Nicola Upson's Josephine Tey

 I have just finished reading Nicola Upson's ninth book in her series using the real-life detective writer Josephine Tey as one of the main characters. 

                                                Faber & Faber first edition - 2020

Quoting from the dust jacket's blurb: December 1938. Storm Clouds hover once again over Europe. Writer Josephine Tey and Detective Chief Inspector Archie Penrose gather with friends for a Cornish Christmas, but two strange and brutal deaths on St Michael's Mount - and the unexpected arrival of a world-famous film star, in need of sanctuary - interrupt the festivities. Cut off by the sea and a relentless blizzard, can Josephine and Archie prevent the murderer from striking again?

Once again, Nicola Upson proves that she can 'spin a yarn'. There's no great or deep insights into the detection side of things, but she builds up a believable cast of characters on the way.  Like nearly all her previous stories, Upson brings in real-life people and often uses real-life events (if usually altered to fit her tale) to good effect. Here, Marlene Dietrich joins the others at a planned Christmas retreat which goes horribly wrong. The two murders, and murderers, are quite different. The first, a spur of the moment, rush-of-blood to the head between two old friends who have long lived on the Mount; the other a killing based on events many years ago, and set out in the 'prologue' chapter. There are one or two little plot twists which greatly added to the story, if not the suspense.

2008

I have been collecting Nicola Upson's Tey series ever since the first volume An Expert in Murder came out in 2008. Set in London's theatreland in 1934, the link with two murders appears to be Josephine Tey's play Richard of Bordeaux. I wrote to Upson in March 2009, to congratulate her on her debut, sending her some of Tey's signatures from some of her first editions I had collected.  She wrote back a thank-you letter, saying she was currently on the last chapter of Book 3 and was about to launch No. 2. Sure enough, I bought them as they appeared - Angel with Two Faces (2009) and Two For Sorrow (2010). A fourth one - Fear in the Sunlight (2012) soon followed.

                        2009                                      2010                                       2012

 

I have enjoyed all the books, whether set in Cornwall and its Minack Theatre; researching the Finchley baby farmers with the subsequent hanging of two women in 1903; or joining Alfred Hitchcock and his wife Alma Reville in the North Wales village of Portmeirion; the character studies, settings and murder plots are well done.

Two more books followed - The Death of Lucy Kyte in 2013 and London Rain in 2015. The first atmospherically weaving a story around the Suffolk setting for the infamous Red Barn murder of Maria Marten (who can forget hammy Tod Slaughter in the 1936 melodrama!); the second set during the Coronation celebrations in 1937 London , involving nasty goings-on at the BBC.

    

                                             2013                                          2015

Strangely, Faber brought out the last four books in large paperback format. I hate changes in binding formats - it just does not look right on my bookshelves! The good news is that for the next three books, including The Dead of Winter, the publisher reverted to dust wrappered hardbacks.

    

                                              2017                                        2019

Nine Lessons is set in 1930s Cambridge in the period leading up to Christmas. A serial rapist stalks the streets. The dedication pays tribute to the group of women who survived the real Cambridge rapist and Upson weaves her tale around a creepy and bleak series of events. Sorry for the Dead again uses events of the past - here, it is 1915 - to construct a compelling story on the 1930s Sussex Downs.

It is difficult, after a period of up to eleven years, particularly since I have read so many other novels, to recall in any great depth the storylines of Upson's nine books. None have disappointed me, some I have finished thinking "I really did enjoy that". Nine Lessons I remember being quite creepy; Two for Sorrow being rather sad; Fear in the Sunlight being a fascinating account of the Hitchcocks coming up against Tey, whose novel they were turning into quite a different film. The use of flashback events and real people in her stories works for Upson. I look forward to more. Tey didn't die (albeit far too young at 55) until 1952 and Upson has only reached Christmas 1938!

G. G. Coulton - a Polemical Historian!

 It's nearly a month since my last post - the longest 'gap' yet. There are several reasons for this. First, I have been loading information about my book collection[s] onto an online database called https://www.libib.com/login and have now reached 2,681 added, before having a break. All the Victorian and earlier books in the back bedroom, about half of the books in the Study (17th-21st century History; History series such as Longmans, Oxford and Nelson; Local History and Reference; Castles and Religious Houses; and West Indies books) are on, and in the Library downstairs, I have added Constance Holme, Stanley Weyman, Daphne du Maurier, Josephine Tey, R. H. Forster, Barbara Willard, Mary Webb and others. Since the total allowed is 5,000, and I have just over 8,000 books, I have decided not to add my Puffins and Peacocks and any others of my large collection of fiction and non-fiction paperbacks; or my Oxford World's Classics, Buchan Family and John Meade Falkner collections.

Secondly, I have had to concentrate, for many hours, on preparing the next Accreditation Return (rather like Education's OFSTED) for Ashby Museum. Time I resent spending. Thirdly, I spent longer than I should have done on two books - Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Autobiography of G. G. Coulton, an Historian mainly of medieval topics and one who I greatly admire. My last Blog, on 28th October, was on Conrad, so just a few lines on Coulton.

George Gordon Coulton was born in King's Lynn in 1858 (the same year as John Meade Falkner!) and educated at King's Lynn Grammar School, Felsted School and St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. He started teaching but then was ordained in the Church of England in 1883. Increasingly uncomfortable with the constraints of the official church and losing his sense of vocation, he took on further teaching jobs with spells abroad in Europe. He began writing articles and reviews as an independent scholar, gaining a reputation as a knowledgeable and skilled historian and controversialist/polemicist. In 1911 he gained a lecturing position at the University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 1919 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1929. He died in March 1947.

His speciality was the Middle Ages, but he also wrote strongly opinionated articles/books on modern issues such as Pacifism - The Main Illusions of Pacifism (1916) and The Case for Compulsory Military Service (1917), being much influenced by the position in Switzerland. He was a fierce anti-Catholic (probably why I enjoy reading his works!) and engaged in embittered journalistic controversy with Hilaire Belloc, who detested him! He was convinced monasticism was an unnatural institution and he distrusted ecclesiastical potentates. His Autobiography was published in 1943 and is an interesting read.

First edition - C. U. P. 1943

He charts his life's journey through his boyhood, in particular recalling lovingly his early years in (King's) Lynn and Pentney, giving fascinating accounts of public school and university life in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. He either kept very detailed diaries or he had amazing powers of recollection, as he inserts wonderful anecdotes about friends (and enemies!). He taught at Heidelberg, Sherborne, Sedbergh and Dulwich College, never for very long. I can't imagine he was an easy colleague! His last three Chapter titles really sum up his career: History and Controversy, An Extreme Case * and Soul's Ease. His strongly held views come across clearly: I at first entered the historical field frankly as an amateur; and academic officials had every right to receive me critically...but I feel now from inside, even more strongly than when I wandered outside its precincts, that History suffers more than any other Faculty from academic conservatism and pedantry. He published a series of 'controversial' pamphlets during his career, which were tied together in sets.  He is, perhaps, most famous for his three volume Five Centuries of Religion; Chaucer and His England; Medieval Panorama; and Ten Medieval Studies.  

        

                    Methuen first edition - 1908                      C.U.P. first edition - 1938

The Chaucer book deals not only with the poet's life but also is a far-ranging portrayal of the late fourteenth century - King and Queen, Knights and Squires, the Poor, Merry England, Priests and people. Medieval Panorama is exactly the sort of social history book I love delving into, with its chapters on the Village, Nature and Superstition, Cloister Life, the Town, Trade and Travel and so on. Coming in at 321 and 801 pages, these are big books, amply furnished with original source material. They recall similar books - A. L. Poole's Medieval England (2 vols. 1958 ed.); E. L. Cutts' Scenes & Characters of the Middle Ages (1925); J. J. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (1889); and G. M. Trevelyan's English Social History (1942). I know these are regarded by modern academics as old-fashioned and often misguided - but, I don't care. Narrative History of the old-fashioned sort is readable, unlike more recent tomes, festooned with graphs and charts. I come down firmly on the side (if sides there be) that History is Literature rather than Science - long live C. V. Wedgwood, A. L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, Peter Ackroyd et. al.!

 

Coulton also published The Black Death, No. 46 in Benn's Sixpenny Library (which also included his enemy, Hilaire Belloc's, Oliver Cromwell!) and, back in 1906, a novel Friar's Lantern. Coulton called it his brief fantasia. It is a polemic, particularly against the Papacy, and I enjoyed it!

            

             Ernest Benn first edition - 1929          James Clarke first edition - 1906

* The penultimate Chapter in Coulton's Autobiography deals with the charge that for nearly thirty years, I concentrated criticism so steadily upon a Cardinal of the Roman Church as to arouse a natural suspicion , except among the few who knew me in private life, that I had some personal grudge to pay off. He further went on: My personal contact with the Cardinal was simply that of an ordinary reader (hardly!) who exercises his right of asking an author civilly for straightforward references, in the face of apparently incorrect assertions. The Cardinal was Abbot Gasquet, whose Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (1888), The Old English Bible (1897), Abbot Wallingford  (1900) and English Monastic Life (1904) so annoyed Coulton. I have a copy of the latter book, which includes a chapter on Nuns and Grace Dieu Priory, Leicestershire. Having researched the history of the priory, I can vouch for Gasquet's slapdash and totally partial writing.

Coulton's main charges came in his Ten Medieval Studies (1906; 2nd. ed. 1915; 3rd. ed. 1930):

                                              Beacon paperback edition - 1959

Gasquet, with others like Mgr. Robert Benson, was castigated with references throughout the book, but was particularly dealt with in the Appendix II: A Rough List of Misstatements and Blunders in Cardinal Gasquet's Writings (nearly 200 of them!). The Appendix runs from page 203 to page 270 in the paperback and, even if only half are proven, the mound of errors is appalling. Coulton in his Autobiography states: I shall not live to see it myself, but I am credulous enough to believe in the final victory of reason, however tardy (Truth the Daughter of Time?!), and to imagine a world in which the healthy initiative of writers, and the willing response of readers, will make cheating in History as disreputable, and therefore as rare, as cheating at cards. 

The magisterial Dom David Knowles wrote in his Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (1956) that he was in the first place unusually inaccurate...from c.1900 Gasquet's pages crawl with errors and slips... towards the end of his life, his capacity for carelessness amounted almost to genius; and notes that he was not an intellectually humble man and he showed little insight into his own limitations of knowledge and training.  Knowles is clear: the academic victory lay certainly with Coulton.

Even the present respected Catholic Historian, Eamon Duffy, has said - Cardinal Gasquet, a great Benedictine historian, was both a bad workman and not entirely scrupulous about what he said. So you can be a churchman and a lousy historian.

G. R. Elton, the great Tudor Historian, simply wrote in the Bibliography of his England under the Tudors (1955) that Gasquet's work on Henry VIII and the Monasteries is best ignored.

So, Coulton can lie peacefully, perhaps smugly, in his grave!

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski - aka Joseph Conrad

   In October 1874, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, aged sixteen, left  Kraków by train for Marseilles. After three years of sailing from the French port, he joined the British steamer Mavis. From 1878 to January 1894, he voyaged with the British Merchant Marine. From that point onwards, Joseph Conrad pursued a career as an author. In the 1860s/1870s, much of Africa remained a blank canvas to Europeans. Over the next few decades, it was 'opened up' by Europeans - missionaries, 'explorers', traders and armies. It is writ large in History books that this developed into a 'Scramble for Africa'. V. G. Kiernan (The Lords of Humankind, 1969) has written, Africa in this period became very truly a Dark Continent, but its darkness was one the invaders brought with them, the sombre shadow of the white man.

This is the context of Conrad's own journey to the Congo, starting with an interview in Brussels by the Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo; embarkation from Bordeaux in May; arrival at Boma, the seat of the Belgian Congolese Government in June; further overland trekking to Kinshasa; and then travelling the 1,000 miles to Stanley Falls. Apparently, he did not feel a sense of excitement or achievement; instead a great melancholy descended on him. His boyhood daydreams had been befouled by the actualities of H. M. Stanley and the Congo Free State. This is the context for one of the books he is best remembered for - Heart of Darkness.

Penguin Books - 1999

(part of a Millennium box set)

I must have bought a Penguin copy of the book back in the 1990s. Having just got through André Gide and Albert Camus (see earlier Blogs), I thought I would continue a Covid-19 Misery Fest, by re-reading the novel. The  Penguin printing was diabolical! No margins worth speaking of and small, dark print. Darkness indeed. So, serendipity-like, on a usual pop-in to the Oxfam bookshop in Derby, there awaiting me was a much more reader-friendly edition (see above). 

Now, the confession. I had to read the book, short as it is (a mere 110 pages) in three 'bites'. Why? it bored rather than depressed me - heresy!  I found the writing 'cold' (a strange word to use, I know). I could summon up little sympathy for any of the characters: Marlow chuntered slowly on, like the big river he was on; Kurtz just became a pain, first in reputation, then in the flesh. More interesting were the African woman, with the helmeted head and tawny cheeks...the barbarous and superb woman, who was the only native not to flinch at the screech of the boat's whistle; and the Intended (of Kurtz), who receives Marlow in her lofty drawing room, coming forward, all in black, with a pale head, floating towards me in the dusk.

By his later years, Conrad was, apparently, set fast in his finicky ways, a stickler for spotless boots, prissy neckties, starched collars, regular mealtimes, and punctilious with ladies and tradespeople. This is how his second son, John, remembered his father (who was 48 when he was born). He got angry with everybody: wife, children, photographers, cricket lovers, eaters of porridge ("damned fish glue"). Oh, dear, he would not be a conducive dinner-companion and would be a long way down my list of Authors I would like to have met!  And yet, I must have had my usual spasm of buying a batch of his works and Christine taught The Secret Agent to her students. The ones in my collection are below.

1911 - Penguin reprint 1966     1898 - Penguin reprint 1976

1897 - Penguin reprint 1977     1904 - Penguin reprint 1978

1907 - Penguin reprint 1980     1913 - Penguin reprint 1975

A. N. Wilson (an author I much admire), headed one of his End Columns (3rd September 2001) on The continuing appeal of Conrad's moral universe. He wrote: One of the happiest purchases I ever made was a complete edition of Conrad - £10 for the pristine set...How glad I am to have come to an appreciation of Conrad in advanced middle age! Conrad's great themes, of moral failure, of disappointment not with life but with oneself, are more fully appreciated later in life. Well, not by this 'oldie'. Purblind I probably am; lacking in a certain critical faculty, certainly. But I doubt I will return to Conrad - so many other authors to enjoy, and occasionally endure. I will go back to Camus, possibly even Gide, to top up on my misery quota.  I am much more like to watch a repeat of Albert Hitchcock's 1936 film Sabotage rather than Conrad's The Secret Agent. Sorry, Józef .

Ken Follett's latest blockbuster

 I have just finished reading the fourth of Ken Follett's Kingsbridge series. Although Follett has written over twenty other novels, including Eye of the Needle, which became an International Bestseller (which book nowadays doesn't have that boast on its front cover?), he is probably best known for The Pillars of the Earth, which burst on the scene as long ago as 1989. I didn't read it until many years later, when I picked it up for £4 in Michael's Moon's wonderful book emporium in Whitehaven. I thought it was a bargain then and I feel I still do.

First edition - Macmillan 1989

I seem to remember I bought the book because I was in a frenzy of collecting novels on The Anarchy.

The blurb on the front flyleaf of the dust wrapper supported my purchase. The book takes the reader back to a turbulent era of intrigue and treachery - a time of civil war, famine, religious strife, and battles over royal succession. The cast of characters included Tom, the master builder; Aliena, the noblewoman; Philip, the prior of Kingsbridge; Jack, the artist in stone; and Ellen, the woman from the forest. As a spoiler, I would like to state here that I agree with some of the Amazon reviewers about the latest in the series - give or take, the cast is very, almost too, similar.

                      First edition - Macmillan 2007        First edition - Macmillan 2017

Eighteen years later, Follett followed up his bestseller with another Kingsbridge story - World Without End - this time set in 1327. It is a world dominated by regicide, war with the French, the Black Death and, as always with Follett, the cruelties of religion and churchmen. As one reviewer, when the book came out, wittily wrote: Caris, the principal female character, is a freethinker, proto-Protestant, pioneering medical mind, fab shag, and creator of the three-field system. And surely a candidate for the stake, if a real historical perspective came into play. 

I don't remember as much about the third book, A Column of Fire, which runs from the very end of Mary Tudor's reign into that of James I. Certainly good old 'hatred' is to the fore again, as are the ancient stones of Kingsbridge Cathedral. Tolerance and compromise wage battle against the tyrants who would impose their ideas on everyone else - no matter the cost. Are we in 1558 or in 2020? 

First edition - Macmillan 2020

   

 I once called a friend's book a 'good doorstop' and immediately felt ashamed of myself. 'Blockbuster' or 'heavyweight' is much politer. Follett's large cast of characters and extended time-scale means that his stories will not come in quickly. Pillars of the Earth was 806 pages;, World Without End seemed to result in a Book Without End, weighing in at 1111 pages; A Column of Fire was a mere 746 pages; whilst his latest beats Pillars with 817 pages. I read one reviewer who said they had read the latter in one sitting - don't they sleep or eat?

The negatives about these books are easy to quantify. They are too long; judicious pruning would have helped greatly. The main characters are always irredeemably bad or awfully good. The dialogue too often tips into modern slang/anachronistic wordplay or cod-medieval. The sex scenes are too often gratuitous and laboured (Follett seems to have a fixation about pubic hair). And yet, I quite enjoyed them. Follett clearly does his research and, apart from the above comments, he seems at ease in the period he is writing about.

My main gripe about this Prequel (there is still a gap of 129 years between the end of the The Evening and the start of The Pillars) is that at nearly every opportunity the 'bad' win. There are 817 pages. Not until page 748 do we read that one of the minor baddies, the spy-servant Agnes, has died - of 'Whore's Leprosy'; on page 764, the ale-house keeper/ferry owner baddie Dreng dies of a heart attack (trying to hit his slave girl a second time with a shovel); on page 782 Wigelm, the youngest of the three baddie brothers is killed by the long-suffering Ragna; then, the baddie-in-chief, Bishop Wynstan, the most evil of the brothers (riddled with the same 'Whore's Palsy' and having defecated in his cathedral in front of the King and other nobility on page 806) is finally stripped of his bishopric and sent to the Leper's Island to be looked after by a lesbian-inclined Mother Agatha; his side-kick Archdeacon Degbert ends up as a penniless village priest.

The goodies get their positive come-uppance only at the very end, too. Sheriff Den becomes Shiring's ealdorman; prior Aldred - who has a hankering for his own sex - becomes Bishop of King's Bridge (for most of the book named Deng's Ferry); the hero (yet another builder) Edgar returns from France  (on page 810) to unite with the long-suffering Lady Ragna - on the penultimate page - having just become Edgar of Lordsborough, thanks to her. It all happens too quickly - for both bad and good. 

It was not just the battle, Ragna reflected. Garulf's family had defied the king's rule again and again for a decade, disobeying orders and refusing to pay fines. It had seemed that they would get away with it indefinitely, but now at last their insurrection had come to an end. There was justice, after all. A pity it took such a long time coming. (my highlighting). 

One could say the same about Follett's book, as this is on pages 802-803.

Bibliophile or Bibliomaniac?

 For  many years now I have had attached to one of my study bookshelves the following quotation (from whence I know not!): The lives of Bibliomaniacs are rarely ever quaint and can be, in extremis, utterly alarming. I was reminded of it again today. I have been slowly adding details of my books to a great icloud website https://www.libib.com/library/home. Title, author[s], publisher, page totals, illustration of cover or title page and quality are all detailed. I have been slow due to the fact that I often stop to peruse a book, occasionally one I had not touched for a long time. A few, alas, I had forgotten I owned.

Today, a cutting from The Daily Telegraph (Saturday, November 22, 2008) fell out of one reference book. It was an article by that erudite journalist Christopher Howse, which started A collector has been convicted of stealing rare maps and prints that he cut out of valuable old books in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford. A single page he removed was valued at £30,000! Howse also went on to write about the borderline between bibliophiles and bibliomanes, between collectors and obsessives - a subject I find much more interesting! He gave a few examples of the latter breed. An amiable scholar, who died the previous year, had a house jammed with books. They were on shelves, the floor, in the kitchen - he was unable to use his stove! - and when asked if he could find a particular volume, he would reply "Within a foot or two".  Another scholar had the dream job of cataloguing books printed before 1700 in National Trust Properties. He could research and read books at any major institution. That didn't stop him cramming his home with volumes, on stairways - everywhere. I happen to have a friend whose house is similarly overrun! 

The man who popularised the word bibliomania was Thomas Dibdin, who in 1809 had published  Bibliomania or Book-madness, containing some account of the history, symptoms and cure of this fatal disease. I must look for a copy! I know my 'weakness' - it is for 'sets': Yale's English Monarchs, The New Oxford History of England, Collins' Brief Lives, Haus Publishing's British Prime Ministers, and so on. I have over 400 of the 600-odd Oxford 'World's Classics' pocket volumes, all in first editions. Once I start reading a novelist, I have to collect all his works  - the most obvious is John Buchan; but I have done the same for John Meade Falkner, Daphne du Maurier, Constance Holme, Maurice Walsh, and many others. The only brake on me is cost - I have all Sir Walter Scott's works on first editions bar Waverley. I only have Stevenson's Treasure Island, because I bought it for £9! Recently, I have been after John Galt and others in the 'Blackwood' Group of early nineteenth century Scottish novelists. Before that, there was a brief stab at Mary Webb and A. E. Housman. 

And so the total mounts up, passing 8,000 not long ago. But, I don't waste money on cigarettes and only drink occasionally - that's my argument, anyway. Below are some glimpses of my Library - every book cherished as a friend. W. E. Gladstone (a hero of mine and now pathetically under attack by the moronic pond-life the western world appears to be breeding) sums up my feelings towards these friends:

Books are a delightful Society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves, they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.

My earliest books - from aged six to before University

BEDROOM

                  John Buchan Collection                 du Maurier, Forster, Holme, Tey, Weyman

LIBRARY

Oxford World's Classics 

LIBRARY

  Meade Falkner, West Indies, Monasteries                        History, Biographies

     Castles, Travel, Ludlow, Marlborough    STUDY

Nineteenth Century Historical and Scottish Novels

Puffin and Peacock books

BACK BEDROOM

ALL BOOKS MATTER

Re-reading Albert Camus

 Having just gorged on Gide (see previous Post), I turned to Camus again, for a quick fix. I chose his The Fall (La Chute, 1956). I noticed that I had written in pencil "Swindon, October 1973" on the front fore title page. This sent me scurrying to check on my other Penguin paperbacks: also bought that day in Swindon was The Plague (La Peste, 1947). The other three have written in them "Marlborough, October 1973": The Outsider (L'Etranger, 1942), Exile and the Kingdom (L'Exil et le royaume, 1957) and A Happy Death (La Mort heureuse, published posthumously in 1971). I checked my 1973 Diary and read that it was the Autumn half-term week and I had spent the previous few days touring South Wales and the Borders, feasting on castles - Chepstow, Raglan, Grosmont, Skenfrith, Monmouth, Goodrich, Croft, Ludlow, Stokesay; then North Wales - Shrewsbury, Whittington, Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint and Ewloe. All in three days - oh to be young again! Back home in Marlborough, on Wednesday 31st October it reads "Up town - bought books by Camus". On Thursday 1st November: "Swindon". So my dates are wrong for those two.

                                  

                                    Swindon - Penguin, 1972                Swindon - Penguin 1972

                  Penguin, 1971                      Penguin, 1972                       Penguin, 1973 

Marlborough

The only one I can't remember reading is A Happy Death. I know I re-read the others a few years ago. So - to The Fall. Perhaps not the best novel to pick up during the debilitating Covid-19 period. If you are feeling too happy or smug, then a good antidote is Camus. I must admit I endured rather than enjoyed the re-read this time. I should have picked The Outsider (not The Plague!)

Sartre called Camus' pessimism "solar"...the philosophy of Camus is the philosophy of the absurd, and for him the absurd springs from the relation of man to the world, of his legitimate aspirations to the vanity and futility of human wishes. The conclusions which he draws from it are those of classical pessimism. The Fall is the story of Jean-Baptiste Clamence, once a successful barrister in Paris, now settled in a fogbound Amsterdam as a self-styled 'judge-penitent'. From a cosy life of self-esteem and near-adulation by others, a few events make him see through the fundamental hypocrisy of his existence. His good nature and kindnesses are merely condescension writ large. He descends into debauchery and then self-judgement. Rather like The Ancient Mariner, he collars an un-named cher compatriote who has to listen to his (rather drawn-out for me) tale. I found I had to concentrate beyond the line of enjoyment as the bon mot sentences came too thick and fast. Why are so many French writers (and films) so 'deep'? or, rather, soul-destroying? Left wing, tubercular (severely) and a compulsive womaniser, Camus is an acquired taste. I just hope that in 1972 I was in a much more receptive frame of mind. Camus once said: What interests me is knowing how we should behave, and more precisely, knowing how to behave when one does not believe in God or reason. His books reflect this ambition.

Medieval Women

 Over the past weeks, I have been dipping into a wonderfully produced book, Medieval Women, collated and introduced by Deirdre Jackson (Research Associate in the Department of Manuscripts and Printed Books at the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge University - or she was in 2015 when this book, published by the British Library, came out). It contains 200 pages packed with colourful illustrations of medieval illuminated pages from Psalters, Breviaries, Books of Hours, Chronicles and other manuscripts - a treasure trove of artistic craftsmanship that takes the breath away. Having spent the last few months gradually cataloguing my own Library, one of the facts that stands out is the incredible progress made over the last three decades in the printing (reproduction) of colour images in books such as these. All too often, one notes they are printed in the Far East - Hong Kong, Vietnam and, inevitably, the great Wen of China. It was, therefore, pleasing to see that this book was produced by Gutenberg Press in Malta. Long may it continue!

The British Library - 2015

Deirdre Jackson divides the book into seven chapters: Sexuality; Marriage; Mothers; Learning; Prayer; Literary Patronage; and Work. One of (the few!) positive aspects of getting old is that one increasingly realises how little one knows AND, thus,  how much there is still to find out and enjoy. I have a couple of books on Books of Hours - The Hastings Hours (Thames and Hudson, 1983) Eamon Duffy's Marking the Hours (Yale, 2006) - and a considerable collection on medieval women. However, Jackson's book brought together the two strands in a learnéd and fascinating way. Women who wished to have sex but couldn't were to take some cotton and musk or penny-royal oil and anoint it and pop it in the necessary channel...this both dissipates the desire and dulls the pain. To forestall 'unsuitable' attachments in convents, the Bishop of Besanҫon stipulated that nuns should sleep fully clothed in separate beds with a lamp burning all night. Hovering over all the human race, like some sort of monstrous albatross, was the Catholic Church, whose mantra appears to have been Thou shalt not, rather than Thou shall. The church attempted, usually successfully, to control all book learning and production and tales of Romance. When education was the prerogative of a relatively small elite (around whom the Church militant was wrapped) and when wives and women from the upper classes may have learned to read, but often remained illiterate, it comes as no surprise at the level of religious infestation in all walks of life. 

          

                       Margaret Beauchamp and                     A Prioress instructs

                                guardian angel                                      two novices

                                  c. 1430-1440                                        c. 1290-1300

I found the chapters on Learning (pp. 83-107), Prayer (pp. 109-127) and Literary Patronage (pp. 129-161) the most interesting; but the illustrations, nigh on every page, were breathtaking. The book was worth purchasing for those alone. I just wish all this new knowledge stuck in my brain a little more cohesively.

Deirdre Jackson has a splendid and uplifting final paragraph:

Whether single or married, religious or secular, women made key contributions to medieval culture. The manuscripts they left behind give us a deeper understanding of their lives and retain the power to move, captivate, puzzle and delight us. To turn the pages of a book made hundreds of years ago is like reading over the shoulder of a person who betrays no rising sense of irritation, and is, at any rate, in no position to object. Among the most personal of possessions, manuscripts are also among the most eloquent. Luxurious volumes made for privileged patrons and modest volumes alike offer us insights into a world that seems at once foreign and familiar.  Amen.