Newsletter 2024

A round-up of what I've been up to over the last twelve months

It’s been another really busy year – and I’m very excited about some possible new projects in the pipeline for 2025. More of that anon, but in the meantime… Onwards!

As some / most of you probably know, I started a Substack in the middle of the year – some of you will be reading this on it, in fact. It’s called The Broken Compass. Thank you so much to those of you who subscribe, especially if you’re a paying subscriber! Obviously it means the world to me, and it makes different things possible, which is wonderful.

Original pieces on The Broken Compass include ‘The Sense-Haunted Ground' a long essay, broken into three, about landscape and memory in the Battle of Normandy, with particular reference to the lush bocage countryside around Vire, which I knew very well at one point and which holds a big place in my heart.

Then there is ‘Ladders of Escape' exploring the meaning of Joan Miró’s magical Dog Barking at the Moon, a painting I discovered when my mum gave me as a postcard when I was growing up - in some ways, perhaps, the most personal thing she ever gave me.

And this essay about a painting of his wife and her brother by the great Portuguese artist Domingos Sequeira I fell in love with in the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga in Lisbon this year. Honestly, look at it. It’s so thrillingly immediate and she is so alive.

There are also regular book previews and my picks of the best paintings up for auction in London, and I’ve taken the chance to rework some older essays and pieces on, for example, Rudyard Kipling; the Mayerling Incident; Charles M Schulz; the history of English bell ringing; The Midnight Folk; walking the streets of Elizabethan London; and the macabre story of a woman who survived a 17th-century hanging.

I’ve just run my first interview on Substack – with Darren Freebury-Jones about his new book on Shakespeare’s debts and borrowings among his contemporaries. And I have interviews lined up in the next month or two with Helen Castor, Nicola Tallis and Laura Thompson.

I’ve continued to write the Months Past column for History Today – and I passed my 100th piece a bit earlier in the year. (They’re all gathered here ) On the one hand, it’s incredibly demanding in terms of new material. But on the other hand, I feel like I’ve only just begun. There are just so many stories out there! Highlights for me this year have been pieces on Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky on a medieval battle on the frozen Baltic; on a 19th-century Swiss serial killer; on Ovid in exile; and on Little Jack, the boy missionary And I’ve just written one of my favourite pieces yet – number 115, I think - on the pioneering art connoisseur Giovanni Morelli, which will be out in February.

I had a piece in the summer issue of Slightly Foxed about the fantastic Walburga Ehrengarde Helena de Hohenthal, who was the wife of the British ambassador to various European courts in the latter half of the 19th century - most notably that of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in Vienna - and was better known as Lady Paget, although her friends called her Wally.

She wrote numerous volumes of memoirs and reminiscences in her later years, and they are superb: dripping with colour, and not without an acid wit, but offering a fascinating insight into a vanished world of high politics and higher society. She was an extraordinary woman – she had a whole other life as a vegetarian occultist - and I’m knee-deep in plans to write more about her. (I’m not a little in love with her, to be honest!)

I’ve written another essay for Slightly Foxed this year - which sadly won’t see daylight until next year - about one of my favourite poems, Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice. It was an absolute delight to spend so much time in Louis’ company, and I can’t wait for my piece to be out.

I had great fun writing an essay for All About History on Elizabethan piracy exploring both the famous stories we all know a bit about and the wider, context showing how endemic piracy was around England’s shores in the sixteenth century.

I’ve reviewed for a range of titles this year, primarily The Spectator and Engelsberg Ideas, but also History Today, Literary Review, The Telegraph, and New Humanist.

I like doing new things, and I’ve particularly enjoyed reviewing a number of London exhibitions in the latter part of the year.

The Tirzah Garwood retrospective, Beyond Ravilious at the Dulwich Picture Gallery was a spectacular resurrection of an unjustly neglected artist. I absolutely fell in love with it, as is probably apparent from my review. (I was so touched to learn that Ella Ravilious, Tirzah and Eric’s granddaughter, loved what I wrote.)

Medieval Women: In Their Own Words at the British Library was a triumphant exploration of the richness of women’s experience in the Middle Ages.

The Great Mughals at the V&A, likewise, offered a sensually rich tour through the astonishing cultural treasures of, arguably, India’s greatest empire. I thought it was stunning - and, in the end, strangely moving.

Versailles: Science and Splendour at the Science Museum followed the same track in some respects, in that it revealed the language through which an early-modern imperial dynasty sought to articulate its authority - in this case, science and reason. It was thoughtful, nuanced and powerful.

Then there was Six Lives at the National Portrait Gallery, an exhibition dedicated to the six wives of Henry VIII. It had lots of good material but I felt it didn’t really deliver on its potential.

Much praise has been heaped on Helen Castor’s The Eagle and the Hart, a dual biography of Richard II and Henry IV. Comparisons with Shakespeare are inevitable, and not necessarily to Shakespeare’s advantage. It really is a masterpiece of both narrative history and psychological insight, and a brilliantly sustained exposition of how both individuals and systems react to sustained duress. It’s one of my books of the year by a long, long way.

Daisy Dunn’s new book, The Missing Thread, is the other of my books of the year. I’ve long been a great admirer of Dunn’s writing, not just for its its intellectual clarity and nuance, but also for its elegance, poise and life. The Missing Thread superbly revivifies the history of antiquity from Minoan Crete to Boudica’s rebellion by restoring women, known and unknown, to the narrative. The scale is epic but the effect is vivid, intimate and moving. The book is a triumph of research, imagination and empathy.

I reviewed two books about the British Empire: Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day and Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld. To cut to the quick: Parker’s book is a tour-de-force. If you’re going to read one book about the empire, make it his. I’d give Sanghera’s a miss to be honest. Two more disappointments: Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild: People and Animals After 1492 was a much better book, but another mixed bag, but both were better than Diane Darke’s Islamesque, which I thought really poor.

On the other hand I greatly enjoyed two fascinating new books at the intersection of art and faith: The Spiritual Adventure of Henri Matisse: Vence's Chapel of the Rosary by Charles Miller and The Illuminated Window: Stories Across Time by Virginia Chieffo Raguin. The first is a study of the art of Henri Matisse in the last years of his life, with particular reference to the Dominican Chapel he designed in the south of France after the war. I thought the book brought together - elegantly and powerfully - the personal, intellectual and spiritual circumstances surrounding the creation of a project that Matisse himself described as “the fruit of my whole working life”.

Virginia Chieffo Raguin’s book is a study of stained glass and its capacity to encapsulate and perhaps embody narrative. I enjoyed this greatly, although I found the earlier chapters exploring examples of medieval and Renaissance glass the most compelling and revelatory.

I also enjoyed Christopher Beckman’s A Twist in the Tail about anchovies in western European food and culture. (It probably helped that I really like anchovies.)

Michael Gilson’s Behind the Privet Hedge on the social history of gardens in suburbia was in part a surprisingly full-throated defence of both the suburban project and the need for private green spaces. In the context of urban poverty and human needs and aspirations it was, in a way, not a little moving.

I very much liked Max Décharné’s Teddy Boys: Post War Britain and the First Youth Revolution both for its exposition of post-war social history and its empathetic and nuanced account of working class culture and its home-made rebellions.

The Bonzo Dog Band – and especially Neil Innes and Viv Stanshall – meant an immense amount to me growing up. So I leapt at the chance to review Dip My Brain in Joy the bittersweet memoir by Yvonne Innes about her long, happy marriage to Neil. It was lovely, sad and moving - and still raw in its grief. But the man’s big heart shone through.

Heather O’Donoghue’s Beowulf: Poem, Poet and Hero is a superb account of the famously daunting poem in English literary history. It’s probably best approached as a companion to a reading of the poem, but I defy anyone to read this book and not feel compelled to pick up Beowulf itself - whether in Heaney’s magnificent version or, dare I say, the original itself.

The lead review of the summer issue of New Humanist was my take on Jay Owens’ fascinating Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles. It’s a powerful examination of the role of dust in modern society, ranging from Elizabethan London to the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s and beyond. I thought the book had its flaws, but they were far outweighed by its strengths.

I really enjoyed Marjorie Garber’s Shakespeare in Bloomsbury. Garber’s writing about the influence of Shakespeare on Virginia Woolf was, I thought, often profoundly beautiful itself. I was less enthralled by the other members of the Bloomsbury set, although there was sometimes something interesting to be said, but the book is worth the entrance fee for the long, long section of Woolf’s extraordinary intimate engagement with Shakespeare’s works.

At the top of the year, I reviewed Anthony Grafton’s brilliant Magus: The Art of Magic from Faustus to Agrippa, about the great magical figures of the European Renaissance, such as Faustus, Agrippa and Ficino. It’s quite a dense book, but an unquestionably rewarding exploration of the deep thinking about the nature of humanity - and of life itself - that went into their philosophies.

Covering similar ground to an extent was Tabitha Stanmore’s Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic. There was lots to enjoy about Stanmore’s book, and I liked her argument about the centrality of what we call magic to daily life in pre-modern Europe, but I thought it could have done with a little more the intellectual underpinnings of the processes she describes.

Last but not least, I really liked Amy Jeffs’ Saints. The book mixes the fictionalised narratives of about forty saints with brief non-fiction essays and some of Jeffs’ own woodcut illustrations. It follows the same format as her two previous books Storyland and Wild, which explored the myths and histories of pagan and early-medieval Britain respectively. It had its weaknesses, but I enjoyed its heartfelt plea for the rediscovery of Catholic folk mythology and culture.

Poetry-wise, I was so delighted to be commissioned to write something for this anthology from Sidekick Press. Kirsten Irving and Jon Stone who run Sidekick were a dream to work with. They commissioned me after reading a couple of dream poems of mine, ‘The Straw Child’ and ‘Lisa in the Garden in Mendocino'. In the end I wrote a prose poem for them - a new form for me – about a pagan burial discovered beneath an Anglo-Saxon church. I tried to build as many layers of meaning into it as possible, some of which are intended to remain hidden, but still add a kind of mass, I think. It’s called ‘The Girl with the Golden Thread’. (Promo film is here!)

I was also thrilled to have a couple of poems – ‘Ely Cathedral considered as a light farm’ and ‘Listening to the dead’ – in this terrific anthology, Thin Spaces and Sacred Places, edited by Sarah Law. Sarah also published two other poems of mine – ‘The Anchoress’ and ‘The Pomegranate’ – in her Amethyst Review.

I do need to work on a collection, I think…

What else?

It was a huge pleasure to chat to the great Dan Snow about Walter Ralegh and El Dorado for his History Hit podcast.

And it was fun to be interviewed by Holly Nielsen for a piece in the Guardian about playing Age of Empires with my son when he was younger.

Back at the top of the year, I also answered a Q&A from the US poetry website Fevers of the Mind.

On another note, I also edited a fascinating book about the double self, which covered everything from Plotinus and Neo-Platonism to My Little Pony, which I must say was eye-opening! I also consulted on some future titles in related fields. It was a very enjoyable project, so we’ll see what comes of that.

Lots already in motion for 2025, including the aforementioned exciting projects for which I’m keeping everything crossed!

But in the meantime, wishing everyone a happy, healthy and prosperous New Year!