The Captive Reader

George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book – edited by James Ramsden

April 25, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

I think we can all agree that it’s fairly futile to “review” someone else’s commonplace book. At best, you can say the compiler has flawless taste that exactly matches your own and that you copied down every passage for your future entertainment. I’ve yet to have that happen but I do always find some gems and there were a more-than-usual number of them in George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book edited by James Ramsden.

Lyttelton, the Eton schoolmaster whose correspondence with former pupil Rupert Hart-Davis has been entertaining readers since the 1970s (see my reviews of Volume One, Volume Two, and, after a lamentable lapse as a reviewer, Volume Five), was born in 1888 into a family line rich with aristocratic politicians and had been dead for 40 years by the time this was published in 2002. He spent his entire career at Eton, sharing his love of literature with generations of boys, and the depth of that love and knowledge is on display here. Lyttelton is not limited by eras or tongues, happily reaching out across centuries and the Western world (with some suspect Chinese sayings thrown in) for his tidbits. French quotes remain in French, on the assumption that readers need no translation. Oh for the optimism of 2002. I suspect today publishers would add translations for more accessibility.

The book ends with an affectionate essay about one of Lyttelton’s friends and early letters between him and Hart-Davis that predate the published correspondence. But they are beside the point for anyone but completists; the rest of us want to see what delightful quotes Lyttelton pulled from his varied readings. And he does not disappoint. Here are my favourites:

Aphorisms

He that leaves nothing to chance will do few things ill, but he will do very few things.
– Halifax (the Trimmer)

The Arts

The civilised are those who get more out of life than the uncivilised, and for this the uncivilised have not forgiven them.
– Palinurus [Cyril Connolly]

Eccentrics – possibly the greatest of all the sections

The Rev. G. Harvest of Thames Ditton, a keen fisherman, missed his own wedding to go gudgeon-fishing. The lady broke off the match. He often forgot it was Sunday, and went into church with his gun to find out why so many people were there.
– G. H. Wilson

McTaggart, the celebrated philosopher, always wore a string round one of his waistcoat buttons. Gilbert Murray asked him why and he answered ‘I keep it handy in case I should meet a kitten.’

History

The real vice of the Victorians was that they regarded history as a story that ended well – because it ended with the Victorians.
– G. K. Chesterton

Letterwriting

Have the love and fear of God ever before thine eyes, God confirm your faith in Christ. Je vous recommande à Dieu. If you meet with any pretty insects of any kind, keep them in a box.
– Sir Thomas Browne to his son, 1661

Nations

When sanctions were imposed on Italy, an Italian journalist called on his countrymen to desist ‘from such pernicious British habits as tea-drinking, snobbery, golf-playing, Puritanism, clean-shaving, pipe-smoking, bridge-playing, and inexplicable apathy towards women.’

Reading

Every book worth reading ought to be read three times through; once to see what it is all about, once to observe how it is done, and once to argue with the author.
– G. M. Young

Posted in A Century of Books, George Lyttelton | Leave a Comment »

Library Loot: April 24 to 30

April 24, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Sharlene from Real Life Reading that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library. If you’d like to participate, just write up your post-feel free to steal the button-and link it using the Mr. Linky any time during the week. And of course check out what other participants are getting from their libraries.

Sharlene has the Mr Linky this week.

All fairly recent releases for me this week:

An Almost Impossible Thing by Fiona Davison – very much looking forward to this history about early female professional gardens.

Run to the Western Shore by Tim Pears – looking for shades of Rosemary Sutcliff in this historical novel set in Roman Britain.

Begin Again by Helly Acton – I thoroughly enjoyed Acton’s sharp first two novels (especially The Shelf) so am looking forward to this, though the premise seems more conventional than her earlier books.

The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes – a novel about the daughters of Thomas Gainsborough that has been getting rave reviews (including from Hilary Mantel before her death).

The Point of the Needle by Barbara Burman – I don’t really sew but am still intrigued to learn, as the subtitle has it, “why sewing matters”.

The Dictionary People by Sarah Ogilvie – after a long time in the hold queue, very excited to start this history/biography of some of the many varied and fascinating people who contributed to the Oxford English Dictionary.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | Leave a Comment »

Goodness, How Sad! – Robert Morley

April 21, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Only one brief entry for me in this week’s 1937 Club: Goodness, How Sad! by Robert Morley. It’s described as “a comedy in three acts” and while it certainly has three acts, the comedic angle is more suspect.

Dealing with a struggling theatre company currently encamped in an unnamed Midlands town, the entirely of the play takes place in the sitting room of Mrs Priskin’s theatrical lodging house. It is here that Carol and Christine, two young women in the company, are currently residing and where their colleague Peter frequently (especially around mealtimes) visits, much to the annoyance of Mrs Priskin. Carol, the younger of the two women, has just about made up her mind to have an affair with Peter, less out of any passion for the likeable Peter than out of a desire for the experience which she thinks may also improve her acting (“so original”, the more world-weary Christine remarks).

Also about the house are “Mother and Father”, an older married couple who travel the country with performing animals – currently, they have trained seals though Father, properly Captain Otto Angst, still thinks with longing of the beautifully-trained elephants he toured with before the First World War. More mysteriously, there is another lodger who takes great care to stay out of sight. What nefarious past, the girls wonder, is he hiding? Mrs Priskin seems remarkably unperturbed that she is almost certainly (they conclude) harbouring a murder or a sex maniac.

But the real, absorbing interest of the three young people is the failure of their current show and the fate of the upcoming performance of The Constant Nymph. Closure seems imminent and, with it, the loss of a paycheque. It’s not that it’s a bad play or cast, just that it has nothing to capture the town’s audience and lure them away from the lazy allure of the cinema.

When the identify of Mrs Priskin’s other border is revealed, there is suddenly the promise of a saviour: he is not a murder or sex maniac, but Robert Maine, a British theatre actor turned Hollywood movie star. He is hiding out at Mrs Priskin’s for a break from stardom (and perhaps other things) and while Carol and Christine are briefly impressed by his fame, they soon spot the opportunity to save their own futures: after all, wasn’t it the very play they are staging right now that made Maine a star? And surely he wouldn’t mind stepping back into it for a performance or two if it means saving their livelihoods?

Robert, drawn to the lovely Carol, does not mind as it makes it all the easier to conduct his flirtation and Carol, dazzled by fame and eager for experience, is delighted to be swept along. Within days, she’s rethinking her entire future and whether her dedication to the stage is as strong as she once thought.

Suitably, Goodness. How Sad! premiered in the provinces, at the Perranporth Summer Theatre in Cornwall. It reached London in late 1938 and was (based on the reviews in the edition I read) very well received there with frankly overly generous praise about its wittiness and charm. I think the News-Chronicle came closest to the mark when it claimed “It easily persuades you to laugh: it comes near to making you cry” because, yes, it has its humour but it is also a story about disillusionment and the heartbreak wrought by longed-for experience.

Posted in A Century of Books, Play, Robert Morley, The 1937 Club | 4 Comments »

Library Loot: April 17 to 23

April 17, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

The Waters Under the Earth by John Moore – many of you read this when it was reissued by Persephone in late 2022 but it largely passed me by until Ali included it in her Twelve Books for 2023 post. Happily, it was easy to get from the university library

Tales from Ovid by Ted Hughes – another recommendation from Bound to Please (what would a Library Loot post be this year without at least one Dirda-influenced choice?)

Feet of Clay by Terry Pratchett – back to Discworld!

The Swann Family Saga by R.F. Delderfield – do I own all of these already? Yes. Do I in fact own them in both hardcover and paperback editions? Again, yes. But they are fragile and don’t stand up to being thrown around in my bag as commute reading so library copies to the rescue! (A more pertinent question would be: do I have time to read anything else when checking out three doorstoppers like this? Realistically, no. But let’s find out)

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 5 Comments »

Time Out of Time

April 11, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

via VisitScotland

Over the weekend, I read And No Birds Sang by Farley Mowat, his classic memoir of his time as a very young infantry officer during the Second World War. It’s a wonderful book and I do plan to write more about it soon, but I wanted to share this excerpt first.

In early June 1943, Mowat and his fellow soldiers were offered four days of leave from their base near Glasgow. It wasn’t officially embarkation leave, but by mid-June they would be on ships bound for Sicily. Rather than head to the city, Mowat set off for the countryside and found himself in a gentle, fantastical setting that could not have been more of a contrast to where he would soon be.

To me, this sounds like a wonderful plot for an entire novel and the fact that it came from real life only makes it more extraordinary and worth sharing:

Most of my friends headed south to London, but I thought it foolish to waste half of a too-brief leave riding around on crowded trains. Also it was still springtime and the countryside was calling to me. I got a map of Scotland and did something I had often done as a child – shut my eyes and pricked the map at random with the point of a pencil. Where the pencil landed was where I would go. This time fate selected a region called the Trossachs, only a couple of hours’ rail distance from Darvel. I packed my haversack, took binoculars and bird book and departed.

A meandering local train deposited me at what seemed to be an abandoned station in a valley of misted, glimmering lochs fed shining tarns that plunged down the slopes of green-mossed mountains. Things all seemed slightly out of focus behind a shimmer of rain as I stood on the empty platform wondering what to do next. There was no even a station master from whom I could inquire about accommodations. As I belted my trench coat and prepared to go in search of shelter, a rattle-trap taxi came snorting toward me. The driver seemed amazed to find that someone had actually descended from the train but when I asked if he could find me a place to stay he nodded me in beside him. Wordless, he drove up an ever-narrowing valley on a gravel road that climbed beyond the last clump of sombre spruces to end in the driveway of an ornate nineteenth-century castle crouched under the shoulder of a massive sweep of barren hills.

Once the summer seat of a rich marquis, this rococo pile had been closed since the beginning of the war but was now being given a new lease on life as a hotel. However, it was short on guests. Beside myself there were two Canadian and two New Zealand nursing sisters, a Free French naval captain and a young South African armoured corps lieutenant – surely a strangely assorted gaggle of wander-voegel to be brought together by whatever chance in this remote cul-de-sac.

The staff, which outnumbered the guests by three to one, consisted mostly of old servitors of the marquis and they displayed an almost pathetic anxiety to make us welcome. The aged butler, now acting as a maître d’, pressed on us the finest foods the estate could provide – venison, salmon, grouse, fresh goose eggs, butter, Jersey milk and clotted cream – and pleaded with us to avail ourselves of what remained of the marquis’ wine cellar. We slept in regal if slightly musty splendour in vast, echoing apartments, and dined, the handful of us, in a glittering hall beneath chandeliers and candelabra. In the evenings we danced to 1920s music from a wind-up gramophone in the richly panelled trophy room before a mighty fireplace that roared red brands into the moonlit nights.

By day, in a soft veil of warm June rain, or under the watery warmth of a shrouded sun, we climbed among the hills, saw herds of red deer on high, windy ridges; flushed black grouse and capercaillie from the redolent heather of the valleys; picnicked on venison patties, and drank bitingly cold tarn water mixed with pure malt whisky.

The mood we shared was of time out of time. We were a band of brothers and sisters and so companionable that there was no pairing-off – none of the panting, hectic pursuit of sex that usually dominated the leaves of servicemen and servicewomen. It was a world beyond reality that we so briefly knew together.

Posted in Bookish Thoughts, Farley Mowat | 6 Comments »

Library Loot: April 10 to 16

April 10, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Sharlene has the link this week.

Back to Istanbul by Bernard Ollivier and Bénédicte Flatet, translated by Dan Golembeski – I loved Ollivier’s three volume memoir of walking the Silk Road (starting with Out of Istanbul, one of my favourite books in 2020) and was delighted to hear about this later journey. At age seventy-five, he set off with his new partner to walk from France to Istanbul.

Falling into Place by Thomas Swick – I’m always excited for memoirs about Central Europe so obviously had to pick up this one, about a man who fell in love with a Polish girl in the 1970s and ended up moving to Warsaw: the personal story of a young man’s discovery of the world and his development as a travel writer. It is also a love story, as he and Hania overcome cultural differences, communist bureaucracy, and unhealthy separations. Intertwined with both is the story of the revolution that altered history.

Table for Two by Amor Towles – I’ve been looking forward to this collection of short stories and a novella by Towles.

An Open Book by Michael Dirda – Dirda refers to his childhood regularly in his writing so I’ve had some teasers before starting this memoir but am looking forward to getting the full story.

The Larach by Alexandra Raife – reread of my favourite book by this author.

Kolymsky Heights by Lionel Davidson – I’ve read two thrillers by Davidson so far and they’ve both been entertaining but the treatment of women was fairly off-putting. I thought I’d given up on Davidson but Elle’s comment on my review of The Night of Wenceslas that she was really impressed by this one had me ready to give him another chance.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 1 Comment »

Library Loot: April 3 to 9

April 3, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Gap Year Girl by Marianne C. Bohr – a travel memoir about taking a gap year – in your mid-fifties. I enjoyed Bohr’s recent book about hiking the G20 in Corsica so was excited to track this down.

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett – I’m having great fun with Pratchett this year.

The Leopard by Giuseppe di Lampedusa – the classic novel of societal changes in Sicily during the risorgimento.

A Commonplace Book by Alec Guinness – Alec Guinness’ diaries (A Positively Final Appearance, My Name Escapes Me) are wonderful and revealed him as a passionate reader so it’s fascinating to see what passages he jotted down in his commonplace books.

George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book – while grabbing Guinness’ commonplace book, it seemed only right to grab another. I’ve learned to love Lyttelton through his letters with Rupert Hard-Davis and I particularly enjoy his thoughts on whatever he was reading, so look forward to this.

Readings by Michael Dirda – as if Dirda hadn’t inspired enough of my reading this year through Bound to Please (including 2 of the books this week – it’s because of him I’m reading Pratchett again and have finally picked up The Leopard), I’ve gone back for more. This is a collection of personal essays rather than criticism though so less devastating for my TBR list.

My awareness of Alec Guinness and the Lyttelton Hart-Davis letters are also thanks to Dirda (after reading Browsings) so this is really a Dirda-driven post, with Bohr as the one exception.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 6 Comments »

A Slow Spring Sunday

March 24, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

The Artist’s House in Paris – T.F. Simon

After several hectic work weeks and a flurry of socializing, today has been a wonderful chance to be lazy. It is a gorgeous spring day here, with cherry trees and magnolias in blossom, daffodils hanging on (though slightly defeated by a heatwave last weekend), and tulips eager to burst forth. And, best of all, I had nothing I needed to do.

This meant I was free to run my errands this morning in the most desultory fashion, taking the longest possible routes between my destinations before finally wandering completely off to explore beautiful neighbourhood gardens far from any shops.

This afternoon, it meant I could take my book and a travel cup full of tea to a local park and read in the sun for a few hours, occasionally pausing to watch six eagles having an equally lazy afternoon doing laps high above.

Sun on Snow by Alexandra Raife was my perfect accompaniment for the gentle setting. I discovered Raife’s gentle books thanks to this “Can you help?” post back in late 2018, where a reader was trying to remember the name of a domestic novel set in Scotland with similarities to D.E. Stevenson. That book turned out to be Drumveyn, which I tracked down alongside a few other books by Raife, and while none of them were especially memorable, they were just right for quiet Sunday afternoons (much like D.E. Stevenson).

In today’s publishing world, Raife’s books would likely be called women’s fiction. There is always some sort of romance, but it’s usually fairly subdued in comparison to the family or social relationships of the main characters. In Sun on Snow, which was published in 1999 and is technically a contemporary novel but could have been set any time in the previous twenty years, young legal secretary Kate arrives at Allt Faar after a series of dramatic events in London. After a brief encounter with dashing Jeremy, she has discovered she is pregnant and that neither her adoptive parents nor Jeremy are happy about it. Kicked out of her family home, Jeremy has arranged for her to stay with the Munro family in Scotland in the house where he was raised after his parents’ deaths. For Jeremy, this neatly tidies everything up. For Kate and the Munros – matriarch “Grannie” and her three adult children, dull Harriet, widowed Joanna, and only son Max – it’s all rather awkward.

But slowly Kate adapts to life at Allt Faar, learning to pitch in the way everyone else does and proving herself far more capable than suspected. After a lifetime of feeling like she needed to be worthy of the love of her cold adoptive parents, Kate finds it easy to love the good-naturedly judgmental, slightly chaotic Munros and feel part of a family. There are tragedies, but not insurmountable ones, and romances, mostly pleasantly resolved, and it is all just exactly what one should read on a lazy Sunday while basking in the sun.

Posted in A Century of Books, Alexandra Raife, Fiction, Personal | 8 Comments »

Library Loot: March 20 to 26

March 20, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

I did a whirlwind tour across three different library systems recently, picking up plenty of interesting things. And then didn’t read any of them on the weekend because a) the weather was spectacular and I spent most of my time outside and b) what time I did spend reading was (wisely) devoted to A Stranger in the Family by Jane Casey, the newest book in the Maeve Kerrigan series. It was only released on Thursday (just as an eBook in North America. Print copies come out in June) and for once I didn’t have the patience to wait for the library to buy it. It was predictably great and, like all of Casey’s fans, I can’t wait for the next book.

The Twenty by Marianne C. Bohr – a memoir about hiking the GR20 trail across Corsica when the author and her husband turned sixty.

Blue Mystery by Margot Benary-Isbert – continuing my exploration of Benary-Isbert’s children’s books with this mystery about a missing plant.

Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber – after enjoying Mother Knows Best, I’m back for more of Ferber’s short stories with this early collection.

In Allied London by Count Edward Raczynski – after putting this collection of WWII diaries on my to-read list back in 2018, I’ve finally tracked it down!

The Smoking Mountain by Kay Boyle – I only recently read the Neglected Books review of this collection of stories about post-WWII Germany but it sounds very much like my sort of book.

Mrs Lorimer’s Quiet Summer by Molly Clavering – how exciting to have tracked down a Dean Street Press book! My experiences with Clavering have been very mixed (having read Near Neighbours, Dear Hugo, Susan Settles Down and Touch Not the Nettle) so I’m interested to see what I make of this.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 7 Comments »

Library Loot: March 13 to 19

March 13, 2024 by Claire (The Captive Reader)

Sharlene has the link this week.

Susan and Joanna by Elizabeth Cambridge – like all right-thinking people, I love Hostages to Fortune but have found Cambridge’s other books impossibly hard to track down. Finally, I’ve had success with this story about two young women and the early years of their very different marriages.

The General and Julia by Jon Clinch – with perfect timing, this recently released novel about a dying Ulysses Grant reflecting back on his life as he writes his memoirs arrived just as I finished Ronald C. White’s biography, American Ulysses. In a few short weeks I will have gone from knowing almost nothing about the man to being abnormally well-informed.

Ready or Not by Cara Bastone – a romance about a pregnant heroine falling for an old friend isn’t the easiest thing to pull off but Bastone has done it beautifully.

What did you pick up this week?

Posted in Library Loot | 4 Comments »

Older Posts »