MRS TREFUSIS TAKES A TAXI

Mrs Trefusis Retires...and reposts an old story to remind you of what she once was

2016-07-15T22:25:00.003+01:00

Alas, dear readers, I have so singularly failed to keep up with Mrs Trefusis as life has evolved, I am retiring her. I find I'm no longer very good at autobiographical writing, and as there are only so many words in me, I have discovered that the imaginative ones go into the great unfinished novel, and the rest go into keeping up with The Books That Built Me. She may well ride again, but for the moment, I'm taking the gold watch...

By way of a parting, I thought I'd re-post the the story of how Mr Trefusis and I ended up together, which I wrote in 2009, not long after I started blogging, inspired by something the ineffable Belgian Waffling had written.

I've gathered all three episodes into one post. Well, someone said that reading things on a mobile phone was no impediment to the art of long-form writing...

LOVE IN THE TIME OF INTERWEB

Alas, disappointment awaits all tragic romantics: I seem not to have the depth of sentiment for 37°2 le matin. Beatrice Dalle would turn her nose up at the film script and sack her agent for suggesting it. Renee Zellwegger might consider it until the moment she realised it would require her to get fat again.

Mine is only an amour fou in the sense that it's utterly bonkers and quite silly. Sigh. I always wanted to be even a little bit poetic. But no.

This is not, I'm afraid, a tale of doomed love. There is nothing unrequited. No hopeless yearning. No notes slipped under the door, only to remain wedged under the carpet*. Then, as now, the only moonlight in the great Trefusis romance is in the gap between fusing all the lights and flipping the trip switch, candlelight is reserved for when we have people to dinner and need to disguise the parlous state of the paintwork. The closest we ever came to love songs was when I discovered a Michael Bolton CD in his possession. Reader, I nearly broke up with him on the spot: it's hard to deal with that kind of shocking truth. Another 'make or break' musical moment in our relationship came when I discovered Trefusis Major had downloaded Britney Spears' 'Pieces of Me' from iTunes. His defence was that he found it 'poignant'. Oh God, I thought, it surely can't get any worse.... Be not mislead by this: Mr T and I are devoted to one another. But Goethe would have walked on by and we'd be nothing more than colourful village rustics in the footnotes of a Hardy novel. But a nice cup of tea and a sit down is more my emotional style these days.

But so much is prologue. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this whole story maybe prologue in an 'all gong and no dinner' sense. Tant pis. My story starts in the office, not too many months after 9/11. I am, unusually, single. I haven't been single since I was 18. Three -possibly four and a half - horribly serious long term relationships have come and gone, without so much as a wafer thin mint to pass between them, and now I've finally extricated myself from the latest kitchen sink drama I consider myself in retirement. Or more accurately, perhaps, in recovery.

My problem in relationships was always in inability to say no, so I'd find myself living with (and indeed, was once married to) entirely unsuitable people for years on end for a variety of entirely unsuitable reasons. Perhaps this might be something to return to, but for the moment you find me somewhere in early 2002 slaving over a hot spreadsheet being interrogated by my colleagues about why I'm so resolutely uninterested in putting some slap on and drinking vats of wine at an overpriced style bar in the interests of Being Chatted Up. But I know drinking wine on a thursday night is a merely the thin end of the wedge: some idiot will buy me a glass of sauvignon blanc and the next thing I know I'll be living with a balding photocopier salesman in a thirties semi in Cheam because I don't want him to be upset when I say I don't want to see him again. Go to the barber's often enough and you'll end up with a haircut. I don't want another bloody relationship, so I need to steer clear of all venues where relationships might be a possibility.

However, this being the moment of 'Sex and the City', I am rather intrigued by the notion of dating. As distinct from relationship. I surreptitiously watch a few episodes, purely in the spirit of research, SATC not being quite as, ahem, positive a viewing choice back then as it later became, and learn that dating appears to come without obligations. No one is going to start burning you CD's of Captain Beefheart's Ashtray Heart and insisting that their life will be ruined if you don't watch the directors cut of 'Last year in Marienbad' with them. What's more, one appears to be able to date several people concurrently, as long as one dates in the American sense ie no real physical contact.

This sounds like an excellent scheme. Dating. What I want is for someone to buy me expensive cocktails in hip hotel bars and laugh sycophantically at all my jokes. They don't have to do it twice, no one will be able to accuse me of being a porridge girl, easy to make but appalling to get off the saucepan afterwards. Alas, this is London in the very early noughties. All men have been dropped on their heads as adults and appear not to want to even wish an early thirty something girl a cheery 'Hello' in case she brandishes a set of ripe ovaries and a ticking biological clock in his direction. Datees appear to be in short supply. I am disgruntled.

"Internet dating" says Colleague A one afternoon, apropos of nothing.

"What?" say I, a swift, pithy response ever ready on your heroine's lips.

"Internet dating. Vast supply of ostensibly unattached men, all desperate to meet girls, not all of them photocopier engineers or Albanian refugees. Try it - it worked for my sister"

Why the hell not, I think. What can possibly go wrong? At worst I'll garner a few hilarious stories about putative serial killers and men with dishonourable intentions, and at best I may get a few expensive cocktails (and possibly cheap sex, though you should know that Mrs Trefusis is a woman of the highest moral probity and not easily parted from her virtue).

So I sign up immediately to one of the new fangled interweb dating sites and sit back happily as I watch the inbox of the iMac fill up with vast numbers of astonishingly normal looking thirty and forty something men, most of whom have their own teeth and hair. Admittedly, it takes me a few email exchanges to discover that GSOH doesn't stand for good salary own house, though I wish it did because i've always thought a sense of humour was an overrated commodity in a man. For the first time in my life I appear to be spoilt for choice - yes, I know they haven't met me yet, only my souped-up cyber-self - and I resolve to meet everyone who fits my stringent criteria (breathing, human, at least superficially male) for a coffee, and if they look promising, one of the aforementioned cocktails.

And so I embark on a thrilling frenzy of non-stop dating. Which is, predictably, Enormous Fun. There's only one slightly psychotic axe-murdering type and even the IT consultants are a laugh in their own trogloditic way.

And Mr Trefusis? Well, children, that will have to wait for another time....

*I read far too much Thomas Hardy as a child. Most deleterious to one's romantic benchmark.

ESPRESSO BONGO

So. Where were we? Ah, yes. I was getting into dating as a cure for serial monogamy. Well, when I say 'monogamy' I am of course excising from the record the rather non-monogamous episode with that scoundrel Vronsky on the grounds that it was more than 10 years ago and the Statute of Limitations has expired. But essentially, there I was in 2002, having missed out on the excitement of 'dating' as a teenager, assuming it was even invented in the 1980's which I doubt*, mad keen to make up for lost time and enjoy a misspent adulthood.

Ah, the possibilities of new technology. Anyone that tells you there aren't any single men in London has merely set their standards too high. There's no point insisting on tall, or dark, or handsome, or rich, or poetic, or athletic, or funny or whatever else it is women are supposed to want from a man: he's just as likely to be Mr Wrong. So it was with a spirit of adventure that I accepted an invitation from anyone who emailed me and could also spell and demonstrate correct usage of the apostrophe (oh come on... low standards doesn't mean no standards). In practice, this sometimes meant two dates a day. I hasten to add that this was the early days of internet dating, there were many, many more men than women on the more popular sites, so it was very much a supply/demand issue, rather me being especially delicious. Every Good Boy Deserves Favour. Or a coffee.

And so, for several weeks, I became Costa Coffee's best customer. I drank espressi with ad men, capucchini with the IT guys, machiati with lawyers (maybe it's the wig-like white foam?), San Pellegrino with journos and a diet coke with a former marine doing 'private protection work' for foreign nationals. He didn't progress to cocktails.

In the midst of all this coffee drinking (wired? Moi?) an email drops into my inbox. "I had to look up Manolo Blahnik**,” it says, “But I guess that means I'm not gay". There’s little more to go on, barely enough to prove proficiency with English grammar and punctuation. 'All-comers', I remind myself, encouraged by the fact that he’d at least had a look at my profile, and I click through to his, as taciturn as his email, yet with promising photos. However, though buff and intriguing in manner of ‘strong and silent’ Heyer hero, Manolo-Man lives Abroad. No sense in whetting one's appetite for someone who's 500 miles away from The Sanderson - look, it was the ne plus ultra of cool in those days. Times change. I send something relatively non-committal in reply and think no more about it.

This being the early days of online dating, there's a certain Austen-esque etiquette to the process. You don't scout round after a likely lad, they are obliged to come to you, and make some courteous remark indicating interest. If he has a face like Nosferatu and lists the cultivation of flesh-eating plants amongst his hobbies, the polite form of refusal is to thank him for his interest, and say 'you're not who I'm looking for right now: wishing you the best of luck with your search'. And after the consumption of coffee - Costa's baristas being every bit an assiduous a chaperone as Charlotte Bartlett was for Lucy Honeychurch - things either progress to a second meeting or there's an exchange of' you're not who I'm looking for etc' emails.

Some men give better email than others, though this is, sadly, no guarantee of fabulousness. I meet up with one promising chap and discover that whilst his body was designed by Apple, his mind is definitely Microsoft Windows 2000, and realise that his mate Cyrano must have been helping him with the fancier elements of his on-screen wooing. And then there are those who tick every box, can quote poetry, have no visible literacy problems and dress unobtrusively, but with whom there’s absolutely no chemistry whatsoever. Sigh.

Anyway, if I detail all of the very nice men I met during my dating frenzy, I’m never going to get round to the story of Mr Trefusis.

Perhaps I have attention deficit disorder, but after several weeks of caffeine overdose and more expensive cocktails and sycophantic laughter than I knew I wanted, I realise that I have Worked Through Some Issues –I’m a quick study – and am ready to work out What To Do Next.

This is what I’ve learned. Hold your breath and wait for the astonishing insights:

There are a zillion single men in London. I don’t need to go out with the first one who expresses an interest. Hah! I can now say ‘Thank you for your interest but not if you were the last man on earth’.

Being picky is silly. Everyone looks pretty promising after a lavender martini.

Martinis are like breasts. One's not enough. Three's too many.

Through-put is easy. Chemistry is elusive.

I decide I’m still not looking for Mr Right. But I reckon I could cope with Mr All-Right-For-Now . Maybe I could meet someone I liked enough to progress from a coffee and a cocktail to a trip to the cinema?  And what of Manolo-Man? Am I prepared to widen my dating territory outside W1? And what is the true identity of the International Man of Mystery? Will I work my way through The Sanderson's entire cocktail menu? Are you bored by this tale yet?  Wait for the next exciting*** instalment….

 *I think we called it 'getting off with' and, if that happened more than once, 'going out with'. **[about the only thing I'd put in my 'interests' box, not wanting my bluestocking tendencies to put prospective dates off]

***I realise this is a purely subjective judgement.      

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LUST

Enough of the specious nonsense. On with the plot or I'll lose my audience - yes, you three, I can see you yawning. It might be dull but it's my life and you'll enjoy it even if I have to bribe you with promises of champagne cocktails in Claridges.

So. It's Easter 2002. London is, as ever on a public holiday, empty of everyone and everything. Thursday's copy of The Evening Standard blows like tumbleweed around the legs of the Japanese tourists blocking the entrance to the escalator at Piccadilly Circus. All of my friends appear to have dashed off in a fit of giggling coupledom in the direction of Babington House or other hip Mr&Mrs Smith hangout. Honestly, that kind of behaviour is designed to bring the twisted spinster out in even the most resolute dating devotee. And when one's audience has disappeared, gathering petits amuses about lecherous lecturers or demented dentists begins to pall.

I mooch around for a bit on Good Friday, watching Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story and spend some time in front of the mirror draping a black scarf round my head, wondering if taking up Holy Orders might not be just the thing. And then, whilst idling on the internet - not nearly as fun as it is now, due to it only being web 1 point zero, or whatever it was called before it was 2.0 - a couple of more than fortuitous emails drop into my RuUp4It.co.uk inbox. One is from Manolo-Man, with whom I've had a little desultory email exchange since the initial one-liner. The other is from Canadian Banker who, despite littering his emails with the kind of literary pretension guaranteed to get my pulses racing, has been irritatingly tardy in extending an invitation to meet. Being an ex-pat, he's evidently bored and home alone with the Audrey Hepburn box set too. Or possibly something a bit more rugged because I've just made him sound very gay. Maybe he was, albeit locked in a B&B Italia closet of his own choosing. I never stopped to find out.

Canadian Banker suggests getting together for the Modernism exhibition at the RA, and frankly, meeting for just a grande frappe latte at Costa isn't going to fill anything like enough of the long weekend stretching and yawning before me. But Manolo-Man's email is, curiously, much more intriguing. "I've had to come over on business, and I've stayed for the long weekend. Don't suppose you're free for dinner tomorrow night?" Well, the mountain has come to mohammed. MM is no longer in parts foreign, at least temporarily. Left to my own devices, Saturday dinner would be pasta with pesto at best: dinner in a proper restaurant with The International Man of Mystery is far to good to pass up on the grounds that I suspect he may be a man of few words. Yippee, I think, the weekend might not be miserable after all, send 'yes' replies to both invitations and nip off to start the laborious process of de-spinsterfying myself.

This involves more than an emergency Show Me Your Wardrobe session, though frankly it's a good job neither of the prospective candidates could have seen the Sweaty Betty yoga pants and a fleece so unattractive that I couldn't even have fancied myself. Obviously there's eyebrows to be plucked, face packs to be smeared on, hair to be laboriously blowdried, nails to be painted etc etc. God that I could have the time to go to this level of effort for anything these days. It's possibly so memorable because it's the last time I did. But it's relevant here, readers, because I break my golden rule: I shave my legs. Now, mistake me not - the hairy legs have nothing to do with sisterhood, though if you've been party to my rants about Observer Woman, you'll know that feminist is a much cherished word in my vocabulary. The unshaven legs were my tried, tested and trusted way of remaining chaste, despite all temptation and the most fervent persuasion. I have too much vanity to be in a situation where I get my kit off only to be unmasked as Mr Tumnus. But although I've read Freud's Psychopathology Of Everyday Life, consciously I believe I'm only defoliating because I have time to kill, rather than because my unconscious is almost certainly Up For It.

The following day, I present myself at the Royal Academy ticket office, and recognise Canadian Banker at once, he having helpfully worn an enormous pair of yellow Oliver Peoples sunglasses in the manner of Bono. Which he doesn't take off during the whole exhibition. In manner of Anna Wintour. We show off madly to each other, and nearly come to blows rushing to translate L.H.O.O.Q on Duchamp's Mona Lisa in a bid to prove that we're so damn cool we love a clever joke in a foreign language (though he cheated, obviously, being Canadian). He's utterly fabulous but really, we were too busy scoring points to notice if there was anything swirling in the undercurrent. And perhaps, dear reader, something has picqued my interest about the trappist with whom I'm due to have dinner....

Unfortunately for you, it's way past my bedtime, and this post has gone on long enough. To discover the true identity of Manolo Man, and to find out whether my unconscious knew what it was doing when it made me wield the Bic razor, you'll have to wait. Again. But I solemnly promise to finish the story next time, if only so I can get on with the business of telling you all about my super-strength British Botox.

Ok, here's a sneak preview for those of you who haven't already guessed the end: Manolo Man is, naturally, Mr Trefusis. But what's more, he's far from a man of few words and reminds me most spookily of favourite Heyer Hero, the Marquis of Alverstoke. Not only that, but I discover an Interesting Truth about myself. And yes, oh yes: Lady Luck has shone upon the future Mrs Trefusis and in the fullness of time, you'll get your happy ever after...Possibly in time for Valentine's Day.

LOVE IN A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

He was taller than [she] had at first supposed, rather loose-limbed and he bore himself with a faint suggestion of swash-buckling arrogance.....he was dark, his countenance lean and rather swarthy, marked with lines of dissipation....*

Manolo-Man is something of a surprise: as I'm walking towards him through the stygian gloom of La Poule Au Pot, a Pimlico restaurant so busy doing authentic french paysanne bistro it could audition for a part in a Stella Artois commercial, I realise that contrary to internet dating protocol, Manolo-Man's photos have greatly understated his looks. He's channelling brooding byronic hero, euro-banker, officer-material and repressed output of English public school all at the same time. Not only that, but the fit of his jacket over his broad shoulders would not have disgraced Weston**. As Mr Trefusis -Manolo-Man being too flimsy a soubriquet for such substantial virility - stands up for me as I reach the table, I realise the dinner has distinct promise.

But the pleasing mien and elegant manners count for nothing compared to the real clincher of the evening. The waiter, straight out of central casting with white apron and superior attitude, comes over to talk about the specials or the wine list or some such, and Mr Trefusis, english as a scone or cricket or a red postbox, breaks into a volley of such fluent, flawless french, I can only gawp at him, captivated and drooling. Reader, early imprinting is not confined to dress sense. A pre-teen run-in with 'A Fish Called Wanda' left me fatally scarred: I go wild for a man who talks foreign and right now, listening to Mr Trefusis recite the menu, I feel like Wandawhen Otto speaks 'Italian'. Oh yes. Oh Yes.

I have absolutely no recollection what we talked about that evening, in English or in French. My pants had flown off at the moment he started on the parley-voo, and all thoughts of not being 'that kind of girl' and of reputation and respect and similar archaic nonsense had flown with them. The next thing I recall is sharing a bottle of Laurent Perrier in the bar of the Royal Court theatre, and brazenly asking him if his hotel was conveniently at hand.

One taxi ride later, I find myself clutched to his manly bosom, and, like Barbara Cartland, I shall leave you shut firmly on the other side of the hotel bedroom door. All I shall say is that my unconscious knew what it was doing when it prompted me to shave my legs in the bath that afternoon. Though such was the allure of Mr Trefusis, I doubt I'd have cared if they'd been bristly as a badger.

A month later, and apropos of absolutely nothing at all not least a conversation with me, Mr Trefusis announces to my father he's going to marry me. The fact that I heartily disagree with this at the time, and vehemently protest I don't want a relationship, hardly matters now, being mere detail and history. And that I finish with him, heartlessly and unceremoniously, halfway through a holiday in Venice a month or so after that, doesn't seem to put him off either. Mr Trefusis knows better than I that my dating days are done. He has set his cap at me, and eventually, I concede he's right.

The moral of this tale? Ignore anyone who tells you a man won't respect you in the morning***. Reader, I married him....

Seven years later, we're still living happily ever after. And because this is Valentine's Day, I should say something nice, and possibly even romantic. But I find that I've come over all British, and although I don't want sentiment, I shall probably eschew the writing of poetry in favour of a comradely and playful punch on the shoulder.

*Venetia. Damerel is one of Heyer's very best heroes.

** Another little detail for Heyer fans

***this is a moot point: it was after midnight, so technically it was the second date. That's my story and I've stuck to it til now despite it being utter nonsense

You tube: a fish called wanda- otto speaking italian

BELGIAN WAFFLING HAS A PROPER HARDBACK BOOK!

2016-05-01T00:07:00.004+01:00

About eight years ago, when I started this blog, I started to ferret around the internet for other bloggers I might like and by a very happy alignment of the stars, I fell across Belgian Waffle, a then anonymous blog written by an English ex-pat about her life in Brussels, the job she hated, 'lesonfons'; her adored small children, and a menagerie of animals, including tortoises and a morose whippet called 'Weepette'. What became immediately clear was that whoever Belgian Waffling was, she wrote utterly superbly - funny, wry, satirical, often confessional, she could turn three hundred words on house dust into the most beautiful and gripping prose, taking one from laughter to tears and back to laughter again in a single post.

She and I became proper friends in actual non-online life and have been firm friends ever since. Back then, she and I were writing novels - Emma finished hers, ditched it and wrote a brilliant memoir called 'We'll Always Have Paris' (I'm still crunching the gears on the novel I began in 2009... I may finish it one day - I'm in awe of Waffle's productivity as well as her talent.)

We'll Always Have Paris, trying and failing to be French, was published last week and you can still, I think, read the first five chapters on The Pool. I challenge you not to want to buy it the minute you've read the first paragraph.

Anyway, Emma very kindly let me interview her about the book and about writing. I distracted her terribly with a conversation about Emma Bovary, which I've mostly edited out, but you can read it here on my Books That Built Me website. And Emma is joining me for her own Books That Built Me on 21st June. Every ticket comes complete with a copy of We'll Always Have Paris and a glass of Bollinger with which to toast Emma's continued success.

We'll Always Have Paris: Trying and Failing to Be French, Emma Beddington is published by Pan Macmillan, price £12.99

HOUND LODGE

2016-04-06T23:43:00.003+01:00

Hound Lodge was once a very luxurious home for the hounds of the Charlton Hunt: long before Goodwood House had central heating, the hounds had underfloor heating and every kind of treat. I daresay they even had a canine equivalent of their own butler.

Here are the whelping kennels. Jolly nice they are too. If I had one of those in my garden, I wouldn't let the dog live in it, I'd turn it into my office.

Now that Hound Lodge has been immaculately restored and turned into a country retreat, it's the humans who live in the lap of luxury, though visiting dogs are very welcome - there are dog beds everywhere, a special dog menu (dogs are rumoured to get dog icecream for pudding - I wonder what flavour?), and someone on hand to wash muddy paws should they have had an enthusiastic romp through The Valdoe (a very pretty wood, with the requisite bluebells, and owls hooting at night). I didn't try the dog menu, of course, but dinner for people was glorious.

Each of the ten bedrooms is named after the hounds of the 'Glorious Twenty-Three' owned by the second Duke of Richmond in 1738. Mine was named after Dido, the leader of the pack.

What a blissfully comfortable bed, possibly due to the mattress stuffed with sheep's wool from the Goodwood flock. I could have quite happily lived in that room - it was full of beautiful flowers and books

and elegant objets. The bathroom was equally sybaritic - after a lovely trip to Goodwood House to gawp at the extraordinary art (Van Dyke, Veronese, Lely, Sevres porcelain, rather mindblowing) I submerged myself neck deep for a bathe in a delicious essence made from the pine needles from the Duke of Richmond's Scottish estates (I may have the pine detail wrong, but the jist is there), and read Elizabeth Taylor's In a Summer Season. By the time I'd gone properly lobster pink (to match the horrid Rita Ora nails), I was late to rejoin everyone in the drawing-room for cocktails.

Butlers? Oh, I'm an old hand with butlers now, she says, with a blasé shrug; When the lovely butler asks one if one would like something to drink, one simply says, 'Oh, a glass of champagne would be perfect, thank you.' and lo it appears.

After dinner, when we came back into the drawing room for coffee, I realised that one of these dogs

was looking at me from over the fireplace, very reprovingly, as if to purse its dog lips and say, 'I saw you have a second glass of Mersault, and now you've just asked the lovely butler for whisky.'

One has to get used to dogs staring at one at Hound Lodge - they're on every surface -

even on the bookshelves - I rather wanted to settle down with the story of Bellman the lugubrious beagle. The fox gets a look in too from time to time -

This sweet china fox was in my room, sitting daringly on top of Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man.

The stone fox looks out over the whelping kennels, immortalised in stone.

I used to see Lucien Freud breakfasting at the Wolseley. He didn't breakfast on sherry. Nor did I.

Instead, I had vast amounts of delicious bacon from Goodwood pigs, cured on the home farm. This Wedgwood china is gorgeous. I wish I could get away with it in West London, but although there are many foxes here, and an awful lot of hounds (well, French bulldogs mostly, round here, but dogs, anyway), it wouldn't do.

I came home and was rather disappointed to discover it wasn't nearly as nice as Hound Lodge - how quickly one becomes accustomed to the good life - and spent the evening assembling flat-packed furniture. The glamour.

Hound Lodge at The Kennels, Goodwood, Chichester. Bring a dog, or borrow someone elses.

The Digital World is Complicated

2016-04-05T14:15:00.001+01:00

Perhaps it's not so much complicated as hard to tidy. I switch on my iPhone every morning and the entire internet falls on my head, as if I've inadvertently opened a messy cupboard.

It's not simply that I'm lured into trying to read the whole of the Internet before breakfast (heartwarming stories of pet rescue found on facebook, a link on Twitter to a - very long - Paris Review interview with Norman Mailer, essential hunt for interesting British stone circles inspired by someone mentioning Julan Cope on Instagram, not to mention reading all my email and the Guardian) it's the writing too. I have developed an unhelpful sense that if I don't keep posting stuff on the plethora of social platforms I will somehow cease to be.

Looking at the last date I posted anything on Mrs Trefusis, you could be forgiven for imagining I have ceased to be. I realised earlier this year that The Books That Built Me needed its own internet home, rather than boring on here about all the novels I like. There is an awful lot of Internet to be done. I have discovered there are no half measures: it is impossible to be a little bit Internet. Either one goes completely dark (imagine, what would one do with all the spare time?) or pushes one's sleeves up, grabs a metaphorical digital spade and gets stuck in.

Anyway, enough prologue, if you like the books stuff it can be found at TheBooksThatBuiltMe.co.uk. Mrs Trefusis had better revert to what it once was, a kind of diary of a not very provincial lady. What is the opposite of provincial? Would it be metropolitan? The Diary of a Metropolitan Lady sounds infinitely more ritzy than it ought. It sounds as if I should be sleuthing round with a cigarette holder in one hand and a cocktail in the other, solving crimes. I'm not. On one hand I have a disgusting white nail varnish like tippex (it looks pale pink in the bottle but it's unspeakably naff on the nail). On the other hand I have painted a single nail bubblegum pink from a range I discover, on closer acquaintance with the bottle, is by Rita Ora, which should have told me everything I needed to know about the unsuitability of the colour.

I panic-bought both bottles of nail varnish in Boots on my way to Waterloo, having realised my nails were repulsive in their natural state. Poor lighting must have thwarted my quest for something unobtrusively neutral.

I particular wanted to look better groomed than usual because I'm on my way to the Goodwood Estate, to the Hound Lodge. It sounds like the last word in luxury: one has one's own butler (what will I do with my own butler? The problem with modern metropolitan life is that it leaves one entirely unprepared for having staff, even if one only has staff very temporarily). How does one make a good impression? I don't want my butler raising his eyebrow about me below stairs, like in Downton Abbey. I have been racking my brains for literary examples - one never sees the servants in Nancy Mitford or Waugh so they're no help as a behaviour guide. I can only come up Jeeves and Wooster and am now worried that my butler might remark that my evening jacket is 'rather exuberant' and I will have nothing to offer but some excuse about the style being favoured by the chaps at Drones.

Hound Lodge has ten bedrooms and sounds heaven on earth: when I arrive I have the promise of tea (I'm assuming proper teapots and good cake and so on), followed by a potter around the Van Dykes and Rubens at Goodwood House itself, or feeding lambs at the farm. I will have to keep my unbecomingly painted hands in my pockets.

EVENT: THE BOOKS THAT BUILT LOUIS DE BERNIERES. 9TH FEBRUARY 2016

2016-01-17T22:08:00.005+00:00

Louis De Bernieres

Louis de Bernieres is the best-selling author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin, The Dust that Falls from Dreams, Birds Without Wings and A Partisan's Daughter. Throughout his life he has written about matters of the heart, and with poetry his first and greatest literary love, he is about to publish a beautiful collection of love poetry: Of Love & Desire, with influences ranging from Pablo Neruda to the classical Persian poets. I have been dipping into the collection over the Christmas and New Year break, and it's evocative, lyrical and alternately witty and poignant: I adore it - it's quite rekindled a long dormant love of poetry in me.

Here is one that particularly touched me, called A Short Night

[After Sappho]
I do remember that night that fled so fast,
When we were golden, beautiful and young,
When dawn surprised us from her yellow throne
And filled the room with gathering song.

Your face shone back at me, your lovely hair
Spread out across your breasts, your hand caressed
My face. You said, Let's always remember this.'
I said, 'I wish these nights were twice as long.'

Of course, Louis is best known for his novels - from the inventive magical realism of his early novels set in South America to the captivating Captain Corelli and The Dust That Falls from Dreams. His trademark wit and charm, coupled with his brilliant characterisation and great skill with language have made him one of our best-loved authors, and I can't wait to discover the books that he loves too. There's something of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts - will 100 Years of Solitude be one of the books that built him?

Join us on 9th February as we talk about how the books Louis de Bernieres loves meet the books he writes.

LEMMY AND ME

2016-01-09T11:14:00.003+00:00

'Stop. Cut. Jesus, whatever directors usually say.' The director, raking his hands through floppy, Brideshead hair, frowned wearily in the general direction of Lady Bracknell. 'Try 'A handbag.' again, and this time, less 'Kenneth Williams plays Edith Evans', more - I don't know - more bewildered.'

'A handbag?' [faintly]

'No, that won't work either. Try sounding exasperated'

'A handbag.' [plaintively]

'Christ, how many times? No sodding Edith Evans. Go again.'

'A handbag' [challengingly]

'No.'

'A hand ... bag?' [tentatively]

'No'

'A handbag.' [wearily]

'And again.'

Rehearsals for the University Drama Society's production of The Importance of Being Earnest were not going well. It wasn't simply that the director's expectations were bafflingly high: Rehearsal Room B was right behind the main stage of the Student Union and any Lady Bracknell would struggle to make herself heard against a Motörhead sound-check - UEA being the default East Anglian concert venue in those days, the band were due on later that evening and from the sound of it were rehearsing as hard as we were.
Anyway, our director, flushed with the triumph of his 'Look Back in Anger' the previous term - some even said the cast's heroic battle with a collapsing ironing board added a symbolic dimension - was determined to put his own stamp on Wilde's classic - perhaps he hoped people might later refer to it as 'The Jonty Jones' Importance'. Jonty had updated the production to the nineteen twenties - motivated less by artistic intention than by availability of costumes, most of which had done service in last year's Present Laughter. He cast a man as Lady Bracknell - very radical for the 1980's - and we had instructions to rehearse wearing a part of our costume, and with the odd prop so that we might better inhabit the role and collapse the artificiality of Wilde's mannered dialogue. I'm afraid, as Gwendolyn, I didn't take this terribly seriously; the best I managed at rehearsal was to fish a Letts diary and a pair of broken spectacles from my pocket ('Mama, whose views on education are remarkably strict, has brought me up to be extremely short sighted') but others of our troupe were more method. An aspididstra appeared. Miss Prism invariably brought a toaster, so we might eat muffins unrepentantly in the second act, there was a battered briefcase (barely big enough to have concealed a baby in a railway station cloakroom but still), Canon Chasuble had borrowed a chasuble from a friend at the Cathedral, Jack Worthing had taken up smoking ('a man must have an occupation of some kind') and Lady Bracknell wore a large picture hat, white gloves, a feather boa and a Cupid's bow of scarlet lipstick beneath his moustache. Our director had the added challenge of directing himself as Algenon, and wore tweed plus twos and a ritzy pair of co-respondent shoes. No one brought any cucumber, there being none available, not even for ready money.

Every term, the cool kids in DramSoc got to do a Brecht or a Beckett for an audience of about seven and to rave reviews from the university paper's drama critic, who smoked a pipe and referred to himself entirely unselfconsciously as 'channelling the late, great Kenneth Tynan'. Every term, the less cool but more commercially-minded members of the society underwrote the inevitable losses of Great Art with a play that guaranteed bums-on-seats: the people of Norwich would turn out for endless Coward or Wilde at a tenner a ticket and so we balanced the books. Credibility was sacrificed on the altar of a full-house and cash-flow traded for predictably poor notices: there was little evidence of a Tynan-shaped Spirit Guide in the critic who wrote after the first night of The Importance of Being Earnest, 'Jonty Jones' Algernon Moncrieff has all the aplomb of a wet Labrador in a production neither important nor earnest.' Fortunately, no one read the University newspaper, and as any actor will tell you, rapturous applause trumps a would-be hack's savaging any day of the week. Fortunately, as long as it was Wilde or Coward and nothing too avant-garde, and you said the lines and didn't fall over the furniture, the good people of Norwich would still come and see it, regardless of how you tinkered with the detail, and were very good at clapping, particularly if you added a strong clacque of parents to the middle of the stalls.

So there we were, less than three weeks to curtain up, full of enthusiasm, telling ourselves that saying our lines against the thrash of drum and guitar was good practice for projecting to the back of the circle, as Jonty Jones became more and more frustrated by the delivery of the play's most famous line, his tweeds bristling with artistic ill temper.

'Let me hear it again.'

'A HANDBAG'

Lady Bracknell burst into noisy tears at the very moment the rehearsal room door was flung open by a skinny, long-haired, rather grubby looking man - be-jeaned and be-leathered. 'What the fucking fuck is this?' he said.
'Lemmy. Blimey. I mean, gosh, Mr erm ... Lemmy,' Jonty Jones glided obsequiously towards Motorhead's lead singer, flicking back the Brideshead hair, 'How do you do?'
Lemmy ignored the outstretched hand and glared terrifyingly at the assembled company. Seen through his eyes we were a sorry sight, like refugees from the set of It Ain't Half Hot, Mum. With the exception of Lady Bracknell, who stopped sobbing and gave Lemmy a saucy, appraising look from underneath the brim of the picture hat, evidently harbouring fantasies of being carried off on the back of a Harley, we all imagined he might call the roadies in to give us a good going over with a length of bicycle chain. 'What the fuck are you doing in my Green Room?' Said Lemmy.
'This is a rehearsal of The Importance of Being Earnest - do you know Wilde? Er, no? Well, you'll find the Green Room on the other side of the corridor - just go back out and the door is right in front of you.'
Lemmy turned on his cowboy boot heel and stalked off. As he slammed the door behind him, the opening bars of 'Eat the Rich' came pounding through the breeze blocks that separated us from the gig.

Jonty Jones undid and re-tied his cravat in a more pleasing shape and turned back to Lady Bracknell.

'Lady Bracknell, Jack? Let's take it from "You can take a seat, Mr Worthing"'

BOOK RESOLUTIONS 2016

2016-01-04T14:03:00.003+00:00

The Box Set: A Dance to the Music of Time, Anthony Powell

A Dance to the Music of Time is a captivating, witty, caustic glimpse into the upper reaches of British society beginning sometime after the end of the First World War and ending in the sixties: it's somewhere between Proust A La Recherche du Temps Perdu and Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga and, like both, runs into volumes, individually of varying brilliance, but a masterpiece taken as a whole. I read the First Movement last summer - the twelve novels of the cycle are much more easily digested in four parts. Don't be tempted to set yourself a target of a book a month for twelve months: like a good telly box-sets, it's designed for bingeing on, gobbling as much of its deliciousness as one can manage in a single sitting. It's not for ekeing out into smaller portions, not least because one will lose track of the marvellous and numerous characters who wander in and out of the narrative, and whose rediscovery at different points in their lives is one of the many pleasures of this great literary treat.

The Greatest British Novel (as voted for by the rest of the world)*: Middlemarch, George Eliot

I'm ashamed to say I've read very little George Eliot: I can only think it's laziness. Middlemarch is not a short novel at nine hundred pages, and it's utterly impossible to skim read it, as I discovered when Deborah Moggach chose it as one of her Books That Built Me. I read enough to recognise why Moggach loves it so, and why Woolf described it as "a magnificent book... one of the few English novels written for grown up people.' I began it anew over the New Year break and resolved to read and savour slowly - it is a literary superfood after all.

*the BBC recently polled 82 critics from Australia to Zimbabwe, but none from the UK, to discover the greatest British novel (from a non-British perspective) - see the list here

The Blind Spot: Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens

I didn't dare confess to Susan Hill, a Dickens devotee, that I had never read Little Dorrit. Nor did I let on that I was secretly relieved when she swapped Little Dorrit for A Christmas Carol for her Books That Built Me. However, if she feels it is Dicken's greatest novel, that's good enough for me.

The 'Greatest comic novel of the twentieth century': Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis

Fond as I am of other members of the Amis family - Elizabeth Jane Howard, Martin Amis - I've boorishly written off Kingsley as too misanthropic and curmudgeonly to be bothered with. This breaks one of my few rules; to judge the work and not the artist and I'm rather ashamed of myself.
Christopher Hitchens believed Amis managed to 'synthesise the comic achievements of Evelyn Waugh and P.G Wodehouse' in Lucky Jim, and Amis remains one of only two comic novelists to have won the Booker Prize (the other is Howard Jacobson). So, I shall give it a go,

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, VIRGINIA WOOLF

2016-01-02T21:09:00.001+00:00

I've re-read To The Lighthouse twice this year - first for Deborah Moggach's Books That Built Me, and then again for Susan Hill's.

It's Woolf's crowning achievement, I think. As a devotee of Mrs Dalloway, it has taken me a while to see that, but it is true. Woolf herself wrote to Vita Sackville West "the dinner party the best thing I ever wrote: the one thing that I think justifies my faults as a writer...". She also sent her a copy inscribed, 'in my opinion the best novel I have ever written'. Inside Vita found all the pages blank.

I fell across a letter of hers to Roger Fry earlier today, written towards the end of May, 1927, a few weeks after its publication -

"My Dear Roger,

[...] I meant nothing by The Lighthouse. One has to have a central line down the middle of the book to hold the design together. I saw that all sorts of feelings would accrue to this, but I refused to think them out, and trusted that people would make it the deposit for their own emotions - which they have done, one thinking it means one thing another another. I can't manage Symbolism except in this vague, generalised way. Whether it's right or wrong I don't know, but directly I'm told what a thing means, it becomes hateful to me. [...]

V.W"

I promise I will write in more detail about Susan Hill's Books That Built Me before this year is much older, but one of the things she and I discussed in relation to Woolf, and particularly To The Lighthouse, is that an author must learn to trust the reader, to not feel compelled to spell things out, to take them from A to B to C, but to understand that the reader is clever enough to feel their own way, to pick up the trail of clues - to 'make it the deposit for their own emotions'.

ADVICE FOR WRITERS II

2015-12-29T23:19:00.001+00:00

At Susan Hill's Books That Built Me the other week week she said, 'the best way to learn to be a writer is to read books by writers far better than you'll ever be'. As a teenager, fixed on a literary calling, she went to the library in search of a book which might tell her how to be a writer and found Woolf's A Writer's Diary. It seems to have done the trick - before Hill was out of her teens she had published her first novel, reviewed by Elizabeth Jane Howard in Vogue, no less, since when she's written and published fifty six books.

So, if I've learned anything from the (nearly) two years of hosting The Books That Built Me, it's that inside every great writer is a careful reader - their craft honed on careful study of those 'books by better writers'.
One sees Susan Hill's admiration for Woolf in her precise, economic prose - the reader is never led by the hand, but has to dart behind the author, catching signs and clues in a conspiracy of reader and writer. Think of how she effortlessly conjures a disquieting, malevolent atmosphere, and then keeps on turning the screw. It is there in I'm the King of the Castle or Strange Meeting as much as it is in her ghost stories, her craft honed by a lifelong passion for Dickens' dank courtyards, misty Kentish marshlands, Marshalsea Prison, the flat, grey Lincolnshire wolds.

So, the best advice for would-be writers is to read, and read well. It doesn't necessarily mean excluding all but canonical texts, restricting oneself to a diet of Woolf, Proust, and Eliots George and Thomas. It does mean reading 'best in class' - if you aspire to domestic noir, read Gone Girl and Before I Go To Sleep but also try Daniel Deronda and The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall (for the latter, look no further than Sam Baker's 'The Woman Who Ran', published next month); if crime fiction is your thing, read Agatha Christie, Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allen Poe as well as Ruth Rendell and Ian Rankin.

If you want to write, read.

MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER

2015-12-20T17:48:00.001+00:00

Is it too early for a Negroni?

No, I rather thought not.

The Trefusis Negroni

15ml Campari

15ml Martini Rosso

15ml Gordon's Gin

The Trefusis Negroni differs very little from any other kind of Negroni - it's simply a little smaller because I lost the cocktail jigger, so resorted to using a tablespoon, which halves the usual quantity of alcohol and means one can have a second Negroni without fear of falling into the hedge the minute one steps outside.

After much experimentation, a fairly ordinary gin like Gordon's works better than the swankier Tanqueray/Bombay Sapphire etc where the botanicals fight with the Campari & the herby Martini Rosso.

The other moderate Trefusis variation is a marvellous golf ball of ice - the Negroni is particularly delicious when very, very cold, and these vast ice globes chill it fast and melt slowly. They're by Tavolo and are easily available on Amazon.

Shove in a slice of orange.

Drink.

Feel better.

THE GOOD SOLDIER, CECCONI'S, WILTONS - NICE PLACES TO READ BOOKS

2015-12-06T20:16:00.000+00:00

Cecconis, Mayfair, home of the finest Negroni this side of Milan.

"This is the saddest story I have ever heard."

The opening of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, is up there with "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" and "It was a bright, cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen" as one of the most memorable first lines in fiction. It's also one of the most misleading; you assume it's a statement of fact - but you're no further than the end of the first chapter before you begin to question its trustworthiness. Dowell, the book's narrator, is not simply telling the story, he is the story - so from whom has he 'heard' it? From that moment, the reader begins to suspect that Dowell may be at best a compromised narrator, and at the least, unreliable, albeit in a sense that he doesn't always 'know how to put this thing down.'

On the surface, the story seems not to be complicated: two well-born couples, one English, the Ashburnhams, one American - John Dowell and his wife Florence, meet at a German spa town, where they become 'a four-square coterie' and spend a companionable 'nine years of uninterrupted tranquility' together until it's discovered that Florence Dowell has been having an affair with Captain Ashburnham, the 'Good Soldier' of the story. But Ford's great skill lies not in exploring the nuances of a conventional love-triangle (love quadrangle?), but in unpicking, and gradually revealing and concealing and revealing again in Dowell's uncertain, bumbling impressions, confessions and revelations, the empty, desolate heart of both marriages. It's a story in which there are neither heroes nor villains, only delusions, self-deceptions and tragic, shameful concealed truths. The Ashburnhams - 'quite good people' - haven't said a word to each other in private for years, yet appear to be a model couple - Florence Dowell's ill-health for which her husband has worked to create a 'shock-proof world' is nothing more than an elaborate charade to conceal an illicit relationship pre-marriage. Yet their spouses aren't deceived innocents, but utterly complicit. It is the saddest story.

So where are we with the 'ever heard'? In as much as Florence has deceived Dowell, he has conspired with the deception. Leonora Ashburnham goes out of her way to constantly uncover her husband's philanderings and debts whilst rigorously maintaining the front of being 'quite good people' and behaving as quite good people might be expected to. Dowell is different - he refuses to believe the evidence in front of him, he is immune to his wife's aunt's dark warnings and seems almost able to ignore the truth of Florence's past when a perfect stranger blurts it out to him. So he has had to be told, he has had to listen to his own story, and that distancing 'that I have ever heard' underscores the tragedy, it is something he has heard, it is hearsay, it may not be true?

Julian Barnes calls Madox Ford 'a proper reader's writer' - I love him because I enjoy his ingenious manipulation of the reader - he's not considered a modernist, and yet, on the evidence of The Good Soldier, I challenge anyone not to garland him with as many laurels for technical brilliance as Woolf or Joyce. Susan Hill with whom I'll discuss the book tomorrow at her Books That Built Me calls it 'the perfect novel form'. I keep coming back to The Good Soldier and every time I'm blown away by Ford's extraordinary control over his novel - it is perfection, and I always wonder, 'just how does he do it'.

I managed to read The Good Soldier in some marvellous places - Cecconis, where the treat of a Negroni and a few chapters of The Good Soldier late one afternoon ( scandalously early for drinking cocktails) managed to restore my equilibrium after a shoddy day - and Wilton's, which is such a fixture of The London dining scene one can quite imagine the Ashburnhams dining there. It is heaven - here below is what they say about themselves.
Its current Jermyn Street location, in the heart of St James's, is ideally suited to its clientele, which includes members of the government, businesspersons, film stars and British aristocracy. Service is discreet, professional and welcoming."

I tried to look like a member of the aristocracy but suspect I only managed 'businessperson'. Anyway, I drank an excellent glass of champagne and finished the Good Soldier as my good friend Wendy arrived to much feting and slaughtering of fatted calf by Wilton's - they look after their regulars very well.

DEBORAH MOGGACH AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

2015-12-04T00:30:00.000+00:00

The Books That Built Deborah Moggach

Deborah Moggach’s Books That Built Me offered guests at the Club at Café Royal a mini masterclass in writing – I went away thinking that these six [pictured] each contain such a profound lesson about how to write, they should almost be set texts on my alma mater’s hallowed creative writing MA.

But the jewel in the crown of the literary treasure trove was Moggach herself – warm, funny, generous, erudite and full of marvellous anecdotes. I’m mad about her.

Huge thanks as always to Champagne Bollinger, Tatler, Prestat chocolate and The Club at Café Royal, and also to Alex Peake-Tomkinson (vast gratitude for the notes below, Alex).

The Books That Built Deborah Moggach.

1. Just William by Richmal Crompton

“I was going to marry him, I just adore him,” The eponymous William is eleven in Crompton's books, and Deborah discovered them at the same age. Although her parents were both prolific novelists, she wasn't a bookish child, but William made her realise that being funny is one of the greatest gifts books can give us - there's a truth in laughter and "humour in everything....'When my mother was suffering from dementia, she said, 'Debby, there were two men in my bedroom last night; one in the wardrobe and the other under the bed. Well, I've never believed in threesomes and I'm not about to start now'."

More than the humour, Crompton's refusal to patronise younger readers makes her writing extra special; she uses what might be thought of now as challenging language and expects readers to just keep up (which of course they do) "People [in the books] were always saying 'testily' or 'unctuously' - she'd even say 'William ejaculated'.... She made language come alive."

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Deborah said that, like everyone of her generation, she was affected by both DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf - Woolf "sensitised me to language". She also said that “Woolf’s snobbishness is very hard to deal with now.” She liked that everything and nothing happened in Woolf’s novels and compared this to Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker, a novel in which a man tries to buy a pair of shoelaces. She said “nothing happens but it is absolutely thrilling.”

Deborah also likes Agatha Christie and Mrs Trefusis pointed out that Christie “is all about plot whereas Woolf is all about voice.” Deborah mentioned how autobiographical some of Woolf’s fiction is and said that her first novel, You Must Be Sisters, was also autobiographical, but writing it “took my past away.”

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Describing Edward Casaubon, the man that Dorothea Brooke – the heroine of the novel – decides to marry, Deborah called him “a frightful dry old stick.” Discussing Middlemarch also led Deborah to talk about how she depicted her own first marriage in fiction – in Close to Home, she wrote about a young mother living in Camden Town, just as she was. She also said that real people can’t be depicted in fiction – “it’s like newsprint, when you hold it too close to your eyes, it blurs”.

She went on to say that in order to create fictional characters who seem real, you should ask questions: what would they do if they got stuck in a lift, for example?

The Siege of Krishnapur by JG Farrell

Deborah described this novel as being “all about people clinging on to their humanity and customs as the world collapses around them”. She described the “myopic world” of this book but also said “a novelist is there to help us broaden our empathies, it’s very important.”

Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

Deborah adapted both The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate for television and says that Mitford’s “dialogue is to die for.” She also commented that Fabrice, Linda’s lover is a “chatterer” and that the “sexiest thing ever” is him calling Linda the minute after he has returned to his own home after the two have spent the night together so that they can talk at length.

Short Cuts by Raymond Carver

Deborah admitted that she loves Robert Altman’s film adaptation of Short Cuts as much as she loves Raymond Carver’s short stories. She commented “Carver understood that writing is all to do with what you leave out. Hardly anything need happen, he understood that. Those stories are an object lesson in how people’s lives are intertwined.”

Deborah Moggach, Something To Hide, Chatto and Windus, £12.99

WRITERS ON WRITERS: JASON HEWITT ON SUSAN HILL'S I'M THE KING OF THE CASTLE

2015-12-03T23:58:00.000+00:00

The Books that Built Jason Hewitt

Jason Hewitt, author of Devastation Road, chose Susan Hill's I'm the King of the Castle as one of his books when he joined me for October's Books That Built Me. In I'm The King of the Castle, Hill explores the cruelty and malevolence of children, and the wilful ignorance of adults who can't imagine they can be anything but innocents, in the tragic story of the bullied Charles Kingshaw and his tormentor, Edmund Hooper.

"I first came across Susan Hill when her short story collection A Bit of Singing and Dancing was on my A Level English course syllabus. Since then I’ve been an avid fan of all her work. Her third novel, I’m the King of the Castle will always will always be my favourite. I think it’s even more terrifying than her ghostly classic, The Woman in Black – terrifying because whilst it has all the feel of a gothic novel there are actually no supernatural elements in it at all. Instead, the horror comes from the everyday actions of two young boys, both trying to gain control and one-upmanship over the other; whilst it also chillingly illustrates the gulf that can exist between children and their parents, who are living in a completely different world, oblivious of the hell that their children are causing each other. It is one of the key books that built me as a writer. The sense of threat that Susan Hill evokes is something that I tried to create in my own debut, The Dynamite Room, and the house in that, Greyfriars, was very much inspired by the atmosphere she creates so wonderfully in Warings. With a writing style that is simple and in no way showy, Susan Hill slowly leads us down a path in to the dark psyche of human nature like no other author I know. She doesn’t shy away from showing the evil of people, and that honesty I find equally terrifying and yet compelling." Jason Hewitt.

I'm delighted that Jason will be at Susan Hill's Books That Built Me on 8th December at the Club at Cafe Royal; I'm very much looking forward to their meeting.

I'm the King of the Castle, Susan Hill is available here, priced £7.99 (P&P free to UK addresses)

Devastation Road, Jason Hewitt, published by Scribner, £14.99

SUSAN HILL AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME. 8TH DECEMBER 2015

2015-11-29T13:45:00.001+00:00

"Books help to form us." says Susan Hill in her memoir, Howards End is on the Landing, "If you cut me open, will you find volume after volume, page after page, the contents of every one I have ever read, somehow transmuted and transformed into me? Alice in Wonderland, The Magic Faraway Tree. The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Book of Job. Bleak House. Wuthering Heights. The Complete Poems of W.H.Auden. The Tale of Mr Tod. Howards End. What a strange person I must be. But if the books I have read have helped to form me, then probably nobody else who ever lived has read exactly the same books, all the same books and only the same books, as me. So just as my genes and the soul within me make me uniquely me, so I am the unique sum of the books I have read. I am my literary DNA".

Howards End is on the Landing is a marvellous memoir, not only for the insights it gives into Hill's 'literary DNA', but also for the people she's met: E.M Forster is a 'small man with thinning hair and a melancholy moustache' who drops a book on her foot in the London Library, there's kind Sacheverall Sitwell and his terrifying sister, Edith, with her extraordinary eyes, 'huge, heavily lidded, mesmerising, half-closed like the eyes of an apparently sleeping but terribly watchful crocodile' and asks a young Hill which poetry she has by heart. There's T.S Eliot, at a party, Elizabeth Jane Howard, W.H.Auden, Roald Dahl, Benjamin Britten, Ian Fleming, Iris Murdoch - I can't think of a more beguiling and breathtaking list of cultural greats. Only V.S Naipaul sounds less than a treat: they meet at Radio 4, Susan Hill is to interview him on Bookshelf.

"When he comes up to me and takes my hand in his silken ones, he bows.'I am most honoured to meet...' a pause. Then '...the wife of the distinguished Shakespeare scholar Stanley Wells.'

Typically generous, Hill goes on to say 'there is surely no novelist writing since the 1950's who is greater than Naipaul'.

Re-reading Howards End is on the Landing, those words - 'I am the unique sum of the books I have read' - spring out at me. I first read it in 2009, and somehow, the fascinating idea of a writer's literary DNA must have tucked itself away into my unconscious. When I conceived The Books That Built Me, I thought it was the exchange between Elizabeth Jane Howard and Martin Amis that had inspired the salon's conceit, but perhaps my preoccupation with exploring the relationship between the books an author reads and the books they write owes a greater debt to Susan Hill: Howards End is on the Landing grafted itself into my own literary DNA, and the result is The Books That Built Me.

I love her work - I'm the King of the Castle, Strange Meeting and The Woman in Black are a masterclass in characterisation, deft plotting and a vivid sense of place underpinned by supple, lucid, evocative prose. I loved going through her 'Final Forty' list of books at the back of Howards End is on the Landing and seeing so many of the books I also love there. And I've loved re-reading the five books she has chosen for her Books That Built Me, and tracing a line back into her writing.

So, on 8th December, at the Club at Cafe Royal, I will touch the hand that's touched the hand of E.M Forster and T.S Eliot, and have the great privilege of talking to an author I admire enormously. Do join me, Tatler, Champagne Bollinger and Prestat chocolate for The Books That Built Susan Hill.

Buy Strange Meeting for £5.99

Buy
Howards End is on the Landing: A year of reading from home

NEW ASTLEY CLARKE BIOGRAPHY PINS, DEBORAH MEADEN AND EVE LOM

2015-11-20T13:50:00.002+00:00

'Confidence is the key to success,' said Deborah Meaden when I interviewed her at an event at Annabel's last week, 'And it's what I always try to instill in my people'.

And it's true, no matter how talented you are, if you're unable to squash the insidious voice in your head that tells you you're not good enough, you won't succeed. You need to believe in yourself.

You can if you think you can.

Clockwise from top left: Astley Clarke Kula bracelets; my place setting at The Arts Club; selection of Astley Clarke Biography pins

It's easier said than done - over the years, I've become practised at oozing a veneer of self-belief. The truth is, I'm always quaking inside, convinced I'll be unmasked. I was particularly quakey about interviewing Deborah Meaden for Annabel's - I know about books, so talking to authors at The Books That Built Me every month is well-within my comfort zone, but steering a conversation about someone's life and successes for a large audience felt very daunting. Try as I might, I was failing to psych myself up: I couldn't find my confidence mojo.

The morning of the interview, my consciously incompetent self was crying out for something tangible to prompt my self-belief. The universe has a way of giving you what you need, when you need it, albeit in unexpected ways, and I found it at a press breakfast given by Astley Clarke.

Astley Clarke is one of the great success stories of online retailing. Founded by Bec Astley Clarke in 2006 to celebrate the best in fine jewellery design, the company grew quickly and began to create their own collections with an ethos to inspire intelligent modern women to wear relaxed fashionable jewellery. One of Astley Clarke's signatures is the Biography Collection, and the purpose of the breakfast was to launch a new iteration of their famous friendship bracelet - the Kula collection (pictured above) -and to introduce Biography Pins: a clever new take on brooches, a selection of fourteen of Astley Clarke's favourite charms, each of which has a symbolic meaning, and can be worn on lapels, or on a scarf or hat, or anywhere and in any combination.

It's a fun, accessible way to jazz up an outfit, but more than that, it struck me at once that you could edit your selection to act as a little aide memoire, to remind you that 'you can if you think you can'. I've never really been one for talismans, but with my nerves jangling about the interview, I knew I could really use a lucky charm. I opened my Astley Clarke box and there, in some gorgeously karmic coincidence, was a Hamsa pin - a symbol of protection that brings blessings, power and strength, and a lightning bolt, to symbolise creativity and inspiration: Sometimes, things do come into your life at exactly the moment you need them.

I'm wearing the Hamsa the wrong way up, don't judge me.

Later that evening, in the taxi back home after the Annabel's event with the brilliant, witty, inspiring Deborah Meaden, I was fiddling with the pins I'd stuck to my lapel and I was reminded of Glinda in the Wizard of Oz when she says to Dorothy, 'You always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself' and I thought, thank you, Astley Clarke for providing me with the perfect study aid.

Astley Clarke Biography pins from £45
www.astleyclarke.com

Astley Clarke, 6 Junction Mews London W2 (also stocked in Selfridges, Liberty, and other stores nationwide)

For US Stockists, please click here

EVE LOM
Confidence also comes from putting your best face forward, of course: it helps if there's no distracting voice in your head telling you your hair is a mess, your eye makeup makes you look tired and your shirt gaps at the bosom. Skincare and cosmetics brand, Eve Lom, partnered Astley Clarke at the breakfast to show off a lovely new product, Illuminating Radiance Powder, a very finely milled golden powder with rose shaped particles and mother of pearl extract. It comes complete with brush, so all you need to do is to shake it gently and sweep on subtle, light-reflecting highlights for instant desk-to-dinner glamour. Or if you're all over the strobing lark (I'm no expert selfie-ist, so it's safe to say that strobing is a completely new word for me) you can unscrew the bottom and use a finger tip to stroke the powder directly onto cheekbones and so on.

Eve Lom Illuminating Radiance Powder inexpertly yet joyously applied

I really love the way it bounces light away from one's face, which has an excellent anti-ageing effect (see below for a picture of me in the harsh winter daylight - can you see my wrinkles? No, you cannot. I call that a result.)

I daresay, if you're good at instagram and contouring, you'd be able to give yourself the cheekbones of Ursula Andress.
It smells delicious and it's now an essential in my 'Tube to Party' makeup bag (other marvellous insta-glam discoveries include Charlotte Tilbury's utterly foolproof Colour Chameleon eye pencil - crayon it on and smudge with a finger for smokey eyes in a trice and Tom Ford lipstick in Wilful, a subtle, glossy red which looks chic rather than disco)

Eve Lom Illuminating Radiance Powder £50 Available from Space NK and other Eve Lom stockists.

NICE PLACES TO READ BOOKS: CAFE COLBERT, SLOANE SQUARE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS

2015-11-15T13:26:00.002+00:00

Wuthering Heights feels like a much darker book now than the one I read at university. Then, it was rich pickings for a cynical student looking for decent marks - one could pick out its psychoanalytic aspects to please a Freud obsessed lecturer, scribbling reams of half-baked thoughts about Penistone Crag and the fairy cave beneath, or about virginity myths and menstruation taboos when the Linton's dog bites Catherine's ankle, about Heathcliff being Catherine's id and Edgar Linton her super-ego. I wrote yet another essay about ghosts, doubling and the Untheimlich (the uncanny) for a professor whose special focus was The Gothic, and another which took a structuralist approach for a third lecturer whose obsession was Derrida (though rereading it, I've no idea how I pulled that off).

Cafe Colbert, Sloane Square. Warm and civilised, unlike Wuthering Heights.

Narratives are never fixed. The plot stays the same yet the reader's perspective is all - what you bring to a book changes it, you inscribe yourself on a novel. My Wuthering Heights was different every time I read it, either in harness to my degree, or because Kate Bush was a powerful cultural influence (not joking - I'd never have come across Bronte, Delius, Hammer Horror, or Kierkegaard if Kate hadn't sung about them and made them sound sexy and mysterious), or because, like now, I'm reading it because Jason Hewitt chose it as one of his 'Books That Built Me', so yet again the story is filtered through a new lens. This time, I'm reading it to locate how Bronte builds the dark, unsettling, claustrophobic texture of the novel - like the moors, Catherine and Heathcliff and Wuthering Heights are savage and uncivilisable - they are part of it, unlike the Thrushcross Grange, Lintons and Lockwood. In death, it's as if the moor reclaims her; Catherine is buried in a corner of the graveyard where 'the wall is so low that heath and bilberry plants have climbed over it from the moor; and peat mould almost buries it'. This sense of a power struggle between the passionate wildness of nature and the controlled, civilising effects of man is also in the house itself - Isabella arrives at Wuthering Heights after marrying Heathcliff to find once expensive furniture thick with dust, once bright pewter dark with tarnish, rich curtains in tatters, torn from their fastenings.
In Hewitt's Dynamite Room and Devastation Road you can see traces of this - part of the success of his writing is that he inscribes the powerless of the individual by embuing a house, a road, a river, an empty field with a dark sense of menace.

I like Wuthering Heights less and less every time I read it - it feels overwrought, self-absorbed, childish now; perhaps I've had a surfeit of it. The fault is in me, of course, because it's one of the Great Books, but four essays and two Books That Built Me later, I can't say I haven't mined its depths. For me, civilisation has triumphed over savagery, and I'm glad to be here in Cafe Colbert, the Thrushcross Grange of the Corbin and King empire, drinking a decent capuccino, surrounded by efficient, unobtrusive and beautifully courteous service, a world away from the belligerent, pious slovenliness of Joseph, amongst ladies waiting politely for Peter Jones to open.

SUSAN HILL AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME, 8TH DECEMBER 2015

2015-11-08T19:24:00.000+00:00

I have never written a ghost story merely to evoke a shudder. I cannot see the point in simply making people afraid. I want to do more. I want the reader to ask questions, to ponder, to be intrigued and to create an atmosphere from which the story will emerge.

Susan Hill is one of Britain's most celebrated writers. The author of more than twenty-six novels, and many works of non-fiction, children's books, plays and short-stories, she is not only a prodigious literary talent, but also pleasingly prolific ; small wonder she was made CBE for services to literature.

Recently, her Simon Serrailler series of crime novels has brought her huge success in a new genre, but it's as a writer of ghost stories many of us know her best, not least because of the extraordinary success of The Woman In Black.

Having read many of her books over the years - my first was the chilling and moving first world war novella Strange Meeting - I'm a lifelong fan, and Susan Hill's Books That Built Me will be an enormous treat. I'm very much looking forward to seeing you there.

Tickets include a beautiful gift edition of Susan Hill's celebrated ghost stories, The Woman in Black and Other Ghost Stories, a glass of Bollinger, a six month subscription to Tatler, a bar of Prestat chocolate to nibble on the way home, and Susan is also giving every Books That Built Me guest at her event a gift of a beautiful notebook from her 'She is Too Fond Of Books' range of literary gifts (her gift range makes wonderful Christmas presents - have a look at more on her website - http://www.susanhill.org.uk/shop

NICE PLACES TO READ BOOKS: DAPHNE'S

2015-10-29T18:25:00.001+00:00

When last I went to Daphne's, towards the end of the last century, it was the haunt of well-heeled euro-sloanes, reasonably chic in the way that a private doctor's waiting room on Harley Street is chic - not much going on in the way of conversation but reassuringly expensive.

Brompton Cross was always the no-man's land of the monied - entirely populated by under occupied flicky-haired women, legs like gazelles, engaged in a desultory wander round Joseph to kill the time between a blow dry at Hari's and lunch at Daphne's with her doppelgänger. Despite being a lifelong WestLondoner, I could never see the point of Brompton Cross: it seemed so determined to emphasise how out of place I was there. So I stopped going.

Anyway, it has changed. Or at least Daphne's has. Joseph, Hari's and Chanel are hardy perennials, but Daphne's has improved dramatically. Now part of Caprice Holdings (Ivy, Sheekeys, Sexy Fish etc), it has gone all Italian. Out has gone the screamingly nineties inferior decoration, and it is now Milan by way of Sloane Avenue, self assured, elegant, closer to the Caprice than to the Ivy in style and with a set lunch menu priced attractively enough to bring in the frequent luncher, not just the hedge fund crowd. Good bread, good olive oil, chilled Eau de Robinet, and there I sat waiting for my lunch guest reading the new Faber edition of The Bell Jar, and leafing through a book of Sylvia Plath's exqusite pencil drawings and marvelling at her prodigious talent. She would have been eighty three on Tuesday. Happy Birthday Sylvia Plath.

DEBORAH MOGGACH'S LATEST NOVEL, SOMETHING TO HIDE, AND THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

2015-09-28T23:05:00.004+01:00

Something To Hide is Deborah Moggach's eighteenth novel. Whilst it has all her trademark wit, warmth and wisdom, it's undercut with a darker edge - the things we have to hide may be more troubling than a few weathered skeletons clanking in the closet.

It begins with Petra, whose love life has always been catastrophic. In her sixties, she's older, but no wiser about men - she entertains her best friend's husband with tales of her 'romantic disasters. From the safety of the marital bed, couples like to hear about the hurly-burly of the chaise longue' but the marital bed is far from safe, and they fall in love. Untroubled by guilt - after all, Petra reasons, Bev's had Jeremy for thirty five years and perhaps it's her turn - their affair trundles along as one might expect in a comedy of manners, until Petra is called to West Africa by Bev, right to the heart of darkness.

Moggach weaves the lives of three other women into the story, all of whom struggle with secrets and betrayals in their own way - Petra's best friend, Bev, whose husband she's been borrowing, and American Lorrie, cheated of her life savings and with her soldier husband away in the Middle East, she embarks on a vast deception rather than confess to the loss of the money. In China Li-Jing is struggling with infertility and trying to understand exactly what it is her husband does on his West African business trips. No matter where you are in the world, it seems everyone has something to hide.

I first came across Deborah Moggach's work in Tulip Fever, set in Amsterdam at the height of the tulip mania that gripped the Dutch in the early seventeenth century, in which a painter and his sitter fall in love, and have always loved her writing. She's best known for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, but has also written many screenplays, including my favourite Pride and Prejudice (the one with Kiera Knightley - don't hate me) and television adaptations. I'm enormously excited that she will be November's guest at The Books That Built Me - tickets are available here

NEW BOOKS: GRIEF IS THE THING WITH FEATHERS, MAX PORTER

2015-09-20T23:01:00.005+01:00

I'm not quite sure how to describe Max Porter's Grief is the Thing with Feathers, other than to say it's breathtaking, original, experimental, heartrending and is inspired by Ted Hughes Crow, which Hughes wrote in the aftermath of Plath's death. It's part prose poem, part novel - a spare, poetic story of a widowed father and his two sons, who are visited by Crow, babysitter, trickster, healer, antagonist, who threatens to stay until they no longer need him.

I have stolen (please let me know if this is highly illegal) an excerpt from Grief Is The Thing With Feathers, originally printed in The Guardian a few days ago, and appended it below. No review I could write would show the extraordinary power of Porter's prose better than this extended quotation could.

Extract from Grief is the Thing With Feathers

Once upon a time there was a demon who fed on grief. The delicious aroma of raw shock and unexpected loss came wafting from the doors and windows of a widower’s sad home.

Therefore the demon set about finding his way in.

One evening the babes were freshly washed and the husband was telling them tales when there was a knock on the door.

Rat-a-tat-tat. “Open up, open up, it’s me from 56. It’s … Keith. Keith Coleridge. I need to borrow some milk.”

But the sensible father knew there was no number 56 on the quiet little street, so he did not open the door.

The next night the demon tried again.

Rat-a-tat-tat. “Open up, open up, I’m from Parenthesis Press. It’s Paul. Paul … Graves. I heard the news. I’m truly gutted it’s taken me this long to come over. I’ve brought a pizza and some toys for the boys.

But the attentive father knew there had been a Pete from Parenthesis and a Phil from Parenthesis, but never a Paul from Parenthesis, so he did not open the door.

The next night the demon ran at the door, flashing blue and crackling.

Rat-a-tat-tat. BANG. BANG. “Open up! Police! We know you’re in there, this is an emergency, you have five seconds to open the door or we will smash our way in.”

But the worldly grieving man knew a bit about the law and sensed a lie.

The demon went away and wondered what to do next. He was tabloid-despicable, so a powerful plan came to him.

Rat-a-tat-tat-tat. Knock. Knock. Knock. “Boys? It’s me. It’s Mum. Darling? Are you there? Boys, open the door, it’s me. I’m back. Sweetheart? Boys? Let me in.”

And the babes flung their duvets back in abandon, swung their little legs over the edge of the bed and scampered down the stairs. The chambers of their baffled baby hearts filled with yearning and they tingled, they bounded down towards before, before, before all this. The father, drunk on the voice of his beloved, raced down after them. The sound of her voice was stinging, like a moon-dragged starvation surging into every hopeless raw vacant pore, undoing, exquisite undoing.

“We are coming, Mum!”

Their friend and houseguest, who was a crow, stopped them at the door.

My loves, he said.

My dear, sorry loves. It isn’t her. Go back to bed and let me deal with this. It isn’t her.

The boys floated their crumpled crêpe-paper dad back up, one under each arm steering his weightlessness, and they laid him down to sleep. Then they sat at the window looking down and watching what happened and they liked it very much, for boys will be boys.

Crow went out, smiled, sniffed the air, nodded good evening and back-kicked the door shut behind him.

Then Crow demonstrated to the demon what happens when a crow repels an intruder to the nest, if there are babies in that nest:

One loud KRONK, a hop, a tap on the floor, a little distracted dance, a HONK, swivel and lift, as a discus swung up but not released but driven down atomically fixed and explosive, the beak hurled down hammer-hard into the demon’s skull with a crack and a spurt then smashed onwards down through bone, brain, fluid and membrane, into squirting spine, vertebra snap, vertebra crunch, vertebra nibbled and spat and one-two-three-four-five all the way down quick as a piranha, nipping, cutting, disassembling the material of the demon, splashing in blood and spinal gunk and shit and piss, unravelling innards, whipping ligaments and nerves about joyous spaghetti tangled wool hammering, clawing, ripping, snipping, slurping, burping, frankly loving the journey of hurting, hurting-hurting and for Crow it was like a lovely bin full of chip papers and ice cream and currywurst and baby robins and every nasty treat, physically invigorating like a westerly above the moor, like a bouncy castle elm in the wind, like old family pleasures of the deep species. And Crow stands thrilled in a pool of filth, patiently sweeping and toeing remains of demon into a drain-hole.

His work done, Crow struts and leaps up and down the street issuing warnings while the pyjama-clad boys clap and cheer – behind-glass-silent – from the bedroom window. Crow issues warnings to the wide city, warnings in verse, warnings in many languages, warnings with bleeding edges, warnings with humour, warnings with dance and sub-low threats and voodoo and puns and spectacular ancient ugliness.

Satisfied with his defence of the nest, Crow wanders in to find some food.

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME: JASON HEWITT, AUTHOR OF DEVASTATION ROAD

2015-09-20T21:25:00.001+01:00

Jason Hewitt, author of Devastation Road

Say 'road novel' or 'road movie' to anyone, and you'll likely get Kerouac's 'On the Road' or 'Thelma and Louise' or 'Easy Rider', or even 'The Grapes of Wrath' as an answer, or some other example which makes the genre seem uniquely American. But the road or journey as a narrative form has its roots much earlier than that, in Homer's Odyssey, or Virgil's Aeneid - a hero sets out on an often perilous journey, survival by no means guaranteed, but when the destination is finally attained, he will have learned something about himself and the world he lives in.

Devastation Road is such a Bildungsroman: an Englishman wakes up in a field somewhere in Europe in the last days of World War II. He doesn't know who or where he is, only that he is lost, and has lost his memory. He meets Janek, a Czech teenager, and despite not speaking the other's language, they manage to piece together enough to discover they share a common cause: the urge to learn the fate of their respective brothers. They start walking, like the millions of other displaced persons in 1945 - which feels incredibly potent in the context of the current refugee crisis - in search of safety, and in Owen's case particularly, in search of identity.

It's a meticulously researched novel - Hewitt took the physical journey his protagonists take in the novel and also learned to speak Czech - but it's Hewitt's ability to conjure the intense, vivid, claustrophobic confusion of a Europe broken apart by war and to deftly explore themes of identity, nationhood, and the extremes to which desperate people are driven in a bid to survive, that gives Devastation Road its narrative impact.

Jason Hewitt will be my guest at The Books That Built Me at the Club at Cafe Royal on 6th October. Tickets are £26.99 (plus eventbrite fees) and include a copy of Devastation Road, a glass of Bollinger, a bar of Prestat chocolate and a 6 month subscription to Tatler (at the special price of £12 for 6 issues)

The podcast below is a brilliant conversation between Scribner's Elizabeth Preston and Jason Hewitt about Devastation Road - and it's really worth a listen

NICE PLACES TO READ BOOKS; THE IVY and SCOOP

2015-09-20T06:00:00.000+01:00

The bar at The Ivy

I like eating at the bar in elegant restaurants - it feels less formal and so infinitely chicer, it's always quicker if under time pressure, and if one wants to eat alone, it's the best place in the house to be. I haven't been to The Ivy in eons, not since my sister had her wedding reception there - but it recently had a refurb, and has emerged from its second cocoon as an even more beautiful butterfly than it ever was. The addition of a bar in the centre offers a perfect vantage point for people watching: Go early, or late, and you'll always be able to get a place. I was lunching there with a friend, and my preceding meeting finished early, so I took my place at the bar, ordered a very nice glass of a white burgundy, and finished the last few pages of Scoop. Julia Stitch would have approved.

The Ivy 1-5 West Street, London WC2

HANNAH ROTHSCHILD AT THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME

2015-09-19T23:22:00.001+01:00

When John Updike wrote, 'a writer is just a reader turned inside out', he distilled the essence of The Books That Built Me: as an author, how do the books you cherish set an unconscious agenda for the books you write?

All writers have a magic library within them, and all writers are necessarily great readers. One of the great privileges of hosting The Books That Built Me is to read the books an author has chosen and then to try to follow a golden thread back into the books they write, to scratch gently at the connections, to peek inside the writerly mind, part literary detective, part psychologist, delving into their readerly selves.

My guest at Annabel's this week for The Books That Built Me was Hannah Rothschild, documentary film maker, writer and Chair of the National Gallery. Her first novel, The Improbability of Love, is a vivid satire of the art world, where the stakes are so high, people are inevitably compelled to behave in an unbecoming manner. It tells the story of Annie McDee, sweet, single and skint, recovering from the disappointment of a failed relationship, who buys a grimy, unprepossessing painting in a junk shop. Little does she know it's 'The Improbability of Love' a lost masterpiece by Antoine Watteau, one of the greatest painters of the 18th Century. We're drawn immediately into a cut-throat and deeply glamorous world, peopled by exiled oligarchs, billionaire collectors and unscrupulous dealers, the super wealthy and the avaricious, all of whom would do anything to possess the painting. Guests from Tatler drank Bollinger and nibbled on Prestat's Cardamon and Orange milk chocolate, because at Annabel's, one can't survive on literary chat alone.

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT HANNAH ROTHSCHILD

1. Black Beauty Anna Sewell

2. Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford

3. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh

4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy

5. Essays, Hugh Trevor-Roper

6. Just Kids, Patti Smith

The Improbability of Love is part-narrated by the painting itself - which brought us immediately into Black Beauty [1], whose first person equine narrator never strikes one as in any way odd as a child. I can think of a few books narrated by animals (Andrew O'Hagan's Maf the Dog, White Fang etc), but a book narrated by a painting has to be a literary first. The idea that a painting could tell a story if only it could speak came to Hannah when she was quite a small child, being taken to art galleries by her father.

Who hasn't read Black Beauty through buckets of tears? In Love in a Cold Climate [2], Fanny - who Mitford fans first meet in the preceding novel, The Pursuit of Love - is told by the Lord Montdore that she used to weep over the Little Match Girl 'Perfectly untrue,' thinks Fanny, 'Nothing about human beings ever had the power to move me as a child. Black Beauty now - !' Love in a Cold Climate is one of my favourite of Nancy Mitford novels (so satisfying, even on the fiftieth re-read), possibly because of the glorious and improbable love affair that kicks off between grand Lady Montdore and Cedric, the long-dreaded Nova Scotian heir, who turns out to be a beacon of charm and apotheosis of glamour, with his blue goggles ('made for me by Van Cleef and Arpels') and ritzy suits piped in contrasting colours. On re-reading LIACC in the context of TIOL, Cedric reminds me hugely of Barty, equally glamorous. Barty is one of my favourite characters in Hannah's book, not least because he is so redolent of delicious Nicky Haslam, without whom no party is complete, and who was the subject of one of Hannah's television documentaries.

Barty is quite Nicky Haslam, says Hannah, but, whilst the book is rooted in a world with which she is very familiar, it's not a roman a clef - though much like readers of Evelyn Waugh's Scoop [3] wondering whether Lord Copper is based on Lord Beaverbrook or Lord Rothermere, it's almost impossible to read it without trying to match characters to Real People. TIOL is not without its autobiographical elements - Annie has moved to London to try to mend a broken heart as Hannah herself once did, recording her thoughts and feelings in a notebook with a canary yellow cover to which she returned many years later when writing the novel to recapture the sense of being lost, lonely and unloved in her portrait of Annie. Anna Karenina [4] is a book that captures the desperation of love so perfectly one can hardly bear to re-read it. But, as Hannah discovered, some books are entirely different on a later reading, and second time around what came out of Anna Karenina for her was less the central tragedy of Anna's love for Vronsky, but the portrait of a society in the middle of enormous social change.

Hugh Trevor-Roper's essays [5] remind Hannah of her father, himself an extraordinary polymath, who read History under Trevor Roper at Christ's College Oxford. The essays are short, precise, and combine extraordinary erudition with beautiful simplicity - what an astonishing talent to be able to express complexity with perfect economy. Hugh Trevor-Roper's reputation as a great historian of Nazi Germany (amongst many other areas of expertise) lead us to explore the dark secret at the heart of The Improbability of Love, the subject of Nazi looted art. Hannah's family had more artworks stolen by the Nazis than any other - over 5000 individual pieces were taken from the French Rothschilds alone. Our discussion about art, its value, its collectors and its makers brought us to Just Kids [6], Patti Smith's memoir about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Just Kids is important to Hannah because it's a book that she and her daughter connect over, but I suggested if it might not also be because of what Smith has to say about artists and the creative process - Smith, like Hannah, is taken by her parents to an art gallery as a young child, where she is transfixed by the Picassos - 'Secretly, I knew I had been transformed, moved by the revelation that human beings create art, that to be an artists was to see what others could not'. Smith and Mapplethorpe are intensely in love, a devotion that transcends his homosexuality and their relationships with other people, and is the bedrock of their development as artists - a beautiful paradigm of the improbability of love.

The Improbability of Love, Hannah Rothschild, is published by Bloomsbury. RRP £14.99

We drank Bollinger Special Cuvee, the purest expression of Bollinger's house style, and ate Prestat's Cardamom and Orange chocolate

With huge thanks to Annabel's and to Tatler for supporting The Books That Built Me

A Rothschild, Bollinger, Annabel's, Tatler, Prestat chocolate, brilliant novels - I think we unlocked ultimate level luxury on a Tuesday night

THE BOOKS THAT BUILT ME PODCAST - HELEN LEDERER

2015-09-11T19:51:00.002+01:00

I'm still learning the ropes when it comes to recording the Books That Built Me (all tips gratefully received) - I've managed to miss off the introduction here, but fortunately captured Helen's cracking standup that preceded the BTBM itself.
Right, off to do some swotting for tomorrow's Chiswick Book Festival - I'm properly interviewing Helen Lederer at 5.15, not just having a cosy chat about books and I'm really quite terrified...

HELEN LEDERER AT CHISWICK BOOK FESTIVAL & CWIP (Comedy Women in Print)

2015-09-05T21:00:00.001+01:00

In 'Love in a Cold Climate', Nancy Mitford's sharp, witty, glorious satire, Lady Montdore advises Fanny on her trousseau "The important thing, dear,' she said, 'is to have a really good fur coat, I mean a proper, dark one.' To Lady Montdore, fur meant mink; she could imaging no other kind except sable, but that would be specified. 'Not only will it make all the rest of your clothes look better than they are, but you really needn't bother much about anything else as you need never take it off. Above all, don't go wasting money on underclothes, there is nothing stupider - I always borrow Montdore's myself.'
Lady Montdore is one of the great comic creations - appallingly, horribly snobbish, monstrously self-obsessed, she never fails to make me roar with laughter. The character was apparently inspired by Violet Trefusis, about whom I really should know more, since I appropriated her name for this blog.

Anyway, I mention 'Love in a Cold Climate' because I've been trying to compile a list of the books that make me laugh in preparation for interviewing the wonderfully funny Helen Lederer at Chiswick Book Festival next Saturday, where we'll be talking about her career, her latest novel, and comic fiction. It's oddly more difficult than I thought it would be. I love Mitford, of course, and Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm, and the acid satire of Waugh's Vile Bodies and Scoop. Martin Amis in Money is much funnier than Amis Senior's Old Devils. My taste for Terry Pratchett is validated by discovering my literary heroine, A.S.Byatt, is a fan. Diary of a Nobody is funny (and funnier now that I know it inspired another marvellously witty writer, Nina Stibbe - her Man at the Helm is a masterclass in tragicomedy), and Jilly Cooper and E.F Benson and Sue Townsend and Helen Fielding and Malcolm Bradbury and Molesworth (Geoffrey Searle?) and heaps more.

Comic writing seems to be too pleasurable to be garlanded with laurel wreaths, despite its consolations for a reader. Only two comic novels have won the Booker in forty-six years; Kingsley Amis for Old Devils, which I can only think was a kind of 'lifetime achievement award' - because Old Devils is by no means his funniest - and Howard Jacobson for The Finkler Question. There is a literary prize for comic fiction - The Bollinger Wodehouse Prize - but it's the only one of its kind: Howard Jacobson is clearly an incorrigible over-achiever in the comic category - he's added two Bollinger Wodehouse gongs to his Booker....

The Bollinger Wodehouse prize introduced me to Helen Lederer, shortlisted for this year's prize. I quickly cornered her at the shortlist party, buoyed up by a glass of Bollinger, and persuaded her to be my guest at The Books That Built Me, and in getting to know Helen better, I've learned that she's establishing her own prize celebrating women's comic writing; CWIP, or Comedy Women in Print. Having had a long and successful career in comedy herself, performing and writing (and her first novel, Losing It, is very funny indeed, Helen's mission is to showcase female writing talent, fiction and non-fiction, - think Bailey's Prize for comic writing - and to show how wonderfully life-affirming and confidence building and empowering comedy can be for women.

Anyway, we shall talk about all of that, about her novel (and the one she's writing now), about her forthcoming role in the film of Absolutely Fabulous, and much more at The Chiswick Book Festival next Saturday - tickets for the whole day only cost £10. - it would be wonderful to see you there

In the meantime, tell me which novels have made you chortle, or snigger, or split your sides, and why?