James Attlee invites us to savour the long nights of winter – their rare darkness and the too-easily-forgotten light of the moon.
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Dr Sally Bayley.
‘Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea’, so begins Henry James’s novel, A Portrait of A Lady. James’s novel begins with tea and ends in cross-cultural despair: a young American woman, Isabel Archer, running back to a tyrannous husband in Rome. Culturally, socially and personally speaking, Isabel fails to translate herself. She lacks any real ceremony and, in turn, any real dignity; instead she resorts to desperate duty. Her order of being, her personal and cultural choreography, is never her own…
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Dr Sally Bayley.
When I was eight years old my grandmother taught me how to make tea. It has proved to be one of the most vital lessons of my life. Tea, in my household, was radically inclusive. Making it was my first lesson in socialising… In a house swarming with adults and children, you never made tea just for yourself, it was a community affair and took place in the depths of a large dark brown pot whose bottom seemed limitless. I peered down its deep dark shaft and thought of those striking miners I had heard about on the television and wondered if they were striking for more tea breaks as well as better pay…
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A small film, by our very good friends Muir and Osborne. Knitted, filmed, edited and composed by Muir in celebration of their new book Best in Show: Knit Your Own Cat. A worthy pastime if ever there was one.
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Last week we packed our bags and moved to the Wilderness. We arrived on Tuesday, with two vans full of our favourite outdoor things – deckchairs, firebowls, storm lanterns, blankets… – to install ourselves near the lakes of the Cornbury Park Estate, and in the tents of the very first Wilderness Festival. We hefted boxes and carried piles of blankets, attached lanterns to bamboo poles and hung them from trees, arranged deckchairs, put up bunting and washing lines, decorated stages and projection screens, and late at night allowed ourselves a swim in the lake (four girls in matching polka dot swimwear) then warmed ourselves around our very own firebowl…
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Jon Day.
Over the hill, through a gap in the trees, Coniston Water spins itself out into the distance: a blue ribbon of water glinting in the spring sunshine. It isn’t the largest or the deepest of England’s lakes, but it might be the most tragic, and from here it feels like the most mysterious…
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Jon Day.
The London Library has always beguiled readers who love books both as vessels of meaning and as physical objects; readers who love to touch and smell as well as to read. The library has nestled quietly in the north-west corner of St. James’s Square for over 160 years, and its modest façade now hides over a million books. You can measure its holdings in distance rather than number: miles of books, serried ranks of print, line its labyrinthine interior of cast iron floors and solid wooden shelving…
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Travel writer Sara Wheeler on Martha Gellhorn.
Which story, of fiction or non-fiction, has had the most impact on you in your life? Can you tell us a little about it?
I first read Martha Gellhorn when I was eighteen. I chanced on a paperback copy of The Face of War in a second-hand bookshop, and devoured the first thirty pages standing there among the shelves…
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I’ve wanted to learn to knit for a very long time. Over the years I’ve made a good few attempts, asking my mother to remind me how to cast on more times than she can bear. But sadly, I’ve never progressed beyond knitting a single, flat, square piece, made up of one type of stitch and a single colour. And how I regret my lack of persistence. I would so love to be able to pick up a pair of knitting needles and, over a few quiet evenings in front of the telly, or in the local pub, create myself a small, charming, disarmingly perfect, stuffed dog such as these…
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