The Secret Life of Books – Tom Mole (2019)

With thanks to the publisher for the review copy

The Secret Life of Books is another in a long line of attractive tomes produced to woo all us book lovers who love reading about the things we love to read. Preaching to the choir? Oh absolutely, but that’s no bad thing. Tom Mole brings his own ideas to the genre and there are some lovely personal anecdotes here too – including an insight into his young daughter’s adorable book group. There is also a rather surprising story about Philip Larkin and an Iris Murdoch book.

“I realised that you couldn’t talk about the book as an object without also talking about the things that people did with books. Reading was one of those things, of course, and people’s reading left their own traces on books. But reading was only one of the things that people did with books, and not always the most important.”

Well… I still think the reading of the books is the most important, but yes, when you think about it, we do, do a lot of other things with books. We buy them, collect them, give them away, deface them, talk about them, socialise around them, take them on holiday, arrange them on bookcases. This book is a celebration of all the things we do with books and more besides – as it also traces the history of how those things we do with books came about.

Looking at the subtitle; Why they Mean More than Words we see the author’s intention in this book is to explore the physical book, rather than what they contain. I found this a very interesting way to approach a book about books. The book is broken up into eight chapters, and between each pair of chapters is an interlude that celebrates a piece of artwork featuring books.

What emerges is a thorough exploration of books as objects, from the early scrolls and codex through to the leather bound first edition that would cost a small fortune to own today, to the cheap second hand paperback sporting coffee stains and inscriptions and on to the e-book. Mole suggests how books can reveal something of the status and wealth of the owner (think those very expensive first editions). There are often so many different editions of the same book – the contents are the same yet the physical object very different and what they mean to the owner can also be different. We leave something of ourselves behind in these books too as the author discusses – food stains, jottings – a bookmark where we stopped reading and never went back. We also take a great pride in the way we display our books. The author also suggests that the books we choose to put on our bookshelves tells us something about who we think we are. Oh, and don’t we all love looking at people’s shelves?

“A library is an argument. An argument about who’s in and who’s out, about what kinds of things belong together, about what’s more important and what’s less so. The books that we choose to keep, the ones that we display most prominently, and the ones that we shelve together make an implicit claim about what we value and how we perceive the world.”

The author understands the physical relationship we have with our books. He remembers an old Benjamin Disraeli book he has which had survived long years without being read, Mole had to cut the pages himself in order to read it. When we are searching a book for a favourite passage, we use nonverbal clues to help us – our memory of the physical book itself, the place on the page, how far through the book it was – this isn’t something we can do with an audio or digital book.

Something that resonated with me is how keeping a book previously read on our shelves somehow keeps it alive – something of that book is retained in our memory. Personally, I look at my bookshelves as places filled with old friends.

“Even if we can’t recall most of what we’ve read, the presence of the books serves as an aide-memoire, a reassuring sign that not everything we’ve read is lost. Books on the shelves are sandbags stacked against the floodwaters of forgetting.”

The author considers how technological developments are changing the way we read, and therefore our relationship both with books and the way we share them. Once it might have been wing backed chairs that gave a reader a small amount of privacy, shielding them as they lost themselves in a book, today it could be noise cancelling headphones that help to cut us off from the world around us. The author clearly understands the benefits of e-books – but warns how these technologies can also prove problematic, reminding us how e-readers have built in obsolescence, and how files stored on old devices can suddenly become difficult to access.

The Secret Life of Books contains lots of fascinating little nuggets of information with lots of historical facts I didn’t know, an exploration of books as objects is an interesting take on the book about books. The author’s enthusiasm for books is infectious, and this is a treasure trove for book lovers.

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Educated – Tara Westover (2018)

My book group chose Educated by Tara Westover for our August read. I wasn’t sure it was the kind of thing I was in the mood for. I needn’t have worried – it’s enormously compulsive and was a great book group choice. We met last Wednesday, we all found things that made us so angry, and there were sections some of the group found very uncomfortable to read. It definitely gave us quite a lot to talk about.

“There’s a sense of sovereignty that comes from life on a mountain, a perception of privacy and isolation, even of dominion. In that vast space you can sail unaccompanied for hours, afloat on pine and brush and rock. It’s a tranquillity born of sheer immensity; it calms with its very magnitude, which renders the merely human of no consequence. Gene was formed by this alpine hypnosis, this hushing of human drama.”

Tara Westover grew up in Idaho, in sight of stunning mountains known as the princess, told all government agencies were her enemies, that the end of days was coming and had to be prepared for. Hospitals and schools were all part of the conspiracy and the family kept away from them. Apart from church attendance the family lived quite apart from their neighbours. Her life was entirely different to that of most little girls born in mid-1980s America. Until she was nine years old, she didn’t even exist, her birth had never been registered later she was issued with a retrospective birth certificate.

“I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected.”

Tara; the youngest of seven children was destined however, to prove herself to be phenomenally focused, determined and a real survivor. The landscape in which she grew up in, was one that it would prove difficult to extricate herself from.  

Their community was a Mormon community. However, Tara’s father had taken some of the tenets of their religion to another level. The family home was a little way out of the small local town, incorporating a scrapyard, from where her father made his living. The Westover family were nothing like the other Mormon families in the area, who lived pretty much like other American families. Tara and the three siblings closest to her in age were home schooled – though what Tara’s mother saw as education was somewhat limited. The children could read and do basic maths, and there was one science book in the house for them to learn from. At some level I think (my book group agreed) Tara’s mother must have sensed something of her daughter’s natural intelligence. When Tara was still quite young her mother appeared to have some concern for her daughter’s learning – however she never built on that concern, and Tara was allowed to grow up in appalling ignorance of the world and its history.

For years there was no TV or telephone in the house – later Tara’s father Gene, allowed them – he seemed to change his own rules as it suited him. Tara’s mother became an unqualified midwife (in the same way wise village women did in England during the middle ages) and soon began to mix her own home remedies for the frequent accidents that happened in the scrapyard. Tara’s older brothers were always limping home sporting one gruesome injury after another, their father never very concerned by the battle scars his children wore. Whatever the accident was, no matter how serious, doctors and hospitals were never consulted.

As Tara grew older, she was expected to work alongside her father and brothers in the scrapyard. Her father began to get more extreme in his views, her brother Shawn more and more violent, and Tara’s clothing and behaviour is scrutinised and commented upon, she becomes afraid of falling below the required standard. As Tara becomes a teenager, she is allowed to take part in some local dramatics, when it is discovered she can sing – here she makes her first friend. It is the first small change. Her brother’s violence is shocking, and hard to read about, and Tara survives it by excusing it to herself – she sees his girlfriends enduring the same treatment, and her parents doing and saying nothing.

When she is sixteen, Tara decided that she wanted to learn, and set out on the long, difficult journey that was her education. Having never finished or in fact started high school – she manages to win a place at BYU by passing ACT exams – though her challenges are only just beginning. Showing the most extraordinary determination Tara finally embarks on her education – one that will take her from BYU to Cambridge University and Harvard. During these years and in her visits home she begins to question her memories of home and the things that happened there – and whether she will ever really be able to maintain her relationship with her family.

“But vindication has no power over guilt. No amount of anger or rage directed at others can subdue it, because guilt is never about them. Guilt is the fear of one’s own wretchedness. It has nothing to do with other people.”

Educated is a fascinating memoir, not only in the depiction of the Westover family – but in the story of how Tara changes. From her first awkward beginnings; a teenager unused to the company of other girls, who knew nothing of world history, and who felt her own ignorance daily, still terrified of doctors – to the woman who would leave Cambridge with a PhD.

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Bookworm – A memoir of childhood reading – Lucy Mangan (2018)

Last year I saw so much love for Bookworm by Lucy Mangan across Twitter and the blogosphere. As I was deep into A century of books and it didn’t fit, I resisted the urge to buy it in hardback. Fast forward several months and it was chosen by my very small book group as our April read. The rest of the group met Wednesday night to discuss it and it would seem everyone loved it, though I wasn’t able to go, I joined in virtually.

“Each book is a world entire. You’re going to have to take more than one pass at it.”

Bookworm; A Memoir of Childhood Reading is a slice of deliciously warm bookish nostalgia. It immediately returns us to those timeless days enjoyed by a child bookworm, the days when spending time with a loved book was the most important thing to be done once the irritation of a day at school had been dispensed with.

The book starts with The Very Hungary Caterpillar and ends with The Wolves of Willoughby Chase and in between those two there is a world of wonderful children’s literature to be reminisced over. From Sugar Pink Rose a feminist elephant who refuses to turn pink – through the adventures of My Naughty Little Sister and Milly Molly Mandy to the land beyond the back of the wardrobe, and dozens of more besides. Mangan has such a deep and genuine affection for the books she talks about that her joy in them becomes quite infectious.

There is a big section all about Enid Blyton and the controversy and snobbery she has unleased over the decades – I must say I read a gazillion of her books.

“Blyton is not demanding. She is not an expander of minds like any one of the imaginatively and linguistically gifted authors already mentioned or still to be discussed. Her great gift lies in proving beyond doubt to children that reading can be fun, and reliably so. That the marks on the page will translate into life and colour and movement with ease. This is a thing you can master, a foundation upon which you can build, and also a retreat into which you can escape. She makes it all possible, time and time again. It was for this reason that Roald Dahl – whose own professed primary aim in writing for children was always to entertain them and thus induct them into the world of books – went to bat for her when he was on the 1988 Committee on English in the National Curriculum. He fell out with the rest of the board on the issue of whether her books should be welcomed in schools.” 

Roald Dahl novels come in for several mentions too – as do all manner of children’s classics like The Railway Children, The Secret Garden (I wasn’t alone in my child crush on Dickon) Tom’s Midnight Garden, Goodnight Mr Tom and Little Women. I saw the shadow of TLotR looming – and so couldn’t help but raise a silent cheer when Mangan revealed a dislike of Tolkien’s fantastical world. Her feelings almost exactly my own – although she did actually read all of The Hobbit – while I have never read more than a couple of pages out of idle curiosity.

Whilst discussing the books of her life, Lucy Mangan inevitably talks about her childhood. We meet her family, her mother a gynaecologist – Lucy played quietly, usually with books, behind the secretary’s desk while her mother held consultations. Her quiet father who frequently bought her books, (I couldn’t help but be reminded of my own dear dad – who sometimes bought me books) her younger sister who wasn’t at all bookish. She missed out on outings with her dad and sister because her nose was stuck so far into a book – her family soon became used to her distraction. We meet the next generation – Lucy’s young son to whom she has now begun reading some of the books from her extraordinary collection of ten thousand books.

She was a child who didn’t have many friends – there was another Lucy who lived next door – hours and days lost to other worlds. We’ve all been there – just one more chapter – sneaking the light back on late on a school night.

“The intensity of childhod reading, the instant and complete absorption in a book – a good book, a bad book, in any kind of book – is something I would give much to recapture” 

Lucy Mangan reminds us – should we need it – what it is to be a real bookworm, particularly the child bookworm who without any responsibilities yet, practically eats books. Books were the young Lucy’s friend, her saviour and her frustration when they are banned from the dinner table – Lucy’s relationship with books was and is total – responsible for many of the joys and heartbreaks of her childhood.

Bookworm is a glorious achievement – and I can see why it has become a book so loved by readers. I realised however that I had missed out on a lot of children’s literature by moving on to adult books very early. By eleven I was reading Agatha Christie rather than Enid Blyton, Jane Eyre instead of The Railway Children, terrible nurse and doctor romance novels, Catherine Cookson, Victoria Holt and Jean Plaidy, a few classics like 1984, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and Nancy Drew (she was definitely for teens). I was less fussy back then. Perhaps I was in too much of a rush to move on to adult books but when it comes to Sweet Valley High – I really don’t think I missed anything.

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The Smallest Things – Nick Duerden (2019)

Review copy from the publisher

The Smallest Things is both a memoir and a celebration of family – a family who the reader becomes quickly very fond of. Nick Duerdon writes with poignant intelligence, honesty and enormous affection. I was nearly reduced to tears on the bus!

Nick Duerdon grew up in a London high rise flat with his mother. His grandparents, his mother’s parents, lived in a suburb of Milan, Italy. They were always there. There was a language barrier which made things a bit more awkward, Nick’s Italian very limited, his grandparents speaking no English. However, they were an unchanging presence in his young life that could always be relied upon. The recipients of dutiful visits in school holidays, where carefully preserved rituals had been maintained for years.  

“At first I suffered these weekends dutifully because I was young and brash, and because time in Milan stood so tauntingly still and I didn’t. But as I aged and slowed, and as they did too, these trips out of normal life became visits to cherish, to burn into my mind’s eye for the time when the inevitable happened and they weren’t around any more.”

As Nick Duerdon entered into middle age, himself a father of two daughters, his 98 year old grandmother is reluctantly obliged to go into a care home. It is the moment in which he begins to realise that perhaps he didn’t pay enough attention to his grandmother in the past. Living in London with his Spanish wife and two young daughters, Nick sees how history is beginning to repeat itself with his girls and their Spanish grandmother.

When we’re young, we take the people around us, a little bit for granted, we forget I suppose that they won’t always be there. Families are often a mystery – and we forget sometimes to ask the important questions while there is still someone to answer them. There have been little mysteries in my own family – small things, we wonder about when we look back – why did such and such happen? why did that person suddenly go and live there? It’s frustrating to know that those questions will never be answered. One of the reasons I enjoy family memoirs so much is because families are so endlessly fascinating – and the fascination is so often in the small things, the silly squabbles, the rituals and traditions that are unique to that family, the tiny hurts and tender spots that never quite heal, and of course the mysteries.

In The Smallest Things, Nick Duerden examines the rich, poignant complexity of family life. Nick’s mum was only in her fifties when she died, his ageing Italian grandparents his last link with her. Nick’s duty visits to his grandparents continued into adulthood – short trips in the main, long weekends becoming shorter as the earlier plane home begins to be always the one booked.

“Time with my grandparents really did operate at a more gradual pace. It was a stagnant thing. Swollen with inactivity, no pressing need to maintain the urgent thrust of modern life because here life wasn’t modern at all. It had stopped with my grandfather’s retirement years earlier, and these days tock only followed tick if tock could be bothered. There were no distractions, little incident, no pressing places to be, nothing to get done.”

Visits are looked forward to, but once installed in his grandparents’ apartment, the same old routine is fallen into, beautifully cooked dishes of spaghetti for lunch and days in which the evening game of cards is the highlight. He describes the visit he took with his wife – before she was his wife – and the rare trip out in the car, they took with his grandparents. It was of course a disaster – his grandfather confused by the new roads – too stubborn to admit he didn’t know the way. The atmosphere of awkward tension is palpable, and tenderly portrayed.

Nick witnesses his grandparents ageing – never sure when he says goodbye if it’ll be the last time. The passage of time brings changes for all of us – and it is always sad when we spot the decline in others.

“The last time I had seen them together, they didn’t bother eating at the living-room table any more, deciding that it was quicker, and less fuss, simply to eat in the kitchen, both of them done with the ceremony of tradition. A significant capitulation, this, the white flag of surrender, the beginning of the end.”

With his grandmother ageing and becoming ever frailer – Nick goes in search of the secrets his late mother left behind. A family friend helps to sensitively fill in some gaps. He finds that in the end it is often the smallest of things that bind us together, when things have remained unspoken for years.

As it says on the cover; this is a memoir of tiny dramas – after all isn’t that the essence of family life? Tenderly written, and unexpectedly poignant The Smallest Things is a beautiful celebration of family life and those relationships which are the most important.

Highly recommended for those who enjoy family memoirs as I do.

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Appointment in Arezzo – a friendship with Muriel Spark – Alan Taylor (2017)

Following a wonderful year of #readingmuriel2018 this seemed the perfect book to end 2018 with.

Alan Taylor first met Muriel Spark in Arezzo in 1990, she was already seventy-two and had been living in Italy with her companion Penelope Jardine since the 1970s. Taylor had gone to Arezzo especially to interview Muriel Spark. From this first meeting there blossomed a mutual, fond friendship which only ended with Spark’s death.

In Appointment in Arezzo, Alan Taylor tells the story of Muriel Spark, using his knowledge of the writer, as well as his conversations and friendship with Muriel and Penny. Taylor and his family became regular visitors at San Giovanni; Muriel Spark’s home in Italy, he tells of the family’s first holiday there, when Muriel and Penny were away travelling, and the Taylor family were left in charge of the house and the dogs. There were other times the family stayed with Muriel and Penny and their household is a charmingly chaotic, colourful one, a place of real warmth I felt.

“As we got out of the car, Muriel, dressed in an elegant trouser suit, emerged from a gnarled door, beaming broadly and greeting the children as if she’d known them all their lives. She had in her hands two notebooks, one of which she presented to each of the children. Jennifer’s was called ‘Confidential’ while Michael’s was ‘Underground.’ ‘Hide them from the customs officials,’ Muriel whispered.”

Alan Taylor was to accompany Muriel on several trips abroad – arranging for her to speak at the Edinburgh book festival – an event that had the whole of Edinburgh fighting for tickets – well you can hardly blame them. We witness Muriel in Manhattan, and Taylor recalls the years that Muriel Spark wrote for the New Yorker – and had her own office in their building. When the New Yorker celebrated its seventy fifth birthday, it invited Muriel Spark to take part in a festival, and due to Penny’s fear of flying, it was Alan Taylor who accompanied her.

“Throughout our stay in New York Muriel seemed carefree as I imagined she had been when she first arrived there in 1961, fascinated by everything and everyone. It was easy to forget that she was in her ninth decade and in constant pain. I couldn’t help but compare her with the elderly cast of Memento Mori. ‘How primitive life becomes in old age,’ thinks one of them, ‘when one may be surrounded by familiar comforts and yet more vulnerable to the action of nature than any young explorer at the pole.’ Muriel’s approach to ageing – and the infirmity that was its inevitable accompaniment – seemed to be to ignore it wherever possible.”

It is clear that the families became close, and Alan Taylor gained a deep understanding of Muriel Spark’s work, her character and personality. It seems to have been an understanding born of great respect for her work and affection for her as a person. It is obvious however that this book is in no way supposed to be a complete biography – it is the story of the Muriel Spark who was Alan Taylor’s friend.

“No life can be wholly recaptured in words. Something is always missing or unnecessarily included, or over-emphasised, or mis-recalled or made more of, or less of, than it merits. Scott Fitzgerald said that there never could be a good biography of a good novelist, because if he is any good he is too many people; Muriel would certainly have agreed with him.”

Taylor returns to those years before he knew Muriel Spark – and recounts briefly the years Muriel Spark herself covered in Curriculum Vitae. Her upbringing in Scotland, her brief disastrous marriage and the beginnings of her writing career.

However, Taylor certainly doesn’t shy away from those more controversial aspects of her life. He confronts the very difficult relationship with her son; Robin, relating aspects of their correspondence – which certainly shows another side to the story. He also confronts Muriel Spark’s attitude to her Jewish roots – one of the biggest arguments she and her son Robin had. He acknowledges Spark’s prior suspicion of biographers – especially following her experience with Derek Stanford – who had so betrayed her and whose unofficial biography had so infuriated her.

Taylor gives us Spark’s thoughts and feelings on all the key moments in her life, and her long career in writing. Taylor’s portrait is hugely affectionate, a warm, honest portrayal of a woman he quite obviously felt very in tune with. It is a wonderful portrait, and a wonderful book. It provides a fabulous companion to Curriculum Vitae – and for me really completed the picture of a writer I have come to admire so much.

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Basil Street Blues – Michael Holroyd (1999)

The name Michael Holroyd is very familiar to me, and yet I don’t really know why it should be. Checking the list of his published works (mainly biographies) I see I have read nothing else by him. Yet, when I asked for recommendations for a book published in 1999 for my A Century of Books, his name jumped out at me as one I recognised. So, Basil Street Blues was the book I picked for 1999, buying an old paperback second hand edition, knowing that I generally rather enjoy family memoirs.

Holroyd writes superbly, in Basil Street Blues we are treated to a parade of fascinating character studies, honestly and faithfully reproduced by a consummate biographer. These people, now long dead, and mostly forgotten I am sure, outside the Holroyd family – breathe again.

In the 1970s Michael Holroyd asked his parents to each write an account of their lives, their marriage, his childhood etc before they died. By this time his parents had been divorced and living separately for many years, but they had each come from different worlds – and their son wanted their stories. Holroyd used those accounts as the basis of this book – although he found there were some big inconsistences in their accounts, and so he had to become a bit of a detective into his own life.

Michael Holroyd’s father was Basil de Courcy Fraser Holroyd, descended from the 1st Earl of Sheffield, Michael’s grandfather had sold Lalique glass out of the Breves Galleries in Basil Street. His mother; Ulla, however, was originally from Sweden, where she had lived closely with her mother; Kaja– her parents having separated she barely knew her father.

“My grandmother (Kaja) is a snob. Snobbishness is her form of authority. It cows other people, and this suits her. That is why she looks so young in the photographs and my mother so ill-at-ease. My grandmother believes in appearances and living up to her beliefs, she appears splendidly superior.”

Unfortunately, the marriage was not a success, and when the couple separated during the war. Michael’s father took him to live with is family in their home Norhurst in Maidenhead – the family had relocated there during the war from the original family home of Brocket. It was not a harmonious household – though Michael was loved – he grew up under a barrage of spite and recrimination between the other occupants of the house.

“Norhurst was to be my intermittent home for twenty years. Everyone was very kind to me, but the atmosphere had become saturated with unhappiness. It was a ritualised unhappiness, repeated in the same formula of words through the awful succession of meals, housework, and more meals that was our routine, every day, all year. I can hear their voices still.”

Living in the house were, his grandparents, his father occasionally when home, his aunt Yolande and old Nan, who had been employed when his grandmother Adeline first became a mother. It seems the women of the house never stopped scrapping, snarling and spitting – and so boarding school first Scaitcliffe and later Eton, and visits to his mother must have been welcome distractions at times. Though despite chapters relating to Holroyd’s school days and later the beginnings of his writing career, this is a book which mainly concerns those we have never heard of – the members of his family.

The stories of his grandparents and his parents – I found truly fascinating – yet they are not happy stories. His grandfather remaining unhappily married to a woman of volatile temper – later had a long affair with a woman called Agnes in London. His own parents separating and re-marrying – more than once – happiness seemed to be mostly an elusive thing. By the time he came to ask his parents to write about their lives, they were both in ill health, Michael was now having to support his father financially. I am left with a sad image of these two people – for whom life was often difficult.

“My parents, who had long been divorced, and gone through a couple of subsequent marriages, each of them, as well as various additional liaisons, were by the late 1970s living alone in fragile health and meagre circumstances. They appeared bewildered by the rubble into which everything was collapsing. After all, it had started so promisingly.”

No doubt Holroyd trusted that his readers would find his family as interesting as he did. He doesn’t spend much time talking about himself and he is quite humble about his own writing. His own achievements come in for very little mention – though he does reveal that after having written an autobiographical novel ‘A Dog’s Life” his father threatened to sue if he published it in Britain. Despite his obvious fascination and understanding for his own family, this isn’t a very warm or happy book – Holroyd grew up surrounded by failing and unhappy marriages, conflict and changing fortunes. His account of these however is moving and surprisingly engrossing.

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Stet: An Editor’s Life – Diana Athill (2000)

I love Diana Athill’s writing and have now read several of her memoirs and a volume of short stories. However, the book that seems to be mentioned again and again by fans of her work is Stet – An Editor’s Life. I can now see why, it is a book full of bookish gossip, lifting the lid on almost fifty years of publishing.

Diana Athill was born into the kind of family, where young women would have grown up not necessarily expecting to have to work for a living. They primarily escaped this dire fate of course by marrying, but, by the time of Athill’s parents’ generation the family finances had changed a lot – and it had been impressed on Diana by her father, that she would need to make her own living. During the Second World War Diana worked for the BBC – and it was around this time that Diana met André Deutsch who was to become such a key figure in Athill’s life.

André Deutsch was a young Hungarian about to dip his toe into the world of publishing. Not long after meeting Deutsch at a party in the flat she shared with a friend, Diana was to leave her job at the BBC to join André Deutsch in the publishing firm of Allan Wingate, and later as a director when he started a new company under his own name.

Athill obviously had a lot of respect for Deutsch, the two were good friends, but she was well aware of his faults – and seems to have been one of the people best able to handle him. André Deutsch was clearly a very difficult man to work with, he definitely had his own little ways. He was given to terrible rages and was irritated by employees who he felt weren’t up to scratch, yet Diana continues to work well with Deutsch through business ups and downs across four decades. Athill is also wonderfully self-effacing about her own abilities, playing down rather the important role she played in bringing so many books to life. Her love of literature is obvious – and she shares many anecdotes of the vast amount of editing work she did.

“We must always remember that we are only midwives—if we want praise for progeny we must give birth to our own.”

She was rigorous in her approach to work, she clearly took her work seriously, yet she had a sensible approach – to what we would now call work life balance.

“Generally office and home were far apart, and home was much more important than office. I was not ashamed of valuing my private life more highly than my work; that, to my mind, is what everyone ought to do.”

In the second part of the book Athill talks about her relationship with six of the writers she worked with during her long career: Mordecai Richler, Brian Moore, Alfred Chester, Jean Rhys, V.S.Naipul and Molly Keane. I’m afraid I didn’t know anything about Richler and Chester, and Brian Moore I have heard of but not (yet) read I recently bought The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne which Athill references quite a lot in that chapter.

However, V.S Naipul, Jean Rhys and Molly Keane I have read quite a bit – and so I found these accounts particularly fascinating. I don’t think I was particularly surprised that V.S Naipul was – well quite frankly – pretty horrible – (his poor wife!). About Naipul, Athill says:

“I saw him as a man raised in, and frightened by, a somewhat disorderly, inefficient and self-deceiving society, who therefore longed for order, clarity and competence.”

Nor was I surprised to hear how fragile Jean Rhys was – though the extent of that fragility is completely at odds with the precise genius of her writing. What a fascinating woman, though a sad one – and hopelessly impractical.

“No one who has read Jean Rhys’s first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad at it she was.”

Athill is very honest about these people – and there does seem to have been a culture of accommodating their every whim – valued writers (certainly of this kind of stature) were rather pandered to it seems.

I wonder if that was just how things were under Andre Deutsch? or whether it was common to other houses? My assumption is that things have changed hugely since those days. It makes for compelling reading.

It is incredible that a woman born in 1917 – who worked for the BBC during the war, is actually still with us, she will be 101 on Friday.

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