Essays & Features

An interview with Francis Spufford, RSL Review, Autumn 2017.

“Spufford has used the calendar as a structuring principle which undergirds the rapidly unspooling action of the city. We may be lost in the double bluff of mercantile dealings, or in the crowd chasing Smith through the streets, but we know the date and what it asks of us. ‘I wanted the calendar supporting from underneath all that picaresque running about’…”

Springlines, Little Toller, 2017: I contributed a memory of a Sussex pond to this book about hidden water in the landscape, with poems by Clare Best and paintings by Mary Anne Aytoun-Ellis.

Springlines

Commissioned by the International Literature Showcase and Writers’ Centre Norwich in 2017. The subject was to be ‘crossing borders’; the kind of border-crossing I started to think about was unexpectedly close to home. This essay was the beginning of what became, many years later, The Rising Down.

“Peering into the wall, aslant, seeing nothing but shadow, I’m looking into a past so alien to me that I can hold it in my mind for only moments at a time. What looks to me like darkness was someone else’s vision of light…”

I recommended Pulborough Brooks in a Guardian travel feature on favourite places, July 2016.

‘Virginia Woolf in 1916’, Centenary Programme, Charleston Trust, 2016.

“She read enormously and immersively: Carlyle, Samuel Butler, contemporary novelists from Arnold Bennett to Elinor Mordaunt – who was, she thought, finding expression for things the Victorians never thought of. Her admiring review of Arthur Symons’s essays was also a conversation with him and a manifesto for modern prose. She was reading the eighteenth-century dramatist Carlo Gozzi to practice her Italian; her lists of verb declensions (in purple ink) are now in the British Library.”

A re-reading of Katherine Swift’s classic book for Slightly Foxed, Summer 2016.

“We make our way from the silence of a December midnight (Vigils: the hour of darkness and waiting) to the high sun and roses of Sext. This is June, all life and busyness. Then on towards the last of the canonical hours, Compline, with its tonal character of completion, retrospect and thanks.”