bar was first known as Snickers when it was launched in the United States. Bill Bryson tells us, in his (highly recommended) history of the 'American' language, Made in America, that Snickers bars, when launched by the Mars company in 1930, were named after a horse....

4. Skittles used to be made from the same stuff gramophone records were made of.
That is, shellac. We're back to bugs, again (this sucks, I know). The lac bug, found in India and Thailand, is the source of shellac, an edible resin which was used to make old '78s', gramophone records from the pre-rock 'n' roll days. This was also the stuff used to make the hard outer shells of Skittles, but we're informed that shellac is no longer used. Skittles are now, therefore, suitable for vegetarians.

5. Jelly Babies were known as 'Peace Babies' until the 1950s.
When they were originally launched in 1918, Jelly Babies went under the name Peace Babies, to mark the end of the First World War. (So this was the original and sweetest of all the post-war 'baby booms'.) Ironically, the sweets were not made during World War II because of wartime shortages.

So, now you know five facts about sweets that you (probably) didn't know before. Now, go in search of such sweeties and enjoy. I'm off to eat some Gummy Bears.

Another piece of pathetic poetry from the vault

L & R

It is the sixteenth of October. The people of Oxford
gather to jeer, the sharp clear morning air
breathing on the buildings. And the keen, cold wind.

This is the last stand. But problems will occur
at the best-prepared-for martyrdoms, the flames
fanned in the wrong direction, the wind getting up,

the rain keeping the bundles sodden.
One candle, spoken of among the fire and heat,
helps you to keep face, tell left from right:

a metaphor dreamt up in advance, well, no doubt,
yet brought to life amongst the stench of flame
and frightening off all bodily pain. But the final stand

is here, within this ditch, this hell on earth,
thigh-deep in damp wood, praying for a speedy death.

A proposed book of literary delights

I'd love to write a book debunking some of the popular myths about literature. Christopher Marlowe wasn't killed in a tavern brawl. Tennyson didn't invent the phrase ''Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.' Shakespeare's play Hamlet had nothing to do with the death of his son, Hamnet. Lewis Carroll didn't come up with Tweedledum and Tweedledee, or the word 'slithy'. J. K. Rowling doesn't even come close to being the inventor of the word 'muggle'. Oscar Wilde never died of syphilis, though he almost certainly suffered from that literarily-named affliction.

Or, twisting things the other way, there are the surprising and unusual gifts that writers have given us. Charles Dickens first wrote down the word 'boredom'. T. S. Eliot was the first person to use the word 'bullshit'. Edward Bulwer-Lytton, as well as being author of a number of bad novels, gave Bovril its name without realising. Literature and the literary world is full of such gems. But it's not just about trivia, though I think that trivia is incredibly important in educating ourselves in any subject: trivia, to dangle a bon mot in your face, is anything but trivial. But it's more about the fact that many of us know so little of the vast undiscovered ocean of literary knowledge out there, being like Newton's child playing with a few little pebbles of bookish joy every now and then. Of course, maybe John Lloyd and the team of 'QI elves' are already working on 'The Book of General Literary Ignorance', but whether they are or they aren't I have a vision for a different kind of book: one which does for literature what Bill Bryson did for the history of American language and culture in Made in America, or again for scientists in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The walls of university campus Blackwell's all over the country are choc-a-bloc with introductions to literary this, and theorising literary that, but one of the chief things that English schools and departments all over Britain - and the US - really lack is a great introduction to the writers who gave us that thing called 'literature'. I'm not just talking about biographical quirks or etymological oddities, rather something that gives university freshers studying English in all its variegated and diverse forms an idea and shape of the thing they've walked into. And while knowing that Anthony Trollope hated himself for inventing the pillar box (and later died laughing) may not provide them with a framework for deconstructing Heart of Darkness or psychoanalysing Othello, it might provide a less immediately 'useful' but arguably more important role, namely welcoming them into the world of books and literary studies, warming their slippers by the fire for them, and in general acting as their first-semester 'fag'. I for one would buy such a fag, and puff away.

Tour of the South East: Hastings and Hever Castle

Hastings

After we’d finished in Lewes it was already gone 2pm, and we were starving, having had nothing more than a Nutri-Grain bar all day. So we drove out to find somewhere to get a big, fat-filled, greasy meal, and, chancing upon a Little Chef, I ate my third Olympic Breakfast of the holiday. I honestly believe that, in the unlikely event that I ever find myself on Death Row somewhere in the Deep South of America and am told I must select my last meal, I could do worse than to opt for an Olympic Breakfast from the Little Chef. Would they fly me back over to Blighty to taste it in some roadside restaurant in the West Country, do you suppose? Or would they fly out one of the Little Chef … er, chefs to cook up my final feast in the dark, dingy prison itself? Maybe it’s like Blackadder and everyone has to have sausages. For my part, I’d like it if those sausages were served with beans and a fried egg or two.

We then headed to Hastings. I was excited about seeing the town in the sunshine, rather than the squalling rain through which we had driven the day before. The place was, if anything, somewhat disappointing given its important place in history. Mind you, I’m not so sure it quite deserves to be as famous as it is. For starters, the Battle of Hastings—surely its most resounding claim to fame—didn’t even happen in Hastings at all, but a few miles inland at a place which is, appropriately, named Battle. (I have it on reasonably good authority that the village was named after the battle, not that the conquering Normans came to a road-sign that read ‘Battle’ and thought, ‘How poetic! We’ll have our battle there.’) Battle’s other claim to fame—or rather infamy—is that it is the place where the pop group Keane hail from. Where are those bloodthirsty Normans when you really need them, eh?

There is quite a big tourist trade in Hastings though; in fact, almost all of the place has a distinctively touristy tang. There are ice-cream huts, mini-golf courses, shops selling sticks of rock and postcards, and—inevitably—a chance to visit the castle. Unfortunately, we had arrived too late to do the castle, So we had a look round the shops and I bought a copy of five of Seneca’s plays for £1 in a lovely little bookshop that had books piled up all over the floor as well as on the shelves and on revolving stands. There’s something charming about such a bookshop, with its smell of musty, rotting paper and the chaos indicative—at least in my own tiny mind—of a stuffy old professor’s rooms in some medieval Oxford college like Balliol or Merton. It puts all branches Waterstone’s, with their clinical OCD-tastic laying out of the books and ‘3 for 2’ stickers, fully to shame. The owner of the bookshop had the facial hair and questionable taste in jumpers which marks the great eccentrics who always run such shops, and he was friendly enough as he served me. Feeling decidedly happier now I had pocketed a souvenir from Hastings which almost made up for the disappointment of missing out on the castle, I walked out into the evening sunshine ready to go in search of ice cream.

We then had a stroll along the parade, before taking on the cold water and harsh shingles of the beach and dipping our feet in the sea. It has to be done on any British holiday where the coast is in view: you could be staying in the height of the Highlands in mid-January, but if you find yourself on a beach, it’s British law that you have to divest yourself of shoes and socks and expose your lower extremities to the biting cold of the mighty ocean lapping around you. After that we had our ice cream, since the rest of our bodies, feet notwithstanding, was warm enough still at this point. After that, we left Hastings—after all, once you’ve done the tourist shops and missed the castle, you’ve pretty much seen all that the place has to throw at you.


Hever Castle

The next day it was time to head home, but we went via Hever Castle, on the Kent border. This was the home of the Boleyn (or Bullen, as many of the plaques and notices had it in the castle itself) family, the most famous scion of which was Anne, the woman who brought about a Reformation in England in the sixteenth century. The face that brought down a thousand monasteries, if you want to get silly about it. We wanted to have a look round the castle and gardens—and they are charming enough, believe me—but you really pay for the privilege. It was overpriced, over-hyped, and overrated—at £13 entry you expect something special—but the gardens were, I have to say, unutterably lovely if you like gravel paths and little ponds and statues of weird fish-creatures and the like. So the gardens were very pleasant, if nowhere near justifying the hefty entrance fee. I was expecting something special from the castle itself.

Hever Castle was—if you’ll excuse the overwrought pun—heaving. This was the height of the summer holidays, of course, and many parents seemed to be of the impression that this was a good place to bring very small children. I’m not questioning the desire to show your children a place of beauty in order to remind them of the wonderful creations of which our species is possible—no, not for a minute. But I did wonder how much the kids were getting out of it. Their most popular and enduring pastime seemed to be running about the place, but unfortunately the grounds weren’t quite that big, or the place anywhere near deserted enough, to make this a viable activity. So, we found ourselves becoming increasingly baffled by the strange urge that had made parents wake up that morning and decide to bring their toddlers and nine-year-olds to this place.

This may make me sound like an old dyed-in-the-tweed fogey, and if it does, well, I apologise. But it seems to be the same with a lot of kids these days. I don’t blame them for a moment, but I do sometimes feel like turning to the parents and asking them if I could quiz their offspring for a few minutes on their knowledge of Anne Boleyn or the Tudors or Hever Castle. Curiosity is supposed to be the great gift with which we humans are endowed, and it is supposed to be present in children more than at any other phase of life. And yet I worry that we have a generation of children coming through—just after my own generation, arguably—who are no longer as curious about the world as we were. I don’t say ‘They’re no longer curious about the world, full stop’, for that would be unfair and untrue. But I think curiosity, that spark of energy which prompts us to ask questions and want to find out about that which is around us, is not so popular as it once was. It’s partly down to schools, I suppose: education is so syllabus-driven and swamped with tests and exams and assessments, that most of the fun is sucked out of a subject. This has always been the case; it certainly was true when I was at school, ten or so years ago, and it’s one of the reasons why I’ve only since leaving school developed an abiding interest in science, through great books on the subject rather than great teachers. I also think that television, too, has played its part. Television is a great medium, don’t get me wrong—arguably my great love of British history was nurtured, if not directly inspired, by my watching of Blackadder and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men as a child of seven or eight. But there aren’t, let’s be fair, many factual programmes aimed at children, aside from the recent adaptations of the uproariously good Horrible Histories series of books. And aside from books like that, kids aren’t directed to the right books which would inspire them to take an interest in a subject—at least I wasn’t, I know. Anyway, maybe this is all rot and I need to shut up. I just think we don’t nurture curiosity enough in our kids, that’s all. But what do I know? I haven’t even got kids.

In short, Hever Castle is worth a visit, just about. But I think its inflated admittance fee probably puts off a few people. The castle itself contains many rooms containing similar things to the stuff contained in other rooms, and they do have a habit of making a big deal out of very small things while almost shushing into a corner some of the more promising artefacts. But anyway, I’ll let you decide, dearest of readers, should you ever go there yourself.

After Hever we continued our journey home. I had a bag full of books and lots of nerdy stuff about castles and the like to write up. Which I’ve done now—at long last, some three months after the holiday ended—and, in its way, I hope this hasn’t been too dull a travelogue. I’m off now to travel to the land of seventeenth-century Europe in the company of the great Jacobean dramatists. Till next time, then, fair reader, I wish you well on your travels.