Newsletter 2023

I hope this finds everyone happy and well.

I know, I know: another year, another newsletter… I don’t know if this is becoming a ritual now, but it’s nice to look back and remember what the year has brought me. I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to write about a wider range of things in the last couple of years. Long may it continue!

One of the first things I did this year was to write an essay about Alzheimer’s and my father – and more generally about memory and identity – for New Humanist. My father died in May 2016, a couple of days after his 90th birthday. As I remembered it, his failing memory had only been a problem in the last year or two of his life, but in researching the piece I went back through family emails to my mother’s death in 2009, and it’s immediately obvious we all had concerns quite soon after that, and there were a whole series of small dramas and crises I had entirely forgotten about. It was pretty gruelling rereading and reliving all of that, to be honest; sometimes our memory’s work to suppress thoughts and feelings for our own peace of mind.

I wrote another piece for the Bookends column in Literary Review that began with memories of my dad. It’s about marginalia, and how what we write in the blank spaces of books are so deeply human, allowing the dead to talk to the living again. It was inspired by picking an old book of dad’s off the shelf and discovering his annotations in it. It’s occurred to me since that there may have been other books of his with marginalia in that we gave away to charity while we cleared the house. But I was – in every sense – stupid with grief in those years and didn’t think to check.

At the beginning of the year I wrote an essay for The Author, the magazine of the Society of Authors, about the challenges of rewards of running small-press poetry magazines. I’ve always been somewhat in awe of the dedication it takes; for any of them to exist feels like some small miracle in this day and age. To research the piece I interviewed the people behind six of the best, in my opinion: Richard Skinner of 14; Jo Clement of Butcher’s Dog; Gerry Cambridge of The Dark Horse; Lisa Kelly of Magma; Naush Sabah of Poetry Birmingham; and Jane Commane and Matt Merritt of Under the Radar. I’m grateful to all of them for giving me so much of their time.

I’ve been really slack about submitting my own poems this year. I was absolutely delighted though to have two poems published by two fantastic magazines. The Interpreter’s House took my poem Linnaeus, Intoxicated; and Bad Lilies took The Straw Child, an honest-to-goodness dream poem. I was pleased with both of them and it’s lovely to see them out in the world.

Relatedly, I’m very excited to be writing about Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal for the wonderful Slightly Foxed magazine. MacNeice might just be my favourite poet, I think. If I had to choose. That will be finished in January so should be out by this time next year.

I have another essay coming up for Slightly Foxed, which I wrote in the spring and which I hope will be out soon. It’s about the memoirs of Walburga, Lady Paget, wife of Britain’s ambassador to the imperial court in Vienna – among other postings – towards the end of the 19th century. I discovered her books while I was researching something for History Today, and I fell in love with them. They provide a vivid, gossipy, sharply observed insight into the entirely vanished world of aristocratic Europe. I can’t wait for people to read about her!

I’m a great fan of Ann Wroe’s work. I thought her Six Facets of Light was just as luminous and beautiful as its title promised it would be. So it was an absolute privilege to write about her new book, Lifescapes: A Biographer’s Search for the Soul for the Spectator. As I say in the review, it’s a mosaic of fleeting apprehensions, of fragments of perception and experience, built around the idea of a kind of spiritual circular breathing. Wroe has read widely and thought deeply – and wrestled with the demands of the spirit often, I would think. I found it moving and profound – and wholly inspirational.

In fact, when Engelsberg Ideas asked me for my favourite books of the year, Wroe’s was one of the two I chose. You’ll have to click the link though, if you want to know what the other one was. It’s not one I had the chance to write about, unfortunately.

I’ve reviewed several books on migrant and transient peoples. For the Spectator, I looked at Sam Miller’s Migrants: The Story of Us All, which argues that mobility, the urge to wander, is a deeply human need which we neglect and devalue at our peril.

For Engelsberg Ideas, I also wrote about the history of the Roma and reviewed Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear by Klaus-Michael Bogdal and Travellers Through Time: A Gypsy History by Jeremy Harte. The former looks at the attitudes to the Roma of the indigenous peoples through the lens of literature, the latter presents as a social history of the Roma in England. Both have their flaws, but I thought Harte’s book was by far the better of the two!

I reviewed two books about rural identity and the rural working class for Literary Review: Rural: The Lives of the Working Class Countryside by Rebecca Smith and Shaping the Wild: Wisdom From a Welsh Hill Farm by David Elias. As I say in the review, both books explore the profound tenacity of belonging, ways of life in which people belong to places not places to people. That is, landscape as identity not possession. In some ways, you might see both books, and Elias’s in particular, as a kind of counterpoint to the argument that Sam Miller makes in Migrants.

That sense of place as belonging also resonates through Peter Ross’s wonderful Steeple Chasing: Around Britain by Church which I wrote about for the Spectator. Although it’s a warm and generous book that considers a range of sites across the UK that people have made sacral, at its heart it is about the built legacy of the medieval church and how those buildings continue to hold meaning for us, even as faith itself recedes.

As some of you may know, I was raised an atheist and probably still think of myself as such. But both parenthood and the accumulated experience of grief and loss have made me more receptive to the comforts and solace of faith and the deep, unbroken communion between the living and the dead that churches and other sacred places embody. As I wrote in the review, these ancient buildings may not be places that we go to seek answers any more; but they are still places we go to make peace with the questions.

Connected to that is a piece, written last year but published this year, in which I reviewed Heaven on Earth: The Lives and Legacies of the World’s Greatest Cathedrals by Emma Wells for The Critic. Wells surveys the construction of sixteen great medieval European churches – most of them built during ‘the Crusade of the Cathedrals’ in the first centuries of the second millennium. Wells’s account of the buildings is detailed and authoritative, but what interested me most was the sense of the buildings as ways of conceptualising faith in stone and glass – the idea of architecture as “geometrized theology”, of churches as portals to the divine.

I have a piece in the pipeline for January covering similar territory for Engelsberg Ideas, which will look at The two books are The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse: Vence’s Chapel of the Rosary by Charles Miller. I’d have written it this year, but both books have slipped in the schedules.

Meanwhile, I also wrote about medieval England in reviewing Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter by Ian Mortimer for The Times. It’s a really interesting and provocative set of essays about how much modernity owes to the Middle Ages. Mortimer makes a persuasive case that in terms of technology, the rhythms of daily life, and how we conceive our inner selves, we very much live in the afterglow of the medieval world.

Also for The Times, and loosely about the history of technology and thought, I reviewed Theresa Levitt’s Elixir: The Story of Perfume, Science and the Search for the Secret of Life. Levitt captures well the intoxicating excitement of intellectual and scientific daring at a time in which revolutionary ideas about the structure of the world competed with the radical social experiments of the French Revolution for attention. It’s fascinating too on how perfume making emerged from the mix of alchemical, chemical and medical thinking.

For The Economist I reviewed John Darlington’s Amongst the Ruins: Why Civilizations Collapse and Communities Disappear, a survey of civilisational and communal collapse over the millennia. Although in some respect a bleak account of how, time and again, the demand for resources drives both the growth and destruction of civilisation, Darlington also offers some thoughtful reflections on the what we mean when we talk about destruction and conservation, and more generally about human fallibility and resilience.

I’ve continued to enjoy writing two pieces each month for History Today’s Months Past column. I think I’m coming up to my hundredth piece in a few months! I won’t list them all; the archive is up on the History Today website if anyone is interested. But the ones I’ve enjoyed writing most this year have been this one on the development of bell-ringing in England – or really the invention of change ringing – and this one on the unveiling of the Menin Gate. As I’ve got older, I’ve found the scale of the sacrifice in both World Wars more and more moving. Months Past isn’t a place for original research, but I like to dig up little known things where I can, and it was nice to be able to record the names of the two women who represented the mothers of the dead at the wreath-laying ceremony.

Also for History Today, I reviewed Fool: In Search of Henry VIII’s Closest Man by Peter K. Andersson. It’s is the first full length study of the life of William Somer, Henry VIII’s favourite fool. Somer is a fascinating figure – and the role of the fool is challenging for us to think about – but I felt the book spent too much time deconstructing the mythos and not enough reconstructing the man and his world. It’s a really interesting book if you’re interested in that period, though.

For Engelsberg Ideas, I wrote about another – in my view, much more successful – historical biography: Francesca Peacock’s Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish. Cavendish was an extraordinary woman, and Peacock gives us a thoughtful and insightful account of her life and the ways in which she both mirrored and outshone the spectacular times in which she lived. I’m not sure that anyone who has read Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge from a few years ago will learn much new from Peacock’s book, but hers is a much more emphatically feminist reading – locating Cavendish in a tradition that runs at least from Christine de Pizan to bell hooks – and the two biographies complement each other well.

I think perhaps following on from the Menin Gate piece, I’m planning to start a Substack in the New Year and I’ve been working on a long essay to publish in four or so instalments. It’s about memory and identity and the Battle of Normandy, and how the two months of conflict post-D-Day are still written into the Normandy landscape and inscribed on the towns. It centres on the town of Vire, which the Allies bombed to destruction in June 1944. It’s an area I know quite well and spent many summers there with my children, so there are some small private ghosts for me in amongst the ghosts of war.

I also have another piece in progress that might appear there about Joan Miro’s ‘Dog Barking at the Moon’, one of my favourite paintings, which my mum gave me as a postcard when I was a teenager. In some ways it was one of the most personal things she gave me, speaking to all sorts of unspoken things, I think, so the piece will be about what we inherit from our parents and pass on to our children too.

I also have what I think is a good idea for a podcast, too – but need someone to work on it with!

I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing two outstanding works of history this year. One is Generations: Age, Ancestry and Memory in the English Reformations by the great Alexandra Walsham, which I wrote about for The Critic. It’s a powerful exploration of generational conflict and generational change as it played out in the 16th and 17th centuries. Setting the horizontal continuities of each succeeding generation against the vertical continuities of family and inheritance, Walsham vivifies the intellectual and emotional landscape brilliantly.

The other is Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, which I have reviewed for the Spectator. It’s a survey of the empire at its greatest territorial extent on 29 September 1923. My review hasn’t been published yet, so I won’t pre-empt it any further here except to say that, aside from the review copy I was sent, I’ve already bought a proper copy for myself and another for someone else as a Christmas present!

Also written but not yet published for the Spectator is a review of Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. Again I won’t pre-empt the review, but – with one or two reservations – I enjoyed this greatly.

While we’re on the subject of things written but not yet published, I wrote about Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles by Jay Owens, which will be the lead review in the summer 2024 issue of New Humanist.

Last but by no means least, All About History recently commissioned me to write a long piece about Elizabethan privateers – and/or pirates – and their role in the fight with Spain. It’s a world I haven’t written about much for a long time, so it was great to re-acquaint myself with it. I think my feature will be in the January issue, but I’m not quite sure!

Aside from things already mentioned, I’m currently working on a review of Anthony Grafton’s new book Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa for Engelsberg Ideas, and will also be writing about Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals after 1492 for History Today in the new year.

Wishing you all a very happy Christmas. May the New Year bring you many blessings.

Mathew Lyons, FRHistS