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Alfred Stieglitz, I Love You - Joan Lennon

April 4, 2013, 6:00 pm
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They have a strange and difficult allure, old photographs, don't they.  A power.  A poignancy.  As a writer, you want to write - to tell the story - but at the same time you can feel you're being allowed to be part of something that is complete without language.  Already perfect.  

I stumbled across Alfred Stieglitz's work only recently, and I am smitten.  I am also afraid to find out too much about him, in case he turns out to be a creep.  A supremely talented creep with the eye of an angel.  That sort of thing.  Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise - It's not exactly a professional attitude, but in this case, let's just let the images speak for themselves.  Three from the 1890s -     



"The Terminal" (1893)



"Winter – Fifth Avenue" (1893)



"Venetian Canal" (1894) 


And, as a postscript, one more Alfred Stieglitz photograph from the next century - 



"Dirigible" 1910



The man makes me go weak at the knees.  

(Click on the images to see them bigger - it only gets better!)  

Joan's website.
Joan's blog.

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Grand National Memories - Katherine Roberts

April 5, 2013, 6:00 pm
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I have a confession to make. Today I’ll be taking an afternoon off to watch the Grand National, one of Britain’s great sporting traditions. My excuses, if you wish to accept them...

1. I’m horse crazy.
2. I used to work for Venetia Williams, trainer of the 2009 winner, Mon Mome.
3. I won my first bet on Red Rum back in the 1970’s (when I was still underage and had to get my granddad to put the money on for me!)
4. The race is still unpredictable enough to be exciting.

Which is quite a mix of reasons, but I think for most people it's number 4 that makes the Grand National so famous/infamous, depending upon your point of view. Even today with all our carefully-studied form books, safer fences, rules and regulations, the Grand National provides thrills and spills a-plenty. It is still possible (maybe even probable) that a 100-1 outsider will beat the favourite, and that means it’s also possible for someone who can’t tell one end of a horse from another to back a winner.

But how did it all start, and why?

An Irish wager (18th century).
The first steeplechases were run over open fields from one church steeple to the next (hence the name). It all started, apparently, as a wager between two gentlemen in County Cork, who decided to settle the bet by racing their horses across country four miles to the next village. There were few rules, and every obstacle – hedges, ditches, gates, stray sheep – had to be jumped or otherwise climbed over. It was dangerous but must have been very exciting (I don't remember that far back).

an early steeplechase from church to church

The sport quickly caught on. The first recorded steeplechase on a prepared course was run at Bedford in 1810, and the first recognised English National Steeplechase took place on 8th March 1830. This 4-mile race from Bury Orchard in Bedfordshire to the Obelisk in Wrest Park was won by Captain Macdowall on a horse called The Wonder in a time of 16 mins 25 seconds. Not bad, when you consider it can take an hour to drive that distance on a bank holiday!

The First National (1836... maybe)

Becher's Brook, 1890
Lord Sefton laid the foundation stone at Aintree on 7th February 1829, but there is much debate regarding the first official Grand National. Most historians consider the first race to have been run in 1836, when it was won by a horse called The Duke, who won it again the following year 1837. Yet these two early "Grand Nationals" are usually disregarded, because of the belief that they did not actually take place at Aintree. In those days, Becher's Brook was much more formidible than it is today and defined the race.

The War Years (1916–1918)

During the First World War, Aintree Racecourse was taken over by the War Office. To avoid disappointing the racegoing public, the race was moved to Gatwick Racecourse, disused these days and just as well since it is now part of Gatwick Airport. The 1916 race was renamed the Racecourse Association Steeplechase, and the 1917 and 1918 became the War National Steeplechase. They are not usually recognised as Grand Nationals, either.

Last horse standing – Tipperary Tim (1928)

Tipperary Tim started the 1928 Grand National at odds of 100-1. A friend teased his jockey before the race, saying: "You'll only win if all the others fall down!" (I don't remember that year either, but people have said similar things to me in the past). It was a case of famous last words, since 41 of the 42 starters fell during the mist-shrouded, muddy race. Although Billy Barton's jockey managed to remount and complete the race, Tipperary Tim came in first. With only two riders completing the course, this race holds the record for the fewest number of finishers.

“Doing a Devon Loch” - Dick Francis' disappointment (1956)

In 1956 the Queen Mother’s horse, Devon Loch, had cleared the final fence and was leading the field five lengths clear of the second horse. Only yards from what seemed like certain victory, Devon Loch inexplicably half-jumped into the air and collapsed on his belly. Despite efforts by his jockey Dick Francis, he was unable to complete the race. Afterwards, the Queen Mother famously commented: "Oh, that's racing!" and the phrase "to do a Devon Loch" is still sometimes used to describe a last-minute failure to achieve an expected victory. It's the stuff of fiction - as his jockey later proved, when he retired from racing to write his best-selling thrillers. Needless to say, I love those books.

Kindle edition


The horse who had a fence named after him - Foinavon (1967)

When I was a little girl, a melee at the 23rd fence in the 1967 Grand National allowed 100-1 outsider Foinavon to become another surprise winner. A loose horse, which had unseated his rider at the first jump, suddenly veered across the leading group, causing them to stop, refuse, and/or unseat their riders too. Some horses started running in the wrong direction back the way they had come. Foinavon had been lagging 100 yards behind the pack, giving his jockey John Buckingham plenty of time to steer wide of the havoc and make a clean jump of the fence on the outside. Although 17 jockeys remounted and some of them made up considerable ground, none could catch Foinavon before he crossed the finishing line. The 23rd fence (the 7th first time round) is now called  “the Foinavon fence” in his memory.

Red Rum makes me richer (1970’s)

Red Rum is the most successful Grand National horse to date. Originally bought as a yearling in 1966, he passed through various training yards before being bought by trainer Ginger McCain on behalf of one of his owners. Two days later, McCain noticed that Red Rum appeared lame. It turned out his new horse was suffering an inflammatory bone disorder. But McCain had witnessed many lame carthorses recover after being galloped in sea-water, and successfully used this treatment on Red Rum, who went on to win the Grand National three times in 1973, 1974, and 1977 (when he won me my riches - about £2 as I recall). Red Rum finished second in the intervening years 1975 and 1976 and is now buried at Aintree, where his statue also stands, overlooking the course he loved so much.


Red Rum's statue at Aintree


The Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 made it possible for female jockeys to enter the Grand National. The first female jockey to enter the race was Charlotte Brew, who rode the 200-1 outsider Barony Fort in 1977. Sadly she did not finish the race, since her horse refused at the 26th fence. I suppose, being a girl, I should have been rooting for  her... except then Red Rum wouldn't have won.

Safety First (1989) 


After the 1989 Grand National, in which two horses died at Becher's Brook, Aintree finally sucumbed to popular sentiment and modified the course to make it a bit safer. The infamous brook on the landing side of Becher's was filled in, and the incline levelled out although there is still a fearsome drop on the inside of the course. Other fences have been reduced in height, and the entry requirements for the race have been made stricter. The field is now limited to a maximum of 40 horses.

The race that never was (1993)

In 1993, while the race was still under starter's orders, a jockey (think she might have been female, but don't tell anyone) became tangled in the starting tape, which had failed to rise correctly. A false start was declared, but lack of communication between course officials meant that 30 out of the 39 jockeys did not realise this and continued to race. Officials tried to stop the runners further by waving red flags, but many jockeys thought that they were protesters who had invaded the course earlier and ignored them. Seven horses completed the course, including the “winner” Esha Ness (in the second-fastest time ever), ridden by John White and trained by Jenny Pitman – but as the start had been declared false, the result had to be declared void. I can still remember the expression on the winner’s face when he realised this... more stuff of fiction.

A Bomb Scare (1997)

The 1997 Grand National had to be postponed after two coded bomb threats were received from the IRA. I was watching the meeting on TV at the time, terrified there would be an explosion, since my husband was there that year with Venetia’s horses. The course was evacuated, and all cars and coaches were locked in the course grounds leaving 20,000 people without their vehicles for the weekend. With limited accommodation available in the city, local residents opened their doors and took in many of those stranded. My husband slept in his lorry, after stabling the horses nearby. The race was finally run two days later on the Monday.

Up the Girls! (2000 onwards)

In 2009, Mon Mome won at 100-1 for Venetia Williams, only the second female trainer to have a victory in the race since Jenny Pitman. I had got divorced and left the yard by then, but was excited enough to phone my ex-husband and congratulate Venetia's team.

In 2012, Katie Walsh completed the course on Seabass to finish in third place after an exciting race, the best result to date for a female jockey.


I’m writing this ahead of time, so I can’t tell you yet which horse will win in 2013 (if I could, I'd have the mortgage on the beast!). But you can be sure this year’s Grand National winner will touch the hearts of many who do not normally care about horse racing. Will it be another 100-1 shot outsider or the favourite On his Own? Or will Katie Walsh beat her brother Ruby and make it a first for a jockey girl? What a story that would make!

So did you pick a winner this year?


Me and friends playing at being jockey girls in County Sligo, Ireland
My horse racing days might not have turned me into a champion jockey, but they inspired my Alexander the Great novel "I am the Great Horse", since I know what is is like to send a horse you care for into a race (or a battle) praying that he will return unharmed. For those who cannot bear to watch the Grand National, the Kindle edition of "I am the Great Horse" is FREE TODAY AND TOMORROW ONLY from amazon (offer applies midnight to midnight Pacific Time - please check price is zero before downloading).



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Katherine Roberts is an award winning children's author www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Her latest series the Pendragon Legacy about King Arthur's daughter is published by Templar - Book 3 Crown of Dreams is now available in hardcover.

Blog reclusivemuse.blogspot.com
Twitter twitter.com/AuthorKatherine
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How it all began...by Adèle Geras

April 6, 2013, 11:30 pm
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When I was seven years old, in 1951, this is what I was reading. There wasn't much of anything else around at the time. I didn't come to Enid Blyton properly till I was about eight, in North Borneo. While I lived in Nigeria, from 1950 - 1952 or early 1953, I mostly read OUR ISLAND STORY (and I've written about this experience on this blog in the past. Here is the link: http://the-history-girls.blogspot.co.uk/2011/08/blog-post.html) and a book called TALES OF TROY by Andrew Lang. It's not the kind of thing you'd think of giving a seven-year-old to read nowadays but I adored it and could recite long passages from the book off by heart. I read it all the time, eagerly, avidly, and I fell in love from that moment with the story of the Trojan War.

On every single recto page are the words: ULYSSES, SACKER OF CITIES, almost as though this were a kind of subtitle to the legend on the verso pages: TALES OF TROY. This obviously planted something in my mind because I've always taken the side of the Trojans in the war that lasted so many years and that ended with the most famous city destruction of them all, though there have been a few contenders more recently for this dubious honour.

One of the chief attractions of this book is the illustrations. I'm putting up two examples. This one because I used to love declaiming the words that accompany the drawing of the mortally-wounded Paris, throwing himself on Oenone's mercy. I'm going to quote the words I loved so much, just because I still love them. "Lady, despise me not and hate me not, for my pain is more than I can bear. Truly it was by no will of mine that I left you lonely here, for the Fates that no man may escape led me to Helen. Would that I had died in your arms before I saw her face! But now I beseech you in the name of the Gods, and for the memory of our love, that you will have pity on me and heal my hurt and not refuse your grace and let me die here at your feet."

Oenone's expression conveys perfectly what she's feeling: a mixture of still-burning love, pity for a wounded man and a good bit of "I'm not going to be tricked into listening to your blandishments, you bastard!"

The picture of Helen on the walls of Troy, pointing something out to Priam, was my favourite drawing of all. I think it's the dress. I just longed to own one precisely like that and it's still my benchmark for all 'classical' garments.

So this is where my interest in all things classical began. I went on to read Virgil's Aenied Book 2 and then Book 4 while at school. I didn't study Ancient Greek but read translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. I read, as student of French, LA GUERRE DE TROIE N'AURA PAS LIEU by Jean Anouilh. And in the fullness of time I wrote my own novel, TROY, which is the story of five normal teenagers who just happened to have grown up during the time that their city was besieged by Ulysses. And we know who he was, do we not? The Sacker of Cities. It's a story that's endured for thousands of years and every time someone retells it, it lives again. I am proud to have taken my place in a long line of writers who've been inspired by this tale.

P.S. TROY is out of print, but probably findable in a library near you.

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'Boozing with an Old Codger' by Karen Maitland

April 7, 2013, 4:30 pm
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When I was researching medieval falconry, I was struck by how many modern words or expressions have their origins in falconry terms. Boozing, for example, it sounds like modern slang, but iscorruption of bowse or bouse which refers to a falcon drinking excessively (water, of course, in falconry terms).

Callowmeant a bird whose feathers were still growing and was untested on the wing. Fed-up referred to a falcon which had been given a full-ration of food. At which point the bird would lose interest in hunting or doing anything. Haggard meant a bird that was older and captured in mature plumage.  



If you are lucky enough to live in a Mews, you are living in a building in which falconers kept their birds of prey during the moulting period, which could house several hundred birds, because mews comes from the French muer meaning to moult. Other terms, including hoodwink, lure, under the thumb, cadging, gorge, old codger and evenmantelpiece all have their origins in medieval falconry.



That falconry terms have come to be so much part of our language, is a measure of how important it was in medieval times. An afternoon’s entertainment for young girls was to bet on whose merlin could catch the most larks, and the greatest spectacular in medieval times was thought to be the Haut Vol ‘the great flight’, when the quarry bird such as a kite, raven, crane or heron climbed high into the air and the bird of prey tried to attack it from above, resulting in a great aerial battles of life and death.


Nearly everyone in the Middle Ages, rich or poor, would have kept a bird of prey, both for entertainment and for hunting for meat. If you’d gone shopping back then, you wouldn’t have seen people taking their dogs for a walk in the towns, but their falcons or hawks instead. This was because birds of prey were often caught from the wild and released again at the end of the season, so every year, women and men would have been seen walking around the towns with birds on their arms to man or tame them. It was even recommended that women took their birds to church. Can you imagine the noise and mess that created, but I bet they didn’t have trouble with pigeons in the church towers in those days.


 

The nobility even had charters granting their birds of prey certain privileges. The Lord of Sassy was allowed to carry his goshawks into church and could set them to perch on the main altar. The Lords of Chastelas were allowed to take their place among the canons of the Church of Auxerre carrying their hawks on their fists, wearing their swords as well as their surplices and sporting hats covered in feathers. And the treasurer of this church was permitted to assist at Mass while carrying his sparrowhawk on his arm.


 

But it wasn’t only the Europeans who were obsessed with falconry. In the latter half of the thirteenth century, a Mongol Emperor was so passionate about the sport that every year in March he went to Manchuria for the great hunt, taking ten thousand falcons and an equal number of soldiers to guard the hunting birds. He rode out in a pavilion covered with cloth of gold and lined with lion skins, which was borne by four elephants. Inside he kept his twelve favourite gyrfalcons (the royal white falcon) and twelve favourite officers to amuse them. When those on horseback reported the sighting of game he’d open his curtains and cast off the falcons.


Each falcon bore on its leg a tiny silver tablet giving its owner’s mark, and a man known as the ‘guardian of the lost’ would set up his tent on a rise with a banner flying above it so that in the vast camp he could easily be seen. Any owner seeking a lost bird would go to him, and any man finding a lost falcon would take it to the guardian. An early example of a lost property office!



Some people think that the famous Boke of St Albans which lists the birds for each social rank – Eagle for an Emperor… A Merlyon for a lady– was a record of who was permitted to keep each type of falcon. In fact a number of the birds listed were never used in falconry, so it would appear that was written more as a satire comparing the temperaments, symbolism and characteristics of birds of prey to the different classes of people. 


 

While the gyrfalcon was indeed reserved for royalty, largely because one of these rare white falcons could cost as much as a king’s palace, the other laws governing who could keep which bird were more concerned with what a bird hunted rather than the status of the bird itself. So a serf would not have be allowed to keep a bird capable of hunting game animals because as a serf he was forbidden to hunt game and to own such a bird would have been proof he was poaching



One last thought, if you were a royal falconer and were careless enough to lose your master’s valuable bird of prey, the weight of the bird could be cut from your living flesh – makes docking a man’s wages look positively benevolent, doesn’t it?

(Old Codger? - that's a corruption of cadge, the wooden frame on which the falcons perched and which was carried out into the field by a cadger, usually an old man. The cadger used to beg tips from the nobles as payment for this service.)
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March Competition Winners

April 8, 2013, 1:00 pm
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The winners of the March competition are:

Sarah [sic]
Julie
Sarah Nisbet
Kohsamul14
Jean Bull

To get your prize copies of Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, please contact:

Elizabeth Dawson elizabeth.dawson@harpercollins.co.uk

Congratulations!
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American Downton Abbey?

April 8, 2013, 4:23 pm
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authentic firearms are good...

by Caroline Lawrence

Good historical fiction should do five things:

1. Show the world the way it was.
2. Have something to say about that world.
3. Have something to say about our world today.
4. Introduce us to compelling characters.
5. Put it all in a gripping story.

great characters are better
This is a tall order, but the best historical fiction achieves it. This is what I aim for in my Roman Mysteries books and my P.K. Pinkerton series, even though they are for kids.

One of the best historical dramas in recent years was HBO’s Deadwood. It depicted the gold rush town of Deadwood, South Dakota in an eye-watering, jaw-droppingly real way. It touched on themes of order without law, corruption and greed. The story was utterly gripping and the characters – like Calamity Jane (right) – were unforgettable. It is arguably the best Western ever made.

Downton Abbey also meets the criteria. So does Band of Brothers, Boardwalk Empire and even the mega-popular Game of Thrones, where the world is so meticulously depicted that it could almost be historical drama.

Last month I watched three episodes of a new historical drama, this one set a hundred years before Deadwood and two thousand miles east. Courage, New Hampshire takes place in the eponymous fictional town in the year 1770. Its aim is to depict the tumultuous years leading to American Independence. They like to call themselves the "American Downton Abbey".

My husband and I are both historians. We are also purists about period firearms, furniture, food and clothing. We watched the first episode with a running commentary such as "Ooh, a clay pipe!", "Nice brown teeth!", "Excellent wig!", "Pewter!" and "Chickens!"

Authentic dinner in Courage, New Hampshire is not enough to satisfy

But those are the sort of comments you should be making on the second or third viewing. The first viewing should be so riveting that you forget to take notes or even comment. The story should grab you by the scruff of the neck and toss you into a world from which you don’t emerge until the final credits scroll.

Courage, New Hampshire is produced by a team with strong Christian and patriotic values. I don’t mind if film-makers have an agenda, in fact I believe story-tellers need an agenda. But I do mind if it's dull. My biggest quibble with the series is that the storytelling is glacially slow and often incomprehensible.

Here are notes I jotted down as I watched: Nice titles, great music, authentic looking faces, confusing setup, great attention to detail, esp. colors, costumes, artefacts and vocabulary. Can’t understand dialogue. Very slow. Confused. 

Great hats, buttons and bows do not a great period drama make

So kudos to costume designer Mary Johns and set designer Jim Mullally. They get five out of five for the period detail. But a period drama is not all about buttons and bows, authentic though they may be. Director, writer, actor, producer Jim Riley would do well to tighten the editing, add captions to tell us where we are and delegate the writing to someone who will make the stories more profound and exciting.

Courage, New Hampshire... get thee to a script doctor!

(My thanks to the Colony Bay who generously supplied the photos and encouraged me to tell it like I saw it!)


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The last place that bookshops ought to die – Michelle Lovric

April 9, 2013, 10:18 pm
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My second novel, The Floating Book, is about the dawn of printing in Venice. It plays on the idea that publishing a book is like throwing it into the water. The lives of all my characters depend on whether the first edition of Catullus, printed in Venice in 1472, will sink or float.


Of all inventions, I would argue that printing is the one that has most changed humanity, because it is the one that has most influenced the way in which we humans express ourselves. Even the internet still defers to the book, visually and linguistically. We still think in pages, in words juxtaposed with images.


In the course of a few brief years in the middle of the fifteenth century, everything about books changed. Until then, each volume could be created only as quickly as a single man, writing by hand, could compose or copy it. Each book was as different as the handwriting of its scribe and the talent of its illuminator.

With printing, three hundred books could be printed in a day. Three hundred identical copies of each book, day after day.


This transition from slow books to fast ones was recognised for all its wonder and danger. In Venice, the revolutionary idea of printing could have gone either way. Some Venetian oligarchs and many churchmen were against the printing press, believing it to be Lucifer’s latest weapon against the innocence of the ignorant public. But others, such as the book collector Domenico Zorzi, saw mass-manufactured learning as an ingenious boon, akin to the Lord’s multiplication of good things in the loaves and fishes. Not only might writers now feed the minds of the multitudes, but publishers could ensure that this was achieved at a price not beyond the purse of a reasonably prosperous man. The written word was no longer reserved for those with bottomless scrigni or coffers.


On March 18th, 1468, Domenico Zorzi persuaded his peers at the Venetian collegio to allow printing to commence in Venice. And not long afterwards two young German brothers made their way over the Alps from Speyer. Johann and Wendelin Heynrici carried with them the matrixes and iron letters of their trade. By coincidence, and perhaps as an omen, at exactly the same time, there arrived in Venice the entire library of the learned Cardinal Bessarion, destined to make the giddy, beautiful Serenissima a more bookish, serious city. But in those days there was as yet no Marciana library and the books were carried off to the Doge’s Place until a suitable repository could be made for them.

Meanwhile the two brothers from Speyer stoically faced down the byzantine bureaucracy of the Venetian state. They had also to deal with the Venetians’ prejudices against their race – Germans were considered boorish and fit only for making useful objects like weighing scales. It was rumoured that their very skin stank of metal. The brothers had a great deal to prove, and not just their technical skills. 

Printing, of course, would fuse technology with creativity in a way that had never happened before. And in more forms than one: I believe that it is no coincidence that oil painting and printing arrived in Venice at around the same time. Giovanni Bellini himself was a sensale (a kind of tax official or broker) at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, which for me was the logical place for Wendelin and Johann to set up business, in the centre of town and close to the German community’s church of San Bartolomeo on the San Marco side of Rialto. Bellini was brother-in-law to fellow-artist Andrea Mantegna, a great friend of the charismatic scribe Felice Feliciano, who seems to have joined the German brothers in an advisory capacity.

Johann and Wendelin embedded themselves more deeply in their adopted community. They married local girls. Johann’s bride was Paola di Messina, the daughter of the artist thought to have brought the technique of oil painting to Venice. And on September 18th, 1469, the Collegio of Venice conferred upon ‘Johann von Speyer’ the exclusive right to print the letters of Cicero and the Natural History of Pliny ‘in the most beautiful form of lettering’.

And that was the very beginning of Venice’s long reign as the greatest printing centre in Italy.

logo of Aldo Manuzio
Printing stumbled through its first years in the city, beset by accusations of immorality from intemperate priests and rumours of collusion in the forging of currency (the tools of printing being similar to those of minting). Some printers were even executed. The vicious plague of 1478 reduced the number of printers from twenty-two to eleven. But gradually the lot of the stamperie improved. Soon the French typographic genius Nicolas Jenson was competing against the Speyer brothers with his covetable small formats; within twenty years Aldo Manuzio had set up his legendary press. Greek and Hebrew printers gravitated towards the city. Which was the first city to print the Koran in Arabic? Where were the first books produced in Armenian? Where did the first best-sellers appear? Yes, Venice, every time.
The names of the consiliari who signed the original document for Johann von Speyer included Angelus Gradenigo, Bertuccius Contareno, Franciscus Dandolo, Jacobus Maureceno, Angelus Venerio. The names of these men are painted on the ceiling in a small room of the Marciana library where I did the research for The Floating Book, holding in my own hand Johann and Wendelin’s first edition of Catullus, printed in their graceful font and lightly rubricated in red.
Now, nearly 550 years later, the same building shall host another historic appointment. On Friday April 12th, two days from now, the writers of Venice will assemble in the Salone della Libreria Sansoviniana to address a new emergency in the literary life of the city: the haemorrhaging of her once-plentiful and beloved bookshops.


In the last four weeks alone have come the announcements or threats of closures of four more bookshop: addio to the venerable Goldoni, the Capitello, the Laboratorio Blu, the Marco Polo. This is a hard blow for a city that already lost her biggest bookshop, the Mondadori, a couple of years ago (you can read my obituary here) and which has also seen the recent closure of other establishments like the Tarantola and the Fantoni at San Luca, the Rossa at San Pantalon, the Solaris at the Maddalena, the Libreria Patagonia, known for its owner Vittorio’s ability to find even the most unfindable volumes.

a staircase of books at Luigi Frizzo's Acqua Alta bookshop
February 23rd saw the closing of the Ghetto’s Old World Books, run by the poet John Francis Phillimore. The survivors are few and far between, but include the Toletta, the Cafoscariana, Il Mare di Carta. The sellers of second-hand books seem to be surviving better: the Acqua Alta near Santa Maria Formosa, Luigi Frizzo’s wonderland of kitsch, dust and masterpieces, the little shop that used to be his at Miracoli, Filippi in Calle Paradiso, Bertoni, Sogni del Tempo and L’Emiliana.



The announcement of the closure of the Goldoni seems to have been the last straw, or in Italian parlance, the drop that made the vase overflow for Venice’s large and disparate community of writers and illustrators. How can a small bookshop pay a rent of 9000 euro a month? Or perhaps it was the Marco Polo bookshop receiving fines of 1000 euro for displaying a literary event poster without the official Comune stamp that made them think enough was enough? Whatever the final cause, the sense of outrage has now reached critical mass.
More than a hundred Venetian writers and writers about Venice, as well as many illustrators, have been galvanized into an unprecedented ‘class action’ by Alessandro Marzo Magno, author of L'alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo (The Dawn of Books: When Venice Made the World Read.) Among those who have joined the cause are such well-known novelists as Strega Prize winner Tiziano Scarpa, Enrico Palandri, Andrea Molesini, Roberto Ferrucci, Alberto Toso Fei, Renato Pestriniero and Francesco da Mosto. Writers about Venice, including myself, have also been recruited.
The campaign started as a flow of emails between friends, spread to friends of friends and led to a meeting last Tuesday with the Assessori of Commercio e Attività culturali, and other city officials, who have declared themselves ready and willing to participate in the saving of Venice’s bookshops. There was a public meeting on April 4th entitled Venezia al bivio: librerie e non solo: Venice at the crossroads: bookshops and not only bookshops. Even the mayor, Giorgio Orsoni, has said that something must be done. ‘In the city of culture, it is not tolerable that places of culture are thrown out in favour of Chinese mask shops with neon lights. That’s the way the market is going, but a brake needs to be put on it.’ The campaign will culminate in the event this Friday at the Marciana with the launch of Venezia città di lettori– Venice, City of Readers.
The writers have announced that they are going to take a strong and determined position against these losses, which have become untenable. Now Venetian writers are creatures of their time, of this time: they are fully aware that the printed book is suffering everywhere; that bookshops are suffering from online offerings too. But in Venice, the cradle of Italian printing, the loss of the bookshops is less bearable than elsewhere. We are facing, as Tiziano Scarpa puts it, a paradox: a city of culture, without the shops to purvey culture. And Roberto Ferrucci speaks for us all when he says that this is a time when it behoves Venetian writers to stand up for their bookshops. What sense would there be in writing, he asks, if there were no booksellers?
The epidemic of bookshop deaths can also be seen as a metaphor for the inexorable destruction of once-important elements of quotidian life in Venice. It is not only the bookshops that are disappearing in a cityscape now dominated by the economic imperatives of tourism: bars, mask shops and glass shops are the new plague on the built environment. In my own ‘village’ of San Vio, I remember fondly the two butchers (the deaf one and the grumpy one), the fruttivendolo, the latteria, the bakery, the hardware store, the haberdashery. In the last ten years, all have disappeared – and so it is in every zone of Venice, each of which once used to have at least one bookshop, providing vital intellectual and cultural sustenance for a local population as well as employment for educated, book-loving Venetians.

The Marciana, the oldest cultural institution in Venice, has been happy to host Friday’s public meeting of the writers, at which a manifesto will be presented, along with a programme of events designed to breathe life back into the bookshops.


Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
If all goes well, you’ll be reading its contents in the English press, I hope, in the next week.

So I shall not pre-empt them too much. I think they may well be the most interesting and eloquent words uttered about the future of Venice since Filippo Tommaso Marinetti scattered hundreds of copies of his Futurist Manifesto Against a Past-Loving Venice from the Campanile in San Marco in 1910. (The Futurist agenda, however, was quite different from that of the eighty Venetian writers currently pursuing their action against the dumbing-down of their home. Marinetti wanted to ‘murder the moonlight’ and cleanse the ‘putrescent’ Venice, ‘the festering bubo of the past’, of all stultifying sentimentality, recreating her as an industrial modern city, breathing industrial smoke, not dreams. He called for the canals to be drained and filled with the rubble of the ‘leprous’ palaces that lined them, and for gondolas, ‘those rocking chairs for cretins’, to be burnt.)


What can be done to help the bookshops in Venice? Well, without giving too much away, a number of practical measures are under consideration. There are precedents too. In Milan, there is talk of devoting some ‘sacred spaces’ in the public realm to high-quality bookshops, with controlled rents. This has already been done in Paris. Could similar spaces be found in Venice by the three institutions with the biggest property holdings: IRE, the Curia and the Comune itself? Venetian bookshops might be considered cultural rather than commercial operations, with appropriate financial help and reduced rates. Could there be stronger relationships between the bookshops and the museums?


And the writers, in the meantime, will seek ways to raise public awareness about the precious literary sustenance they are in danger of losing. Flash mobs, blacked-out bookshop windows, public readings and other events have been suggested. And Friday’s manifesto itself will be a lasting witness to the passion of Venetian writers for their trade and for their history.


If you would like to sign up to the campaign against the closures of bookshops in Venice, you can join the Venice, City of Readers Facebook group. Here is the link


Notice of the meeting


Robin Saika has posted a new translation of Marinetti’s Contro Venezia Passatistahere


Michelle Lovric’s website


Michelle Lovric’s new novel for young readers, The Fate in the Box– a dark tale of 18th-century Venice– is published on May 2nd by Orion Children’s Books.

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Now You See It, Now You Don't, by Laurie Graham

April 10, 2013, 5:00 pm
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A theatrical theme seems appropriate for this post. My London debut as a dramatist opens on April 23rd at the Baron’s Court Theatre. The Dress Circle, adapted as a one-woman show and starring Sian Hawthorn, is being performed in support of Leukaemia UK. To celebrate I bring you a few theatrical oddities.


I’ve always had a thing for theatres and in particular for backstage, where illusions are created. I love wig rooms and fly towers and the grotty stairs and corridors that link different parts of the theatre in a most disorienting way. Did you know, for instance, that London's Albery and Wyndham’s Theatres have just one shared stage door? It leads directly into the Albery Theatre so cast members for Wyndham’s have to cross St Martin’s Court by a covered footbridge. I’m told too that access from the Garrick stage door into the actual theatre is via an underground passage, though I’ve never seen it for myself.


The nuts and bolts of theatre fascinate me, especially under the stage. This is where the trap room is located, or Hell, as those in the business call it. Sometimes a play calls for figures to appear or disappear, as if by magic. Traps, or openings in the stage floor or wall are the way it’s done, and the trap room houses the machinery that makes it possible. The trap room also tends to get used as a dumping ground for junk, and as a crossover when actors need to get from one set of wings to another without being seen. In some theatres they’re liable to get their feet damp. In the Strand Theatre the trap room is at water table level, and at the Victoria Palace, when it was necessary to enlarge and deepen the trap room to accommodate the lifting machinery for Billy Elliott, there was an unforeseen hold-up. The required excavations were likely to encroach on the royal sewers so permission had to be obtained from Buckingham Palace. It was granted.

Meanwhile, back in the trap room… The simplest kind of traps are the Grave Trap and the Cauldron Trap. A section of the floor slides to one side to allow an actor or a piece of equipment like the witches’ cauldron in Macbeth to slowly descend or ascend by hydraulic lift. For something faster and more dramatic a Star Trap is the thing.   




A small moveable platform is positioned directly beneath the trap, lowered slightly, and then the brake applied. The actor stands on the platform, the brake is released, he goes shooting up through the triangular sprung flaps and leaps smartly clear of the trap before it closes. The star trap isn’t for slowcoaches and even for the nimble they can be dangerous. The great Joseph Grimaldi was once making an entrance through a trap when the counterweight rope snapped and he fell back into the trap room badly bruised. But the show went on. 


The Vampire Trap works on sprung flaps too, but usually behind a scenery flat rather than beneath the stage floor. When it works well it can give the illusion of a figure appearing or disappearing through a wall. A bit of theatrical fog helps. But my favourite of all is the Corsican Trap, also known as a ghost glide. It was created in the 1850s for a stage adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ novella The Corsican Brothers and is the means of making a figure appear to rise and float across a stage.


The mechanism (and you can see here a great demonstration of a Corsican trap at work, courtesy of the Gaiety Theatre, Douglas, Isle of Man)  is as follows. The actor stands in the trap room on a small platform and is then hauled up a rising track while a section of the stage slides out of the way rather like a rolltop desk. The sliding section is called a scruto. A delicious word but try getting away with it in a game of Scrabble. Sometimes the scruto is overlaid with bristles that fall back in place after the ghost has floated past and give the illusion that there is no hole in the floor, nor ever was.


All very quaint in these days of computer-generated effects, but there lies half the charm of live theatre.


There will be no floating ghosts in my adaptation of The Dress Circle, but I’ll be lurking backstage throughout the week-long run. If you’re a follower of the History Girls, do drop by and say hello.

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When words are not enough... by H.M. Castor

April 11, 2013, 5:30 pm
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Illustration from the Codex Manesse (a medieval songbook), c.1304-40

[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons


The large measure of the basse dance must begin and proceed with a reverence, then with a bransle, then with two simple steps and with one double, then with two simple steps as before, and then with a riprise and a bransle.


(From S'ensuyvent Plusieurs Basses Dances Tant Communes Que Incommunes, a treatise on the Burgundian style of basse dance published by Jacques Moderne in 1532/33. Translation by Geoffrey Mathias for an article in Vol. 2 of the ‘Letter of Dance’.)



The 15th-16thcentury Burgundian dance described in the text above would most probably be pretty straightforward to pick up if someone showedyou how to do it. Unfortunately, of course, no one from that time has been able to hang around long enough to provide the demonstration for us, and the artwork of the period doesn’t, sadly, include step-by-step sequences. Terms that were obvious in their meaning to the writer are no longer so for us, and as for the details of bearing and style, the use of hands and head, etc. – well, as you can gather, frequently no attempt whatever was made to describe them. Although wonderful detailed research is now carried out by dance reconstruction experts, and fascinating approximations are achieved, the fact remains that fully accurate reconstructions of movement are impossible to create from instructions that were, in essence, just an aide-memoire for an audience already well-tutored in the type of dance described.


Words, after all, are not the medium through which dance is taught. Dance teachers do a lot of talking, of course – clarifying, explaining, giving musical counts and corrections and pointing out features of movements they are demonstrating – but their principal method of instruction in the first instance is to show the pupil what is required.


Click here, and you’ll see a photograph of the choreographer Christopher Wheeldon in rehearsal with the San Francisco Ballet. If, instead of standing as shown in the photo, he’d said to the dancers: I want you to stand on your right leg facing the left diagonal but with your torso turned to the front, your left leg raised in attitude, your supporting knee bent, your arms raised parallel to one another, elbows bent at approximately right angles but with your forearms sloping a little upwards from your shoulders, your hands relaxed, just above head height… the dancers would, I think, have spent considerable time struggling to follow the instructions – or would’ve fallen asleep. Instead, he can simply demonstrate and say: “Do this.”


That’s fine when Wheeldon – or any individual choreographer or teacher – is present. But what if he or she isn’t there? Indeed what if the crucial person is, not merely on the other side of the world teaching his/her ballet to other dancers, but gone more permanently: what if s/he is dead? How can dance survive, be it a Burgundian court dance or a full-length theatrical performance, when writing it down in words is either inadequate or incredibly laboured (or both)? Can it be captured and preserved in any other way?


Before film and videotape came on the scene (as well as afterwards – but more of that later), the answer was sought through notation: the use of symbols, rather than words (just as symbols are used in musical notation). Indeed, over several centuries, many different attempts were made to create systems of notation for dance. Although codes using letter abbreviations go back at least as far as the 15thcentury, the first known attempt at creating a fuller system of symbols came when Choreography, or the Art of Describing Dance was published in Paris in 1700, with Raoul Feuillet credited as the author, although (as my Encyclopedia of Dance and Ballet tells me) the credit almost certainly shouldhave gone instead to the dancer and choreographer Pierre Beauchamp.



An example of Beauchamp-Feuillet notation from Orchesography or the Art of Dancing ... an Exact and Just Translation from the French of Monsieur Feuillet, by John Weaver, Dancing Master. London, c. 1721. 
by baldwinn [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons


The Beauchamp-Feuillet system showed the paths the dancers should trace across the floor, and onto those path-lines were added symbols that indicated, for example, the direction of a step, or a turn, or a beaten step. A significant number of people must have learned to read this notation, because I understand that it was widely used throughout Europe during the following century, especially to record social dances popular among the wealthier classes. After the French Revolution, however, it fell out of use.


Systems based on stick figures – an obvious tactic! – were developed during the 19th century in France by the dancer, choreographer and musician Arthur Saint-Léon, and in Ukraine by a dancing master called Friedrich Albert Zorn. Here is an example of Zorn’s system:




An example of Friedrich Zorn's system of notation
by Huster at fr.wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], 
from Wikimedia Commons



Even the untutored eye can see that there’s a fair amount of detail here – more than you’d get, say, from the footprint dance instructionsbeloved of many 20th century ballroom dance manuals – but still, the system is crude, and relies on the reader knowing a great deal about the required style without being told. We are still in the realms of the aide-memoire, albeit a sophisticated version – and, indeed, if the notation was only ever intended to be read by contemporaries in the know (dancing masters familiar with the dance fashions of the day, for example), there was no need to go further. The loss of detail is only regretted now, by anyone who is interested in the history of dance – but the notator of the time was not creating the score for us.


Within the world of ballet, however, the requirements around preservation and communication have become profoundly different. Maintaining the traditional versions of the classics – e.g. Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, Giselle or The Nutcracker– is deemed very important, as is giving newer works longevity. Until well into the twentieth century, most ballets survived only by being handed down from one generation of dancers to another. Although this is hugely valuable (and today’s dancers always seek, if possible, coaching from dancers who have previously performed a great role), memory is not perfect, steps inevitably develop personal embellishments or simplifications… and so things can and do morph on the way, rather like a game of what was known in my childhood (is it still?) as ‘Chinese Whispers’. And therefore, while we have the texts of plays from the 19thcentury and the scores of operas, we cannot truly say with confidence at so many generations’ remove that we have anything more than an approximation of the ballets.


Some of the classic productions were brought out of Russia in 1918, however, by Nicholas Sergeyev, thanks to a system of notation developed in St Petersburg by dancer Vladimir Stepanov (and published in his 1892 book Alphabet of Movements of the Human Body). Sergeyev used his precious notation notebooks to stage the same ballets for Ninette de Valois’s Sadler’s Wells company in the 1930s. Three decades later there was confirmation of the accuracy of the notation (at least when working in conjunction with Sergeyev’s memory!), for when the Royal Ballet took its production of Sleeping Beauty to Leningrad in 1961, it was recognized by Russian audiences immediately.



 Extract from La Bayadère, choreography by Marius Petipa – Stepanov notation, c. 1900
by Mrlopez2681 (commons) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

But by that year – 1961 – two newer systems of notation had already begun to transform the way that ballets were recorded in the West and had made possible at last the preservation of works in detail, with the choreographer’s original intentions faithfully recorded even as the work was being created in the rehearsal studio. In the 1920s the Hungarian Rudolf von Laban developed a system that was to become known as Labanotation. And in the 1940s and '50s, Rudolf and Joan Benesh, a mathematician and Sadler’s Wells dancer respectively, together developed Benesh Movement Notation. Nowadays, as many dance companies as can afford it have a notator on the payroll. The Royal Ballet, for example, has been using the Benesh system since the 1950s. (And after training as a Benesh notator myself some years ago, I worked with them in that for capacity for three years.)



An example of Labanotation
by Huster (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Labanotation, as you can see above, is written on a vertical stave. Benesh, on the other hand, is written on a normal musical stave, in which the bar lines correspond to the bar lines in the musical score.



Benesh Movement Notation 
copyright Rudolf Benesh, London 1955



Each system has its advocates, of course, but unfortunately I cannot go into any detail about Labanotation because I am not trained in it. I can say, however, that the period I spent learning and working with the language of Benesh Notation was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life. It is a vastly flexible and subtle language, capable of recording all forms of human movement from the grandest classical jeté to the smallest wiggling of a finger. It can record any number of dancers on stage together, and their relation to one another as well as their individual movements. Equally, it could record the posture you are sitting (or standing or lying) in as you read this article.

Sir Kenneth MacMillan - one of the greatest choreographers of the 20th century - was a fan of Benesh Notation, and worked closely with a notator, Monica Parker, for many years. He said: "I am amazed when ballets are recreated without my being there. There it is in front of me from a piece of paper. My original intention of movement is absolutely caught every time by Benesh Notation."

But why – you might say – don’t ballet companies just video their work? The answer is that all companies – The Royal Ballet included – use video as well as notation. The two form a useful partnership. But trying to learn an entire ballet from a video would be akin to trying to learn a symphony by listening to a recording. Not only would it be a monumentally slow task, but you would have to guess at the counts, trust that no one made a mistake on the day of filming, and you would be unable to distinguish reliably between choreographed detail and the interpretive style of an individual dancer. Not to mention the fact that, with a full stage or studio, it would be difficult for the camera to catch every detail of each person’s movement. A notation score, however, contains all this information; former director of The Royal Ballet (and great dancer) Sir Anthony Dowell has said that the use of BMN "cuts down the rehearsal time by half".


That doesn’t happen, however, by handing the dancers a sheet – or a heavy file – of notation. Most dancers can read little if any notation, and the notator can easily feel rather like a medieval scribe: the only person around who can understand the mysterious scribbles on the page! Instead the notator’s job – if a work is being recreated from a notation score – is to learn everyone’s steps and teach them by showing them. Whatever the developments in notation methods, the importance of showing above telling in dance instruction has not changed.


If you want to see a notator in action (teaching, rather than writing notation), click here for an example of a rehearsal taken by the Royal Ballet’s Principal Notator, the hugely knowledgeable and utterly fantastic Grant Coyle, working alongside Dame Monica Mason in coaching the dancer Marianela Nunez. Note how Grant focuses minutely on the counting and movements, how Dame Monica consults him on details – and spot his notation score, lying open on the music stand beside him!




The international centre for Benesh Movement Notation is the Benesh Institute in London. For more information, click here.

H.M. Castor has written several books about ballet, but rather more about history. Her latest, VIII, is a novel about Henry VIII, and is published by Templar in the UK, Penguin in Australia, and will be published by Simon & Schuster in the US later this year.

H.M. Castor's website is here.


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DOMITIAN: A MUCH MIS-UNDERSTOOD HUMAN BEING AND EMPEROR, BY MC (Manda) SCOTT

April 12, 2013, 3:33 pm
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One of the joys of writing historical fiction, as opposed to historical ‘fact’ for academia is the freedom to engage with the personalities of the people I study.  I can read between the lines and I can infer what seems to me obvious but may fly in the face of academically accepted ‘Truth.’ 
I am studying Jeanne d’Arc just now and have had several historians offer to help as long as I don’t cite them in the acknowledgements for fear of annihilating their professional credicibility: it’s an accepted truth that she was a peasant girl who had visions of Saints and whose faith enabled her to undertake miraculous feats of arms – and this despite the fact that she didn’t speak of saints until the third day of her trial when she was being threatened with torture if she didn’t (she spoke of ‘my father in heaven’ and ‘messire’ which is what a squire called the knight he served, but never of saints).  It also leaves aside the fact that it doesn’t matter how much faith you have, faith by its nature does not let one mount a war horse in full armour and couch a lance in battle: that takes decades of training.
But that’s for another post, a year from now, very likely, when I can go into a lot more detail of who and why and how the woman who called herself Jeanne achieved all that she did.
Today I want to look at another much –spun character from history; this time, one who has been demonized rather than canonized and whereas Domitian was clearly a hard-tempered emperor and more than likely paranoid, it is also the true that in the case of Emperors, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Born into virtual poverty, at least by senatorial standards, Domitian was the second son of a second son. His father, Vespasian, was the son of a ‘tax-farmer’ and mule seller who only entered the senate on the urgings of his mother and older brother; there’s every indication that he’d have been very happy as a military strategist and has no love of politics.  But politics and the army ran hand in hand in the Empire and to be a general, one had also to be a senator; which is one of the several reasons why some of Rome’s legions were quite so badly led (the Twelfth, for instance, was landed with a series of exceptionally bad commanders which largely led to its appellation as the ‘unlucky Twelfth’)
Domitian: photo from Wikimedia Commons
What Vespasian lacked in political ambition, he made up for in his martial skills and he was well on the way to conquering Judaea when Vitellius, third of the emperors to hold the throne in the Year of Four made the mistake of sending an assassin out to eradicate his supposed opponent; and thus turned Vespasian into that which he most feared. 
The resulting civil war tore Rome apart, but Vespasian and his glorious, supremely attractive elder son, Titus, kept out of the way in Alexandria while their legions gained them the throne.  Domitian, by contrast, remained in Rome the whole time, which can, I think, go a long way to explaining what he became when he finally inherited the throne for himself.
Domitian was not inclined to war.  He was not particularly inclined to politics but being second son of the Emperor made him de facto a Senator and he took a consulship when his father died and Titus, the glorious brother gained the throne.
Domitian’s mother died in his youth and he was raised and cared for by Caenis, the freedomwoman who was Vespasian’s life partner and love.  Together, they ended up caught in the Temple to the three gods (Jupiter, Juno and Minerva) on the heights of the Capitoline, and together they fled when it was burned to the ground by Vitellius’ forces.  They spent a night hiding in a cellar then escaped from Rome disguised as priests of Isis – they wore papier mache dog’s heads designed to make them look like Anubis, the dog-headed god, and they carried some of the wealth of Isis out of the city into the suburbs on the safer south side of the city as Caecina’s pro-Flavian troops lined up ready to assault their brethren inside.  He hid out in the house of a school friend and then returned at the end of Saturnalia, when the civil war had reached its bloody conclusion, to hold the throne in the name of his father.
Colosseum: begun by Vespasian, completed by Domitian.
Image from Wikimedia Commons
He didn’t rule, then, though: the general Mucianus arrives smartly on the heels of victory and took over. Ruling through Domitian, he swiftly disposed of anyone who might prove problematic to Vespasian when he finally reached Rome from Alexandria.  Mucianus was effective, but ruthless – a scion of the Piso family who seemed as if he might make a tentative claim for damages or preferment was taken on a chariot ride forty miles out of the city and required to kill himself – we can only imagine under what kinds of threats.  His death quieted a lot of the other naysayers who were suggesting that a second son of such lowly background might not make the perfect Emperor. Others were palmed off with positions in the military which kept them quiet and a long way from Rome.
So Domitian had an early schooling in the kinds of decisions necessary to keep a throne stable.  On top of that, we know that by the time of the year of the four Emperors, he had grown into a young man whose main hobby was the collection of dead flies pinned to a board, who went to bed at six o’clock out of preference and didn’t particularly like socializing.  He was brusque and often said what he thought, which was a novelty in the upper circles of Roman society. 
He was, in short, rather far along the spectrum of behaviour we would consider to be Asberger’s syndrome.  This doesn’t stop him from being brilliant: Einstein, Michelangelo and Marie Curie are all thought to have had Asberger’s and each in his/her own way made a profound impression on the world.  It might also go some way to explaining why Domitian made such a good executive officer. His father took over an Empire that was in economic melt down after the depradations of Nero and the chaos of Vitellius.  In his ten year reign, went a long way to balancing the books, but it took Domitian to take the exchequer into the black – by dint of devaluing the coins and reducing their silver content, but also by creating a massive building programme, courtesy of the treasury, which has to count as one of the first obvious acts of Keynsian economics every practiced.
He spent money on wars: Agricola moved up into the north of Britain and fought the battle of Mons Graupius against the forces of Calgacus, leading to Tacitus infamous ‘speech of Calgacus’ in which he says of Rome, ‘They wrought a desolation and called it peace.’ (we could say pretty much the same now of Margaret Thatcher).  He extended the empire into Dacia (current day Romania and Moldovia, with a few other bits of Balkan territories added in) and made secure the boundaries in ways they had not been with his predecessors.
Above all, he endeavoured to become a guardian of the public morals, which given his own bisexuality was an interesting piece of psychodrama.
What he didn’t do, was to make friends with the Senate, so that when he was finally slaughtered by his own (rightly paranoid) courtiers, those who wrote the histories were free to treat him as a lunatic and a despot when in fact, his greatest crime had been to over-ride the sensibilities of the Senate. Writing 'Rome: The Art of War' was intended as an exploration of the Year of the Four Emperors.  What I had not expected was that I would strive to understand the mind and thinking of the young man who was destined to sit on the throne twice: before his father's return from Alexandria and again after his brother's death.  The end result was - as is always the case - very different to my imagining, but far more nuanced than some of the histories would have us believe. 
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The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2013 by Elizabeth Laird

April 13, 2013, 4:01 pm
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Sir Walter Scott

Stop the presses! News news news!


The longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2013 is completed, and the shortlist will be announced on Thursday 18th April.

Why doesn't the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction make more waves?  It should be front page literary news with spangly stars on. It should be avidly followed by anyone who loves historical fiction, and should cause flutters in the heart of every writer of the genre. It was founded in 2009 by the Duke and Duchess of Buccleuch, who are kinsmen of Sir Walter Scott and keen supporters of his legacy and of the arts in general. With a whopping £25,000 pounds going to the winner, the Walter Scott Prize is one of the richest literary awards in Britain. Past winners are Hilary Mantel for Wolf Hall (2010), Andrea Levy for The Long Song (2011), and Sebastian Barry for On Canaan's Side (2012).



So what makes a book eligible for this award? The Walter Scott Prize has borrowed Walter Scott's own definition of historical fiction: the majority of the events described must have taken place at least 60 years ago. Books must have been first published in the UK, Ireland or the Commonwealth in the preceding year. The judges look for originality and innovation, good writing, and the ability of the book to shed light on the present as well as the past.


 It's easy to be cynical about literary awards, and having been shortlisted for many, won a few and judged several (including the Walter Scott Prize), I know that a good dollop of luck is as necessary as anything else. There are many shoals and weirs to be navigated before the winning book makes it into harbour. The first hurdle is to get the publisher to actually submit the book. This is surprisingly difficult. Some publishers are smart about this, others irredeemably dozy. The judges can and do call in books which publishers don't get around to submitting, but even then a publisher may take an unconscionably long time, or even, in some infuriating cases, refuse to let a book go forward at all.


Reaching the long list is the next goal. In the case of the Walter Scott Prize, several knowledgeable and enthusiastic sifters read through the entries and put forward the ones they think deserve to get through. The books are then circulated to the judges, whose postmen stagger up garden paths during January and February, their shoulders drooping under their book-laden bags.


The meeting to decide on the shortlist is always a humdinger of literary argument. Anyone who belongs to a book group will know how many radically different views a single book can evoke. The judges for the award this year, chaired by Alistair Moffat, are Kirsty Wark, Professor Louise Richardson (Principal of St Andrews University), Jonathan Tweedie of the sponsor Brewin Dolphin, the writer Elizabeth Buccleuch, and myself.


The award is ceremonially announced every year at the Borders Book Festival in Melrose. This takes place in the gardens of Harmony House, an elegant Georgian Mansion which is a stone's throw from the abbey and a few minutes' walk from the centre of Melrose. If you've never been to Melrose, or indeed to the Borders, you've missed out on one of the loveliest parts of Britain. There's a delightful intimacy about the Borders Book Festival, which is surely one of the most civilised annual events in the literary calendar. If you haven't booked up to go already, earmark the dates in your diary: 13th to 16th June. Check the website for the programme at www.bordersbookfestival.org. You really won't regret it.


 

And here's the long list for 2013:


TOBY’S ROOM Pat Barker

BEAUTIFUL LIES Clare Clark

DAUGHTERS OF MARS Thomas Keneally

BRING UP THE BODIES Hilary Mantel

THE GIRL WHO FELL FROM THE SKY Simon Mawer

THE STREETS Anthony Quinn

AN HONOURABLE MAN Gillian Slovo

THE LIGHT BETWEEN THE OCEANS M L Stedman

THE GARDEN OF EVENING MISTS Tan Twan English

MERIVEL Rose Tremain

POISON TIDE Andrew Williams

THE POTTER’S HAND A. N. Wilson


Toby's Room Beautiful Lies  
 The Girl Who Fell from the Sky cover The Streets  
An Honourable Man The Light Between Oceans The Garden of Evening Mists    
 Merivel: A Man of His Time The Poison Tide The Potter's Hand 
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A Key to Smuggling Terminology

April 14, 2013, 5:00 pm
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by Marie-Louise Jensen

Like every area of life, the illicit trade of smuggling has its own vocabulary. I think it's more colourful than most.
Firstly the smugglers had euphemisms for themselves. They were not smugglers, they were Free Traders. Or else Gentlemen of the Night. (As opposed to Gentlemen of the Road who were highwaymen). The term 'gentlemen' is naturally very loose here, as any cursory study of the brutality of the Hampshire smuggling gangs will show.
Then there were specialised roles within smuggling. Wool smugglers were traditionally known as owlers. There's some dispute about the origin of the word. Flaskers specialised in smuggling liquor. The smugglers in charge of the beach and the land-based network were Landers and Tubmen.
The terms for the customs and excise officers are even more varied, naturally. They were known as Preventers, Preventy men, Preventives, Philistines, Watersharks, Landsharks, Pickaroons, Gobloos, Gaugers, Shingle Pickers and even Bluebottles. Clearly, the King's Men were much loved...

The cargo of a smuggling ship was a crop, particularly when it was sunk at sea for later collection. Such contraband was then also known as laggan. Brandy which had been left sunk too long and had spoiled was stinkibus.
Smuggling vessels and smugglers were not searched, they were rummaged. And the smuggled goods also had nicknames; gin was Hollands or Genevars while brandy was Cousin Jacky.
Liquor was smuggled in kegs, which were barrels roped in pairs and carried one in front and one on your back, or ankers which were larger and would need to loaded onto carts.
The captain of the smuggling vessel who could navigate in the dark with incredible accuracy to pre-arranged drop-off points was a spotsman. And (my favourite) the blue flash from a pistol, loaded with powder but not shot, which guided the ships into shore was a flink. Though a spout lantern (which showed light only out to sea) was used once signalling ships from land was made illegal.
Right, now you know the lingo, you are ready to begin free trading.
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Queen's Gambit, by Elizabeth Fremantle: reviewed by Sue Purkiss

April 15, 2013, 6:00 pm
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'Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived...' So goes the old mnemonic about Henry V111's unfortunate wives. The first, of course, was Katherine of Aragon. Then came Ann Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Ann of Cleeves, Catherine Howard, and finally Katherine Parr - the subject of Queen's Gambit.

There are zillions of books about the first Katherine and her successor, Ann, and pale Jane flits through a number - but I can't think of many where the last Katherine features. And where she does appear, she is usually in the background: the woman whose husband flirted - and possibly did more - with the young Princess Elizabeth. So she seems a passive, shadowy character, chosen by the king to be the wife of his declining years, someone to whom things happen - not much of a heroine, then.

But Elizabeth Fremantle reclaims her. In this book, Katherine becomes a real character, and what a delightful one she turns out to be! She is intelligent, lively, beautiful, kind, loyal, brave - why wouldn't Henry want her for his wife, after poor, silly Catherine Howard? (Now, who will write the book to reclaim her? How could anyone be so silly as to think she could get away with cheating on Henry?)

When we first meet her, Katherine's husband, John Latymer, is on his deathbed and in terrible pain. Katherine - Kit - at thirty one much younger than her husband, is skilled at healing and John begs her to give him enough of the draft she has prepared to ease his pain to finish it. She is fearful; such a thing would be against the command of God and would imperil both their souls; but she loves him and so she does as he asks.

Soon after his death, she and Latymer's daughter, Meg, are summoned to court by the Princess Mary. Neither wants to go. Meg is fearful and painfully self-conscious; she has never recovered from an ordeal both of them went through several years earlier when they were held captive by rebels. She clings to Katherine, and to their servant, Dot, through whose eyes the story is partly told. Katherine, though, finds that the court has unexpected consolations - particularly in the very attractive shape of Thomas Seymour. Sensible Kit finds that she has fallen hopelessly in love. Unfortunately, however, the King's eye has fallen on her - and she knows as well as anyone that if he wants her, he will have her.

Normally in any litany of Henry's wives, Katherine's reign is seen as uneventful and calm, especially compared to those of his previous queens. But Fremantle suggests that this was not the case. Due to her unwavering support of the reformed religion - and to her continuing passion for Thomas Seymour - Katherine is in fact fortunate that Henry dies when he does.. The author portrays very clearly the treacherous politics of the court - and the terrifying unpredictability of Henry's moods. For all her gifts of diplomacy and persuasion, Katherine will find outliving Henry an almost impossible challenge.

Fremantle writes really beautifully, crafting a complex and subtle portrait of a woman who, despite her many qualities, needs every bit of skill she has to ensure that she will survive. There are other interesting characters too: Henry, of course, but also Huicke, the skilled but vulnerable court physician, and Dot, the loyal servant.

I have just one problem with this book, and it's one that puzzles me. It's written in the present tense, and for some reason I found this intrusive. I'm not sure why this should be. After all, everything that a novelist does is a construct designed to convince the reader that this created world is real. There's no particular reason I can think of why the present tense shouldn't be used to this end, but there it is, for me it jars. But Hilary Mantel used it in Wolf Hall, and nobody seemed to mind it there - so clearly, it's just me!

This is a rich and satisfying read - I strongly recommend it. It's published by Penguin, at £14.99.
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New Libraries for Old? by Penny Dolan

April 17, 2013, 12:31 am
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Today I went to a meeting of the Friends of my local Library, one of the Carnegie buildings. We met in a small neat room in the basement, next to the children’s library. Back in the first half of the last century, the basement held a shooting range for local riflemen. 


 In the recent years of this century, through the National Lottery, the library was revamped and opened up to more daylight. Now it houses adaptable shelving and rows of well-used computers, although the reference library was lost in the alterations. 

The whole interior is painted in the airy lilac with purple accents that are the standard local authority library colours. It is a very pleasant library, yet I can’t help coming back from these meetings - aware of yet another “re-structuring” behind the scenes -  that this is an uncomfortable age for our national libraries.


True, this week, a new library was announced, courtesy of the Margaret Thatcher Trust, which may well be a subscribing or closed library. Somewhere else, no doubt, a free local authority library is closing or transforming into a community library. 

Although I welcome volunteers and a more open mood in libraries, I know the inspiring expertise - spread too thinly – will fade quickly. Rather like the respected collection of early Victorian children’s literature once held at my local library and now, apparently, lost in the counties archives. Last reported in a cardboard box, somewhere, but now untraceable. Gone with the fairies.

I do not feel the destruction of libraries can ever be a good sign. The ravage of the great libraries of the past - Alexandria, Lindisfarne, St David’s, Leuvain and more - was never the sign of greater tolerance. These libraries were destroyed dramatically with blood, fire and hatred, dramatically and awfully. They were true disasters.

But the current re-structuring and rationalisation of the library service feels like the pettiest, meanest-minded aspect of Englishness. It makes me feel ashamed, knowing that the poor, the old, the out-of work, the students and the immigrants who use the libraries that are most affected.   

It goes deeper. Behind the library lies the stock of books available. I enquired, recently, about an expensive academic book on children’s literature. My local library will help by arranging an out-of-county loan for twenty pounds.  

Will our library stock eventually only offer the light romances and whodunits once the core of the Boots subscription libraries? Will biographies of recent and current celebrities be the only lives available? More importantly, will more study be impossible unless one joins a major subscription library? Or signs up and pays for an academic course? Will history only be "now" and not "once" or "then"?


I have always loved being in libraries, in using libraries. My first library was one of those ornate late Victorian library that declared Here is Learning. That building, with its green copper dome, is long gone. The replacement, which I am sure is well used and excellent, is now contained within a big new shopping mall. Which, if times get even tougher, is a much simpler space to disappear. Rather like the use of the word “librarian”, that became “learning resources manager” in many local libraries and secondary schools. How convenient.

 
Excuse this gloomy History Girl post. I love my local library and the people there. But sitting in such a meeting, working out ways to raise money for a notice-board for the railings outside, set my history teeth jangling. Is what I feel the very faintest echo of how it was when only the priests and the rich had access to books? 

I also find it impossible to post about tomorrow’s event.


Penny Dolan
www.pennydolan.com

Penny Dolan is the author of A Boy Called Mouse. (Bloomsbury)




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Landscape by Maria McCann

April 13, 2013, 4:01 pm
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We have today a post from one of our marvellous team of Reserves, Maria McCann.


With Jane Borodale, Jane Feaver, Gabrielle Kimm and Michael Arnold, I recently took part in a Historical Fiction Day at the splendid Weald & Downland Open Museum in Sussex.  The topic for our panel was landscape.  I found myself focusing on it as I'd never done before: what could I say about my use of landscape in fiction?  What did I find most important and compelling when writing about it?

I began by considering the psychological relationship between characters and their physical environment.  This has always interested me: how would characters have understood the country surrounding them?   Would they conceive of it mainly in terms of inheritance, of money, of physical labour and the many skilled tasks that make up farming, in terms of an enduring (benign or oppressive) social order?  Would rusticity seem a refuge, or a banishment from everything that gave variety and savour to life?  Which modern associations and resonances would be alien to them? 

Religion would certainly shape their perceptions to some degree.  At this point I recognised something more, something central to my own work that had previously been almost invisible to me.  (My unconscious, like the shoemaking Elves, had done most of the work when my analytical mind was off duty; I won't say that I was entirely unaware of it, but I'd never looked at it head-on before.)  I realised that lost Edens and false paradises have always been central to my work, as have journeys, expulsions and the whole concept of life as pilgrimage that finds its most developed expression in The Pilgrim's Progress but stretches right back to the Biblical metaphor of the narrow path to salvation versus the broad road that leads to Hell.     

 

Engraving by Thomas Conder.  Photo: Jo Guldi.    Licence: see flickr.com/photos/landschaft/7035370

As we all know, journeys in the past were slow and inconvenient, events in their own right.   Novelists  are often advised to cut journeys from their narrative and jump straight to the arrival, but I love journeys (in fiction as well as in life) and am fascinated by their psychological resonances.  It's many years now since I was a religious believer, but at some point during my upbringing that metaphor of the true and false roads obviously sank deep. 

Two years spent teaching pastoral texts to seventeen-year olds also had its effect.  Some pastoral themes are very similar to those of the expulsion from Eden - nature, lost innocence - and during that time I became aware of pastoral's enduring appeal.  Amorous herdsmen may have vanished from Arcadia, but not from Brokeback Mountain.  Nymphs bathe al fresco to advertise shampoo and Italian peasants are still flirtatious at ninety thanks to the simple country goodness of Bertolli margarine.  People who have never heard of the word 'pastoral' still respond to the imagery: we still yearn for that impossible place, the countryside as it never was.
 
As a result of mulling over these influences, I'm now much more aware that in my own work,  landscape is sometimes in realistic mode, sometimes symbolic (though I hope not anachronistic), sometimes both, according to the demands of the narrative, while the characters' responses to it are mediated by the ideas by which they interpret the world.  Jacob Cullen, the tormented narrator of As Meat Loves Salt, is troubled by repetitive nightmares while working the land (a detested job, perceived by Jacob as futile) in an idealistic Digger commune: 

'Often, of late, I flew over Hell and looked down on the damned, whose punishment it was to mine rocks with picks and spades.  They flowed over the black surface like ants.  From time to time a flame would lick up and burn some of them off.  The rest kept digging.' 

His friend Ferris (who conceals a love letter inside a map, something I noticed with amusement when re-reading the novel)  dreams of the same commune becoming not an Eden (for 'Eden may not be regained') but the next best thing,  'a happy and prosperous Israel.'  He reads the landscape in terms of the opportunities it holds out for freedom and self-determination: not damnation, but redemption.   

In The Wilding, the shallower and more complacent Jon Dymond congratulates himself on being not an outsider, but 'a proper village man, woven in': a true countryman, living the pastoral idyll.  His self-satisfaction, however, cannot last: his Eden carries the seeds of its own destruction.

In future, when I begin a new piece of writing it will be with a deepened awareness of my own ways of working with landscape.  There are other aspects yet to explore, in particular why I keep coming back to lost Edens and find them so resonant.   Is there a connection with a traumatic house move at the age of six?  I rarely dream of landscapes but for many years now, houses where I've lived in the past have made regular appearances in my dreams.  I'd like to unravel that strand since I suspect there's creative energy bound up in it ― but this blog isn't the place for doing so. 

What are your thoughts on landscape?  And is there some important aspect of your work of which you are now aware, but which wasn't obvious to you at the time of writing?



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The Passing of Baroness Thatcher - Celia Rees

April 17, 2013, 4:30 pm
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I was going to blog about something entirely different but I've just been watching the funeral of Margaret Thatcher. I wasn't meaning to, you understand, but I was caught by the ceremony of it all, the black draped drums, the gun carriage drawn by six black horses, the half muffled bells, the measured tread of the coffin bearers, the soldiers lining the route with their heads bowed and arms reversed. It was a historic moment and they don't come all that often, these great state occasions which we 'do so well' as David Dimbleby likes to remind us. The last funeral for a British Prime Minister conducted on this scale was for Sir Winston Churchill, the honours then done by Dimbleby Senior. A dullish day, I seem to remember, all in black and white, of course, the soldiers in great coats, mourners in top hats and tail coats, with the coffin arriving by river, all the cranes dipping in recognition. No cranes now, only the soaring towers and winking lights of Canary Wharf. A different time, different age. That was definitely history. The world has changed since then.

The gun carriage made its slow way towards St Paul's accompanied by ragged applause and cheers from the crowd. I don't remember people clapping and cheering before. It was more bowed heads and respectful silence. But perhaps that kind of quiet, deferential behaviour has passed into history along with the cranes of the London Docks. The route took the procession down Fleet Street, past signs for Starbuck's, Macdonald's, Costa Coffee, Subway. Change again. If the cameras had panned up a bit, they might have caught the fading titles of the great newspapers whose offices used to line this street which is still our defacto name for the press. The newspapers are not there any more - gone to Wapping and the very term 'press' is obsolete, gone with the old printing presses and the ruthless destruction of the skilled print workers who worked them, swept into history by Mrs Thatcher, along with the mines and the miners' unions, the steel works and steel workers and most of British manufacturing industry. She was a tidy woman by all accounts. 


It is fitting, perhaps, that the route took her next into the City. Up Ludgate Hill past the towers of steel and glass, home to the 'new' industries, released by the Big Bang of 1986. The financiers and commercial lawyers, the banks and insurance brokers, all now spilling out of their offices in shirt sleeves, smart phones and cameras at the ready, to witness her passing and register their presence as part of it to message, tweet, post on Facebook. An unimaginable technology in the 1980s when cameras used film that had to be developed and mobile phones were the size of house bricks. 

On she went to St Paul's Cathedral, where the half muffled bells tolled loud and soft to mark her passing and the great and the good waited for her, her coffin carried up the steps by representatives of  the different branches of the armed forces who lost men in the Falklands War. So they took her into St Paul's, into the presence of the assembled congregation, her family, the Queen, the Archbishop of Canterbury, British politicians, assorted world figures, Henry Kissinger,F. W. de Klerk, and all sorts of others from Jeremy Clarkson to Terry Wogan. To Be A Pilgrim, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, I Vow to Thee My Country, prayers and readings and the timeless simplicity of the Book of Common Prayer Funeral Service. 

Then she was borne out to those raggedly cheering crowds and put into the back of a waiting hearse,  her last public moments over. Whatever one thought about her, loved her or hated her, she made history and shaped it, now she was being taken off to become part of it herself. 

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Looking for Leonardo da Vinci by Theresa Breslin

April 18, 2013, 4:04 pm
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TAKE NOTE:


Our most beloved Architect and General Engineer, Leonardo da Vinci, who bears this pass, is charged with inspecting the palaces and fortresses of our states, so that we may maintain them according to their needs and on his advice.
It is our order and command that all will allow the said Leonardo da Vinci free passage, without subjecting him to any tax or toll, or other hindrance, either on himself or his companions.
All will welcome him with amity, and allow him to measure and examine any things he so chooses.
To this effect, we desire that delivered unto him should be any provisions, materials and men that he might require, and that he be given any aid, assistance and favour he requests.
Let no man act contrary to this decree unless he wishes to incur our wrath.

So wrote Prince Cesare Borgia, Il Valentino, illegitimate son of Pope Alexander VI, in the famous pass he issued to Leonardo da Vinci. And such was the reputation of Cesare Borgia that none would dare to obstruct the work that da Vinci undertook for him over a period of eighteen months as this ruthless Renaissance lord captured city after city across central Italy. 

It is another enigma of the great genius and polymath of the Middle Ages. Why did Leonardo da Vinci, who indicates strongly in his writings a love of nature and creation and an abhorrence of violence, spend almost two years of his life in the employ of the unscrupulous warmonger Cesare Borgia?

The pass was issued in August 1502. This was shortly after da Vinci had left Milan where he had lived and worked for approximately seventeen years. His patron there, the Duke of Milan, for whom he had painted The Last Supper, had been deposed by an invading French army. King Louis XII of France claimed sovereignty over the Duchy, and, although there were indications that the French court would have liked Leonardo to remain, at that point the soldiers ruled the city. The occupying forces were unruly and dangerous, so da Vinci moved around the north of Italy doing various commissions. But to survive an artist needed a patron (no helpful Arts Council dispensing awards) and it was only by accepting the patronage of Cesare Borgia that da Vinci secured a longer term of gainful employment to support his household. 

What is interesting about this period of da Vinci's life is the lack of information. The manuscripts of this man, a compulsive note-taker and sketcher, are scant for these months. It was a time of extraordinary activity in Renaissance Italy: coups and counter coups, scandalous liaisons, horrific acts of revenge, and barbaric instances of torture. Yet we find only a few fleeting glimpses of his life recorded; for example, a brief phrase in a page margin: Where is Il Valentino? Or a sketch of some architecture in Urbino, a city captured that year by Cesare Borgia. Curiously, it is Urbino that has a painting by Joos van Gent called ‘The Communion of the Apostles ‘which predates the da Vinci Last Supper by twenty years. In van Gent's depiction eleven of the Apostles are shown as older men with beards, and one is a youthful beardless figure with golden hair… 
As a writer these "lost years" of Leonardo da Vinci are a gift - the opportunity to build a story round the available historical facts. I trawled over all manner of materials, read da Vinci's own writings, his stories, riddles, jokes, puns, fables, studied his works and followed his journeys through Italy. At least, my editor observed with amusement, these research trips are warmer than those undertaken when doing Remembrance, a novel partly set in the trenches of World War I.

When I began to research, The Medici Seal, before the appearance of Mr Brown’s novel, there wasn’t such a brouhaha about everything da Vinci. Now one has to secure tickets months ahead to view ‘The Last Supper’ in Milan, where the tour guides are rapidly losing the will to live by being repeatedly asked "So, which one is Mary Magdalene then?' A guide in Ravenna told me that she is asked the same question when showing tourists the 6th century mosaic of Christ at supper with his Apostles! However, it's these other versions of that scene that underlines the power of da Vinci's version, beginning with his unique choice of the most dramatic moment of that Gospel. Then there is his ingenious composition - the concealed geometry of the painting. It was in ‘The Last Supper ‘that da Vinci interpreted his findings in physics, mathematics, acoustics and proportion. Rather than a formal grouping, it is a painting charged with emotion; his figures the actual visible manifestation of force, displayed in sound, in time and in place. After studying the figure of the Apostle Matthew, I decided to name my main character, Matteo.

Like many people I have an ongoing fascination with Leonardo da Vinci. His paintings are stunning beautiful, his anatomical drawings absorbing, the minute detail engenders respect for his draughtsmanship yet touch the senses in a profound manner, as in the one showing the child curled in the womb. His engineering projects are startlingly modern. In addition to da Vinci's work there were the people he met on an every day basis: the Medici family who were great patrons of the Arts in Florence, and the Borgias, Cesare and his fascinating sister Lucrezia. All of it crying out to me: Write about this! Write about this! 

My travels took me to Senigallia. 
This town on the Adriatic is famous as the place where Cesare Borgia tricked his rebel Captains into meeting with him and then broke his truce and murdered them. It is recorded that he had two of his Captains garrotted back to back upon a bench. One of them, Vitellozzo, was a friend of da Vinci. It is this incident of the Borgia moving swiftly to eliminate his enemies efficiently and without mercy that Machiavelli wrote about later in his classic work The Prince. While in Senigallia doing location shots for the V&A presentation on my book I was reliably informed by the tourist office that Mary Magdalene's bones were brought ashore there from the Holy Land!

The main character in The Medici Seal, the boy Matteo, is rescued by the companions of da Vinci in the late summer of 1502. Matteo has his own story, a vengeful brigand on his trail seeking to recover a stolen item. The boy becomes an assistant to the Maestro, accompanies him on his trips to the morgue, watches his dissections, holds the Maestro's drawings during his conferences with Cesare Borgia, stands by his side at dinner. There is independent documentation that in the autumn of 1502 the city of Florence sent a diplomat to talk to Cesare Borgia. Their emissary, one Niccolo Machiavelli, met Cesare Borgia in the Castle of Imola. 
This was when Leonardo da Vinci was repairing the fortifications there.

Imagine what might happen with Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, and Cesare Borgia, all together.

I did. 

Photographs  © SCARPA
  
http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/   http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor
Twitter: @theresabreslin1  

LATEST BOOKS
Spy for the Queen of Scots shortlisted for the Young Quills Award
The Traveller (from dyslexia friendly publisher Barrington Stoke)
Divided City  Playscript now available.
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Landscape by Maria McCann

April 19, 2013, 4:01 pm
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We have today a post from one of our marvellous team of Reserves, Maria McCann.


With Jane Borodale, Jane Feaver, Gabrielle Kimm and Michael Arnold, I recently took part in a Historical Fiction Day at the splendid Weald & Downland Open Museum in Sussex.  The topic for our panel was landscape.  I found myself focusing on it as I'd never done before: what could I say about my use of landscape in fiction?  What did I find most important and compelling when writing about it?

I began by considering the psychological relationship between characters and their physical environment.  This has always interested me: how would characters have understood the country surrounding them?   Would they conceive of it mainly in terms of inheritance, of money, of physical labour and the many skilled tasks that make up farming, in terms of an enduring (benign or oppressive) social order?  Would rusticity seem a refuge, or a banishment from everything that gave variety and savour to life?  Which modern associations and resonances would be alien to them? 

Religion would certainly shape their perceptions to some degree.  At this point I recognised something more, something central to my own work that had previously been almost invisible to me.  (My unconscious, like the shoemaking Elves, had done most of the work when my analytical mind was off duty; I won't say that I was entirely unaware of it, but I'd never looked at it head-on before.)  I realised that lost Edens and false paradises have always been central to my work, as have journeys, expulsions and the whole concept of life as pilgrimage that finds its most developed expression in The Pilgrim's Progress but stretches right back to the Biblical metaphor of the narrow path to salvation versus the broad road that leads to Hell.     

 

Engraving by Thomas Conder.  Photo: Jo Guldi.    Licence: see flickr.com/photos/landschaft/7035370

As we all know, journeys in the past were slow and inconvenient, events in their own right.   Novelists  are often advised to cut journeys from their narrative and jump straight to the arrival, but I love journeys (in fiction as well as in life) and am fascinated by their psychological resonances.  It's many years now since I was a religious believer, but at some point during my upbringing that metaphor of the true and false roads obviously sank deep. 

Two years spent teaching pastoral texts to seventeen-year olds also had its effect.  Some pastoral themes are very similar to those of the expulsion from Eden - nature, lost innocence - and during that time I became aware of pastoral's enduring appeal.  Amorous herdsmen may have vanished from Arcadia, but not from Brokeback Mountain.  Nymphs bathe al fresco to advertise shampoo and Italian peasants are still flirtatious at ninety thanks to the simple country goodness of Bertolli margarine.  People who have never heard of the word 'pastoral' still respond to the imagery: we still yearn for that impossible place, the countryside as it never was.
 
As a result of mulling over these influences, I'm now much more aware that in my own work,  landscape is sometimes in realistic mode, sometimes symbolic (though I hope not anachronistic), sometimes both, according to the demands of the narrative, while the characters' responses to it are mediated by the ideas by which they interpret the world.  Jacob Cullen, the tormented narrator of As Meat Loves Salt, is troubled by repetitive nightmares while working the land (a detested job, perceived by Jacob as futile) in an idealistic Digger commune: 

'Often, of late, I flew over Hell and looked down on the damned, whose punishment it was to mine rocks with picks and spades.  They flowed over the black surface like ants.  From time to time a flame would lick up and burn some of them off.  The rest kept digging.' 

His friend Ferris (who conceals a love letter inside a map, something I noticed with amusement when re-reading the novel)  dreams of the same commune becoming not an Eden (for 'Eden may not be regained') but the next best thing,  'a happy and prosperous Israel.'  He reads the landscape in terms of the opportunities it holds out for freedom and self-determination: not damnation, but redemption.   

In The Wilding, the shallower and more complacent Jon Dymond congratulates himself on being not an outsider, but 'a proper village man, woven in': a true countryman, living the pastoral idyll.  His self-satisfaction, however, cannot last: his Eden carries the seeds of its own destruction.

In future, when I begin a new piece of writing it will be with a deepened awareness of my own ways of working with landscape.  There are other aspects yet to explore, in particular why I keep coming back to lost Edens and find them so resonant.   Is there a connection with a traumatic house move at the age of six?  I rarely dream of landscapes but for many years now, houses where I've lived in the past have made regular appearances in my dreams.  I'd like to unravel that strand since I suspect there's creative energy bound up in it ― but this blog isn't the place for doing so. 

What are your thoughts on landscape?  And is there some important aspect of your work of which you are now aware, but which wasn't obvious to you at the time of writing?



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Women Artists in Paris by Imogen Robertson

April 20, 2013, 11:49 pm
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An early reader of Paris Winter made the mistake this week of asking me if there really were many female artists training in Paris during the Belle Époque. Five minutes later they staggered away just as I was getting into my stride.

Women were not admitted to the École des Beaux Arts until 1897, but by that time there were already other opportunities for women to train and these independent schools continued to flourish. One of the most important studios was the Académie Julian and it is still training artists today. Rodolphe Julian (1839-1907) was an accomplished painter, but it was as the owner and manager of a number of ateliers for both men and women that he excelled. He came from a poor background, and though he became successful it seems he was always sympathetic towards the plight of the starving artist. That said, the women always paid a great deal poor than the men for their tuition. It was expected they would have a male relative to support them financially. At first Julian allowed women into the male classes, but it was 'awkward' and 'disagreeable' and soon he was operating women only classes. Men and women working from the same nude model seemed to be the cause of the problem. One of his earliest and most influential pupils, Marie Bashkirtseff, was happy to work in the women only classes because the teaching was the same and apparently the men smoked too much. Julian's wife and former pupil, Amélie Beaury-Saurel, was a successful portrait painter in her own right and helped him run his various schools. She obviously helped enhance his reputation. Lady's Realm in 1900 recommended her to English readers as 'an excellent teacher and, in addition [she] possesses a most charming personality.'

Marie Bashkirtseff - In the Studio 1881
Julian hired teachers who had excellent reputations, many were winners of the Prix de Rome, and the focus of the training was on life-drawing and figurative draughtmanship. Students had to show they were expert at drawing plaster casts before they were allowed to work in oils or with a model. There were regular competitions in which the male and female students competed on equal terms and for cash prizes and his students, again both male and female were regular fixtures in the official Salon. It seems the attitude to the work was serious. The Académie was fairly open about who was allowed to pay their fees and take a place in the studio, but if they did not produce work showing talent they would not stay. According to one woman quoted in Catherine Fehrer's 1994 article in Burlington Magazine '...everything was done to discourage her... There would come a day when she would not be in her accustomed place. No one knew what happened, but whatever it was, it was kindly done and effective.' That sounds a little frightening to me, but though there were certainly rivalries, there were also friendships and given the students were encouraged to continually draw quick caricatures of themselves and their teachers, I'm sure there was some Parisian lightness of spirit there too. His pupils came from across Europe and America, some disappeared and some excelled and their works which spanned extraordinary changes in the art world from the Victorian to the Modern are still greatly admired today.

Of course there were dozens of other female artists who were in Paris but did not study with Julian, but you had better not get me started on greats like Suzanne Valadon, or we'll never get out to enjoy the sunshine at all...
Overcoming All Obstacles: The Women of the Académie Julian is a wonderful study of the artists and their work, and you can find a partial list of the artists, male and female, who trained with Julian here.

  
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WEEDS AND WEEDING WOMEN, by Jane Borodale

April 21, 2013, 5:00 pm
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© Valerie Hill

‘As oft as nede shall require it must be weeded, for else the wede woll overgrowe the hearbs.’ (Fitzherbert, 1532) 

This slovenly gardener (I mean me) has been taken by surprise. Lulled into a false sense of security by the lateness of spring, then just two days of sunshine, and suddenly the bare land is alarmingly green and bristling with a mass of creeping buttercup, ground elder, coltsfoot and bursts of dock and dandelion.

So I’m thinking about historical weeds. Our idea of what a weed is has changed, of course, over time. Many plants we now consider pests have been thought of in the medieval period (and earlier) as food or medicine. But some plants have always been more cosmopolitan, persistent and hungry than others, and they know no boundaries. 

© Valerie Hill
In his celebrated book Weeds (2010) Richard Mabey describes how the first Neolithic settlers in Britain brought seeds of corn poppy, charlock and wild radish inadvertently with their wheat and barley grains in 3500 BCE. Groundsel came with the Bronze Age. The Romans brought ground elder to feed their livestock. Rosebay willowherb started its journey here as a rare garden specimen in the 16th century that slowly, joyously escaped and by the 19th century was rampaging along the railway system, like Oxford ragwort. Nettles too have always followed the human trail, thriving in soil rich with our waste and decomposition and ash – on midden heaps and churchyards, and fields improved with manure from pond silt and grazing livestock. Weeds, like crop-methods, are evolving all the time – and keeping up.

'Burning Weeds', Alexander Mann (1853-1908)
How were they dealt with? In the larger Tudor gardens, weeders were most often poor women working for a few pennies a day. Historian C. Paul Christianson has studied 16th century accounts of the Bridge House garden in London, and in The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London, looks at records of the large numbers of female staff working there and at York Place and Hampton Court. He says that, ‘it was chiefly women, often at first noted in the accounts simply as “a weding woman” or “a pore widow to wede the gardeyn” who were employed,’ often for a pitiful per diem of 2d - 4d. Garden weeds were picked as now by hand, sometimes wearing three-fingered weeding gloves (presumably for protection against bramble, thistle and the rasping, prickly langue-de-boeuf). In the fields though, before hoeing became more widespread in England, cropweeds were tackled thus:

French miniature, c1180
‘Ye have a wedyne-hoke with a socket, set upon a little staffe a yard longe, and this hoke would be ground sharpe, both behind and before. In his other hand he hath a forked styke a yarde longe, and with the fork putteth the weed from him, and he putteth the hoke beyond the roote of the wede, putteth it to him and cutteth the weed fast by the earth.’ (Fitzherbert). 

The fields must have been continually dotted with labourers weeding along the rows, throughout the season. No spraying of herbicides to rely on then – yet according to the 20th edition of The Agricultural Notebook, modern weeds are as troublesome as they ever were. 

Cleavers © Valerie Hill
Cleavers (or goosegrass, or sticky willy, depending on where you're from) can cause a staggering 40 percent loss to a broad-leaved crop, and annual grass weeds such as blackgrass or wild oats in cereal crops as much as a quarter. Other major agricultural weeds in the UK currently include chickweed, Japanese knotweed, thistles and speedwell, and it’s fascinating to compare these species with the main weeds of Fitzherbert’s or Thomas Tusser’s medieval farmland. They would have grappled with our own familiar adversaries like dock, mayweed, cleavers and thistle. Still a major cropweed now, The Niewe Herball (1578) says of poor or wild oats for example that it is, ‘a hurtfull plant to the Rie as other corne.’ 

Field bindweed © Valerie Hill 
But Fitzherbert and Tusser class as pests some that we’d now consider wildflowers; such as knapweed, cornflower, corncockle and pink mallow. Dorothy Hartley mentions in 1979 how it is no longer the vetches ‘that pull downward’, but bindweed. 

It’s an age-old battle. Literally; many annual weed seeds can stay viable in undisturbed soil for startling tracts of time, waiting till conditions are right before germination. Geoffrey Grigson in The Englishman’s Flora (1958) has a great phrase; ‘plough up the old grass, and up comes the charlock, like a vegetable rat.’ Weeds are wily, tough as old boots, and can be very, very patient. Archaeological sites unearthing soil previously covered to some depth have suddenly bloomed with ancient varieties of plant that have lain dormant for as much as 2000 years – truly the living past.

Mayweed © Valerie Hill
The presence of weeds is confusing, too – because as well as being the enemy of the farmer and the tidy mind, they have individual virtues of their own. Whether or not they’re welcome is all about context. 16th-century Henry Lyte, who translated The Niewe Herball, was as much a gardener and husbandman with an estate to run, as he was a herbalist. So he would have understood the repetitive tedium of hand-weeding running grasses, horsetail or bittercress, and while recognising the virtues of any variety of plant he would also have known its nuisance. He says for example: ‘The roote of Rest Harrow or Petie Whin is long and very limmer, spreading under the earth, and doth often times let, hinder and stay both the plough and Oxen in toiling the ground’. However, ‘the barke of the roote taken with hony, provoketh urine and breaketh the stone’. Elsewhere he explains how darnel ‘is a vitious graine that cumbereth or annoyeth corne,’ and yet, ‘with pigions dung, oyle and linseed, boiled and layd plaisterwise upon wens doth dissolve and heale them.’ Bracken in the wrong place disrupts upland and hill grassland, but in the past was an important resource in its own right, for fuel and soap production.

Broad-leaved dock © Valerie Hill
I’m thinking that the process of writing is very much like weeding – it’s all about taking things out, for the good of the whole. Not just at the editing stage, (which is more like the final tidy-up before winter) but the whole way through writing a novel. It’s always about giving enough space to the significant idea or image, not letting it be choked with superfluous word-clutter or unnecessary infill. It’s a fight against those weeds/words of the subconscious, chattering mind that never shuts up; that never stops germinating, propagating, spreading sideways. Fields (or plots!) must be constantly gone over if they are to yield anything. Countless seedling ideas and thought-shoots ripped up and discarded before they get a hold, in order for a few to flourish… Hurrah for the weed-hook and the delete button, because the minute we stop weeding, the game’s over. At the best of times – we’re just keeping the wilderness at bay. Pretending that our thoughts are orderly, sequential, cultured, when really it’s a never-ending battle, above and below ground…


Jane Borodale’s novel The Knot is out in paperback with Fourth Estate - this Thursday! 

There are plenty of weeds in it.





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