Heron Books

Being in no way superstitious, unbothered as I am by all those ladders under which I walk, the black cats passed and mirrors broken, not to mention wantonly stepping inside to open umbrellas, I have no qualms about writing to you on Friday 13th. With customary rationality, I felt quite safe in opening The Haunting of Lamb House by Joan Aiken, in its exceedingly beautiful new edition from Manderley Press. Thank goodness I don’t believe in ghosts, I thought, as I read the diary of young Toby living at Lamb House in Rye in the 1700s who one day saw something – a man? an apparition? – which changed the…

When the weather turns and the wind’s in the east, I always recall a conversation with my grandmother, I in my third-floor university room, looking out above bare trees, she in her stiflingly hot sitting room with a bone china teacup on the table next to the telephone, saying, ‘it is bitterly cold.’ I hear it still, winter in her words but warmth in her tone. After that, she sent me her woollen mittens, darned many times and large enough to fit over another pair of gloves, and now when venturing outside requires a bit of spirit, I say to myself, ‘it is bitterly cold’ before wrapping up in knitted…

There is a poem of Seamus Heaney’s, ‘September Song’ which names John Field, composer, pianist and inventor (perhaps) of the nocturne.* Field gets a mention in War and Peace and in Tolstoy’s autobiography too. It’s not bad as legacies go, added to his compositions, his teaching method and being ripped off by Chopin. There was someone present to note his final words, a pun leaving an impression of wit not exhibited in life. There were children and those children would go on to have children. Field, with that eye for the Horatian monumentum aere perennius, wanted more; his estranged wife, Adelaide Percheron, did too. To their ghosts and we readers…

‘The days of humankind are numbered,all man’s achievements are nothing but a wind,his accomplishments will cease to exist.’ Don’t panic, this isn’t about artificial intelligence. That’s Gilgamesh stirring Enkidu to go on a murderous quest with him in Simon Armitage’s new rendition. I started to write, ‘new rendition of the epic poem,’ but enclosing it in the epic genre and even its status as a poem have been in question in the decades of scholarship on Gilgamesh. By the second page of Armitage’s introduction, he has already asserted as fact claims regarding the historical existence of a king called Gilgamesh and the age and composition of the poem which are…

In a year spent with Lawrence formerly of the band Felt, later of Denim, currently of Mozart Estate (née Go-Kart Mozart), Will Hodgkinson is offered a lot of ideas about the book he is writing by that book’s subject. The ideas are rules. The rules are non-negotiable. No talking to other members of Felt. No use of the word ‘just.’ (‘Why not?’ ‘I just don’t like it.’). No anecdotes. Possibly the writer will need to break some of these. Daily life for Lawrence, the sixty-something-year-old musician for decades on the cusp of achieving astonishing fame is full of such strictures – about music of course but also fashion, food, hygiene…

Having missed the recent Whistler exhibition at the Tate, I have been reading the essay collection on Whistler, edited for that show by Carol Jacobi, and admiring the art produced therein – sketches, oil paintings, etchings and his extravagant design of ‘The Peacock Room,’ a project which escalated wildly, leading him to fall out spectacularly with his patron (details of the story here – scores with enemies should be settled in gleaming gold leaf). The essays are enjoyable and enlightening on Whistler the artist and the man, on the development of his techniques, his admiration for Japanese prints, his delight in litigation and attempts to control his legacy. I have…

In the works is a newsletter on Whistler, Eric Ravilious et al and David Hockney. I have been reading about Whistler’s apparently spontaneous strokes in his smoky London pictures which were in fact laborious – he would make a mark, decide it was wrong, paint over it and begin again rather than adjust it. Many layers lurk beneath the final creation of ‘freshness and movement.’ I have begun reading of Tirzah Garwood, wood-engraver, painter, writer (and wife of Eric Ravilious but let’s afford her her own space in sentence and in consideration) and the stunning work she produced in her few 42 years. I have read about Betty Freeman, a…

Last week’s newsletter closed with Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, which I had just started. I must now insist that you all read it, if you have not already. Vinnie, the fifty-four-year-old American academic in London to collect children’s playground rhymes, is one of my favourite characters in literature. Clear-eyed about many aspects of herself, her research and the perceptions of ageing women and of Americans, she is simultaneously deluded, seeing England through a rosy historical haze applicable neither in the past nor now and imagining that no one could fall in love with her. Enter Chuck Mumpson. An entirely inappropriate prospect. Not even a prospect since, ‘She certainly hadn’t…

When the spider the size of a fifty pence piece made her home above my bedside lamp, I felt revulsion. Her body has the gelatinous look of a Haribo sweet and as much to recommend it. One of us has to move, probably me, I thought. That glass and paper trick having gone awry too many times, I left her and her waving legs alone and prayed that she wouldn’t get cold and join me in bed. Now that I’ve shared the room with her for some time, I have grown more tolerant. Sometimes I wish her good night. She has quietly been performing on me an experiment to test…

I have been seized by illness. My fingers ache as though I have spent hours toiling over an embroidery or hitting refresh on the British Museum website. I suffer nightmares and wake in a cold sweat, strange images floating before my eyes of ships and arrows and dismembered limbs. At the edges shimmer foxes and crows, the stuff of Aesop’s Fables. People have become epithets: the postman, ‘The Deliverer’; Harry, after a battle with the printer, ‘The Conqueror’; I myself, ‘The Unsteady,’ following an encounter with some mead. Bayeux Tapestry fever is upon me. I have not yet secured a ticket to see this mighty comic strip but I am…