Egg and Dart

Disclaimer 1: I married into the family of the book’s subject, Aelfrida Tillyard (1883-1959). My parents-in-law get a fleeting mention towards the end. As I have this personal connexion, the following observations will focus on those aspects of Aelfrida’s life which have overlapped with my own.

Disclaimer 2: Long before I met any of her other relatives, I must have rubbed shoulders with Aelfrida’s daughter Alethea, as for a few months we attended the same church (St Andrew’s, Old Headington). However, I don’t remember her. I don’t really remember much about the church in those days except its general appearance inside (its character has now been drastically changed by re-ordering and I suspect Alethea would barely recognise it), the over-powerful organ (once Merton College’s, since replaced) and for being the only church I’ve come across which used the BBC Hymn Book.

This is described as a ‘novel biography’ though it does not stray far beyond demonstrable fact. Aelfrida’s life is amply documented, though sometimes not enough for the author: ‘what would one not give for a diary account of [Aelfrida’s meeting with my future parents-in-law after their marriage]’.

After a fairly conventional Cambridge academic childhood (with faint Bloomsbury connections) such as is described in many memoirs and biographies, Aelfrida embarked on a doomed marriage with a half-Greek diplomat. Throughout her life she had a mystical bent; in her youth this led to an involvement with Aleister Crowley, but after a family tragedy she gravitated into the Church of England.

She had an ascetic trait I recognise as a family characteristic, but which in her case expressed itself through religion. At one point she joined a lay community, a form of spiritual life which has now fallen completely out of fashion. Why should it have done so? Perhaps it is because there is now a much greater range of opportunities for women, but maybe also because the degree of self-sacrifice it requires is too much for people these days. There are of course still experiments in communal living, but now they tend to be ecological rather than religious in inspiration. And while there will always be Christian mystics, it is now possible and indeed quite common to have spirituality without being attached to any particular religious group or sect.

I skipped on to what really interested me, Anglo-Catholicism in mid-20th century Cambridge. How did it differ from when I came into this wing of the church in the same place some decades later?

Aelfrida’s route was different from mine, as she didn’t have much to do with the church I joined, Little St Mary’s, attaching herself to St Botolph’s. I sang at the wedding of a friend there, and sang a service or two there with the Chapel choir of my college, Corpus. The choir had a rather chilly welcome, because at that time it was believed in the congregation that Corpus wanted to have St Botolph’s shut down and made into its library extension, and that the choir was presumably being sent round to case the joint. An attempt to visit with the choir of Little St Mary’s was refused by the then Rector. Maybe they just didn’t like guest choirs at St Botolph’s? It always struck me as middle-of-the-road, 1662-friendly Anglicanism, rather than High Church.

I could have done with a family tree (perhaps somewhere in the 1006 pages I missed one) not least to help distinguish the various women in the family whose names begin and end in A: Aelfrida herself, Agatha, Alicia, Alethea, Anatolia and Agneta (not Angela, whom I see quite regularly).

Don’t try this at home. Or rather, don’t try it in Cambridge. The Night Climbers of Cambridge circulated in samizdat form for a while, and a copy in the University Library could be consulted by special permission, but has now been reprinted. It is a guide to how to ascend various buildings in the city by external routes, based on the exploits of a group of climbers in the 1930s and illustrated with photographs.

Detailed instructions on how to achieve various climbs are interspersed with accounts of cat-and-mouse games with College porters and other anecdotes (the footnote to p. 156 is particularly entertaining, even if one can see the punchline coming way in advance). The style parodies that of guidebooks of the day: ‘We go to Trinity, the aristocrat of the college climbing-grounds’.

The pièce de résistance is of course King’s College Chapel. The caption to a photograph of the ascent of a pinnacle ends: ‘With three simultaneous grips for the rest of the way up the climb is safe’. Here I can only quote from Douglas Adams: ‘This must be some strange use of the word safe I wasn’t previously aware of’.

Many a night-climber’s career started by climbing into College after it was locked for the night, but other aspects of life in those days, such as patrolling policemen, seem almost as outdated. A Night Climbers’ Society, with its own tie, still existed around 1990 (I knew the President slightly) but little actual climbing appeared to go on by then.

Did this happen at Oxford too, or was it one of those things like circus skills which Cambridge in particular goes in for? The Oxford equivalent seemed to be navigating mysterious subterranean waterways, and if the Oxford Today letters page is to be believed, at one time most of the men and quite a lot of the women had a go at it.

The characters in Grasshopper also go in for climbing on roofs, though they normally get there from dormer windows, which I expect their Cambridge equivalents would disdain. If you enjoyed King Solomon’s Carpet, you’ll probably enjoy this novel too, set in Maida Vale.

I repeat: these exploits are not to be emulated by the reader. But I’m now going to look at a lot of old buildings in a rather different way.

This chronological study of British architecture from Saxon times on is produced by the National Trust and its dimensions (it’s about 15 cm square) mean it can be slipped into a handbag or large coat pocket when visiting a notable building. I haven’t read it all through and I think that is not the best way to use it; it can be dipped into either for information on a particular building or place (as long as it isn’t Manchester, which seems only to have one building worth mentioning), or for a summary of a particular aspect of British architectural history.

The 320 pages contain generous amounts of densely printed text, copious detailed line drawings by the author, as well as photographs (many of them naturally enough of National Trust properties). The quality of photography is generally good, though the photograph of Great Pulteney Street on p. 205 is too under-exposed to be much use. The focus is on large-scale buildings rather than ordinary vernacular architecture, and architecture is regarded as applying only to structures with a roof and walls (apart from the Forth Bridge). Thus open-sided market halls, whether ancient stone ones or later iron-framed Northern examples, don’t get covered. The first few chapters are largely about churches, the rest mostly about secular buildings. Inevitably there are things that the reviewer would have liked to have read more about: post-mediaeval churches, or Art Nouveau (while there may not be many buildings in this style in Britain, it had a definite influence on architectural detail at the turn of the 20th century).

I am not well placed to find inaccuracies, but I noticed one: the Bathwick church referred to (pp. 207-8) is St. Mary’s not St. John’s. The author may not have realised that the asymmetry of Camden Crescent in Bath was not originally intended, but came about because during construction it became clear that the planned east end would be likely to subside down the hill. The indexing, though detailed, is not well laid out because a lack of indentation makes it hard to tell when entries for one place end and those for the next begin. An index of architectural terms would have been useful.

An online search for this book finds the 2007 imprint described as a revised edition, although my copy says it was first published in the UK in 2007. Was an earlier edition published elsewhere? The insidious influence of television can be seen on the cover, where the name of Ptolemy Dean (who contributed a single-page foreward) appears in larger type than that of the actual author.

This is the book of the Twitter hashtag – a selection of examples of behaviour which is perceived as characteristically British, with some more related discussion about matters such as British weather. I recognised a lot of it – especially the chapter about driving, and other traits such as the recent tendency to whisper at people when asking them to move aside, rather than speak out loud. But much of it seems to reinforce a stereotype which doesn’t reflect reality, or at least only partially.

Throughout there is an assumption that people will do anything rather than speak to someone they don’t know. I think this is a south of England thing. Alongside it is an assumption that people will do anything rather than speak to a work colleague outside work – for example by hiding from them on a bus or train. Really? Perhaps I have been lucky in my workplaces, but when a colleague and I have spotted one another on the way to or from work, we have acknowledged one another, and more often than not sat down together (or walked alongside one another) and chatted about work or other matters for at least part of the journey.

Maybe I am just not very British by temperament. For example, I refuse point blank to drink instant coffee and am not terrified by the prospect of speaking in public. The two things I find most baffling about my fellow citizens are their tolerance for poor quality salted butter, and their love of picnicking in car parks (although I gather the latter characteristic is to be found also among Iranians).

This kind of book of observations about behaviour sometimes becomes a classic (we have an entertaining set of them by Paul Jennings), but I think this one will not age well. There are too many references to current personalities, TV shows and so on which will have been forgotten in a decade’s time. And technology and such matters as the layout of supermarkets are changing so fast that references to them will soon be baffling. So if you’re going to read this, do it while it is still topical!

This is a book about the author’s travels in Italy in search of citrus fruit and its growers. The text is a mixture of botany, history and travel writing, with a sprinkling of recipes both historical and present-day (the former tend to be of the ‘don’t try this at home’ variety, and even the latter can involve things like 95% alcohol!) We learn just how many different fruits are grown in Italy, how they are grown, their part in local economies (sadly not what it was in many cases) and about some particular varieties. The author travelled widely in Italy, though inevitably there is more about the south, including Sicily (where lemons played a part in the rise of the Mafia).

Former limonaia at Villa Lucia, Maderno (Lake Garda). Photo by reviewer, August 2020

I notice that the author is a contributor to magazines, and some of the chapters read as if they may have started as magazine articles, which may explain a certain amount of repetition of information between chapters (for example, details of the three original varieties of citrus fruit). The author’s research has been thorough, though I was puzzled by her insistence that English people think only oranges can be made into marmalade; local shops here sell marmalade made from other fruit, and someone must be buying it!

I was rather sorry that there were no photographs to illustrate, for example, some of the weirdly shaped fruit described, or the layout of groves. But if you love Italy and/or citrus fruit, you will enjoy this.

This large-format book was a present from a Polish student and is essentially a coffee-table guide to the country. The chapters are entitled: Geography; Cities; Churches; Palaces, Castles and Manor Houses; and Nature. It was probably wise not to include one on the history of Poland, although the text of other chapters hints at it: ‘Expansion of [Warsaw] was disrupted by World War II when over 70% of the buildings were destroyed’. Well, it would be.

One of the longer chapters consists of descriptions of major cities and towns, with a couple of photographs of each, showing the best views. It would seem that Gdynia, for example, has little to commend it, but many other places have attractive buildings. And this leads to a drawback with the book. If one were about to visit Poland and wanted some idea of what was worth looking at in the area one was going to, it would be very difficult to locate the appropriate photographs. There is no index or map, and the places are arranged (as far as I can tell) in decreasing order of size. A similar observation applies to the chapter on churches (which includes other places of worship too) and the one on palaces and other secular buildings.

This book was self-published in 1964, and I was given a copy some twenty years later by (I think) the author’s son, when I was on a school trip to Greece. It is a collection of essays on mediæval and modern Greece, which the author delivered as lectures when he was cultural attaché at the Greek embassy in London.

Topics are as follows: the Oriental legends about Alexander, the Chronicle of the Morea, the Chronicle of Leontius Machairas, Cyril Lukaris, Evliya Cheleby, the Phanariots, 19th century Ionian society, memoirs from the Greek War of Independence and 19th-20th century Greek poetry (including that of the author’s father).

Being a diplomat, the author is in his element with the ins and outs of diplomatic intrigue, but the reader who is not well versed in the history of the period might find them hard going. The chapters which deal with literature are more interesting, though the translations can be startling: ‘and, as thou gottest going, oh, marvel!’

The author has a very definite idea of what is good Greek stylistically. Within dimotiki, borrowings from Turkish are acceptable, but those from French are deprecated. I never worked out what was so dreadful about gallicisms – we in England have been at loggerheads with the French for much of our history, but are happy to help ourselves to their words and expressions.

If you come across a second-hand copy and are interested in the subject matter, it’s worth looking at. But don’t pay too much for it – the original owner almost certainly paid nothing!

I bought this thinking this would be an anthology of verse read aloud, with at most brief introductions to each selection, but it’s an audiobook, dating from 2009, with extracts of poetry read to illustrate. What is it an audiobook of? There is a printed version of this text, but it’s clearly a spinoff of the audiobook rather than the other way round. So who is Peter Whitfield and why should one listen to 8 hours of his thoughts on English poetry?

He is otherwise mostly known for a number of popularising books about science in the Elizabethan period. To judge by COPAC, few of his works are to be found in University libraries. He is said to be a poet but I can find no example of his poetry. He has also done Naxos histories of art and science, so not a literature specialist.

I didn’t detect actual inaccuracy in the text (however I did not have a means of checking facts at hand), though there were solecisims (Dryden was described as a ‘doyenne’ of poetry!). But my real problem was the style of the criticism. I am not one for theory-laden jargon, and certainly not in a work intended for the general listener, but this could have been written half a century ago. Witness the flowery prose style laden with stock metaphors and with a limited range of descriptive terms (I lost count of the times I heard ‘sensuous’) and the ubiquity of the biographical fallacy (except for matters of sexuality). We are told of the intense speculation about the identity of the woman addressed in Marvell’s ‘To my coy mistress’ – the possibility that she is a purely literary construct is not considered. Obscurer works are dismissed as ‘of interest only to scholars’ (I couldn’t suppress a wry smile every time I heard this). Whitfield makes considerable effort to demonstrate that Yeats was not a modernist, but do people claim that he was? ‘Indian’ for ‘Native American’ and masculine pronouns for the implied reader also mark the style of an earlier age. I was left feeling that this work drew heavily on early and mid-20th century predecessors. Even New Criticism when described seemed a bit too new for him.

The poems are well read, mostly not by Jacobi, but by actors, with local accents respected. There are fewer towards the end of the audiobook, presumably for copyright reasons. The snippets are rather irritatingly short. Why only two short stanzas of Blake’s ‘London’, rather than all four?

I didn’t learn much about English poetry from this side of the Atlantic, though I was introduced to some Americans, and learnt about others who had been just names. There are a number of short guides to English poetry already in existence and it would have been better to have recorded one of those, rather than commissioning this one. Better still, do what I had originally hoped to find, and simply record an anthology of poems read by top-quality readers, with at most a short introduction to each.

If you come across this book soon after I write this, it’s still useful for another couple of years as it covers all solar and lunar eclipses from 1998 to 2017. Each solar eclipse has a map of its path with details of timings, duration of totality and likelihood of cloud in significant places along its route, and an occasionally jokey description to entice umbraphiles: ‘Here we have another eclipse made for fish.’ ‘if you thought the first solar eclipse [this year] was tough to get to, wait until you see where this one is visible from!’. Lunar eclipses, being more commonplace, have less detail though major ones have maps.

This information is prefaced with introductory chapters about eclipses, what to look for during one, and how to travel to and photograph one. The implied reader is American and possibly not well travelled: ‘Make sure that each piece of luggage has both a destination ticket and an identification tag and that both are clearly visible on the outside’. (Despite this, eclipses are given the same amount of attention, regardless of where on the the planet they occur). Throughout there is a mix of serious, detailed technical information and light-hearted presentation.

Sadly, the internet has probably not made it worthwhile to publish a continuation volume for further years.

• John Wiley and Sons, 1997
• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons; 1 edition (6 Oct. 1997)
• ISBN-10: 0471127957
• ISBN-13: 978-0471127956