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Not That It Matters – A.A. Milne

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It’s been about a decade since I blitzed most of A.A. Milne’s very many books, and now I’m enjoying revisiting them.  I thought a trip down Milne Memory Lane would be a handy way to cross off 1919 on A Century of Books, so I picked up his collection of humorous essays from that year, Not That It Matters.

The first piece (although they are not in chronological order) starts ‘Sometimes when the printer is waiting for an article which really should have been sent to him the day before, I sit at my desk and wonder if there is any possible subject in the whole world upon which I can possibly find anything to say.’  (The final line in the book, incidentally, is ‘And Isaiah, we may be sure, did not carry a notebook.’  Which gives you some sense of the wide variety Milne covers in this collection.)

Some of the essays are very indicative of their time – from 1910 to 1919, as the essays appeared during that period in The Sphere, The Outlook, and The Star.  I’m not sure ‘Smoking as a Fine Art’ would appear anywhere today, except as a consciously controversial piece, nor could any 21st century essayist take for granted that his reader went for frequent country houseparties, attended Lords, and had strong memories of the First World War.  On the other hand, many of the topics Milne covers would be equally fit for a columnist today, if we still had the type who were allowed to meander through arbitrary topics, without the need to make a rapier political point or a satirical topical comment.  Milne writes on goldfish, daffodils, writing personal diaries, the charm of lunch, intellectual snobbery, and even what property programme presenters would now call ‘kerb appeal’ – but which was simply ‘looking at the outside of a house’ in Milne’s day.

I love Milne’s early work, because it is so joyful and youthful.  In the sketches and short pieces published in The Day’s Play, The Holiday Round and others, ‘The Rabbits’ often re-appear – these are happy, silly 20-somethings called things like Dahlia and (if me) addressed by their surnames.  They play cricket (badly), golf (badly), and indoor party games (badly) on endless and sunny country holidays.  It’s all deliciously insouciant and, if not quite like A.A. Milne (or anybody) really was, great fun to read.  When Milne turns to essays, he can’t include this cast, of course.  And he was in his late thirties when Not That It Matters was published – still young, perhaps, but hardly youthful.  He was a married man, though not a father quite yet, and his tone had changed slightly – from the exuberance which characterised his earliest books, to the calmly witty and jovial tone which was to see out the rest of his career.  Here’s an example, more or less at random, of the style which makes me always so happy to return to Milne:

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,” said Keats, not actually picking out celery in so many words, but plainly including it in the general blessings of the autumn.
My main qualm with these essays is that they do often end in rather a forced manner.  He’ll put in a reference that drags everything back to the opening line, or finishes off pat in a slightly different direction.  It doesn’t feel especially natural, and is perhaps indicative of the looming deadlines Milne mentions in the first essay…

As the title suggests, nothing of life-changing importance is addressed in Not That It Matters.  He does not adopt a serious voice at any point – indeed, I cannot think of a time in any of his books where he becomes entirely serious, not even in Peace With Honour, a non-fiction (and excellent) book wherein he put forth his pacifist views.  Even at these moments his weightiest points are served with a waggle of the eyebrows and an amusing image.  That’s how he made his impact.

I do prefer the whimsy of his fictional sketches to the panache of his essays, but it is still a delight and a joy to have Not That It Matters and its ilk waiting on my shelf.  It definitely bears re-reading, and I’ll be going on a cycle through Milne’s many and various books for the rest of life, I imagine.

Tomorrow I’ll type out a whole of one of his essays, ‘A Household Book’, because I think it’ll surprise quite a few people.  And will show to my brother that I was RIGHT about something I’ve been saying to him for a decade.  Ahem.  The essay is in praise of a then-underappreciated book by a famous author… and ends with this paragraph (come back tomorrow to see what it was!):

Well, of course, you will order the book at once.  But I must give you one word of warning.  When you sit down to it, don’t be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, still less on the genius of ******* *******.  You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself… You may be worthy; I do not know.  But it is you who are on trial.

Very definitely Gone to Earth

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I don’t give up on books very often, although I do it more now than I would have done before I started blogging.  I still feel a bit ungrateful towards the author, who has put months or years into writing a book, if I can’t be bothered to spend a week on it – but I’m coming round to the too-many-books-too-little-time argument.  (Giving up is distinct from putting it to one side and forgetting about it – it has to be a decisive action.)

When I do give up, it’s usually because I think the writing is too bad, or (occasionally) too confusing.  It’s rarely related to subject matter or character – although if I started a gory crime novel, I’m sure I’d stop reading that pretty smartish.

But I’ve never given up on a novel quite so quickly as I did on Tuesday morning.  Because I now have a 40 minute walk into work, I tend to read a book whilst I’m walking.  (Yes, I’m that guy.  Surprised?)   And I was a page and half – yes, 1.5pp. – into Mary Webb’s Gone To Earth before I concluded that I could not read any further.

I’ve read and re-read, and loved and re-loved, Stella Gibbons’ Cold Comfort Farm, but I’ve not read any of the authors she was parodying.  Well, I’ve read some Lawrence and Hardy, and they’re on the peripheries of her satire, but I’ve steered clear of that peculiar vogue for rural novels which seized British literature in the early years of the 20th century.  Here is the opening of Gone To Earth, with my thoughts interpolated:

Small, feckless [oh, wasn’t that one of the cows in Cold Comfort Farm?] clouds were hurried across the vast untroubled sky [always cross out the adjectives first when editing, love] – shepherdless, futile, imponderable [oh… never mind.] – and were torn to fragments on the fangs of the mountains, so ending their ephemeral adventures with nothing of their fugitive existence left but a few tears. [oh sweet mercy.]

[So, what have we established?  It was a cloudy day.  Right-o.]

It was cold in the Callow [oh, sorry, we’re not done with the weather – as you were] – a spinney of silver birches and larches that topped a round hill.  A purple mist hinted of buds in the tree-tops, and a fainter purple haunted the vistas between the silver and brown boles. [Of course it did.  Purple is a very haunting, hinting colour.  Now, for the love of all that is pure, can we move on?]

Only the crudeness of youth was here as yet, and not its triumph [anyone else feel we’re wandering into heavy-handed metaphor territory?] – only the sharp calyx-point, the pricking tip of the bud, like spears, and not the paten of the leaf, the chalice of the flower.

[Is there an editor in the world who wouldn’t have rejected this novel by now?]

For as yet spring had no flight, no song, but went like a half-fledged bird, hopping tentatively through the undergrowth. [To summarise: it’s early March.] The bright springing mercury that carpeted the open spaces had only just hung out its pale flowers, and honeysuckle leaves were still tongues of fire.  [I think you’ve made your point, Mary.] Between the larch boles [oh good, more boles] and under the thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry came a tawny silent form, wearing with the calm dignity of woodland creatures a beauty of eye and limb [can one wear a beautiful eye?], a brilliance of tint, that few women could have worn without self-consciousness.  Clear-eyed, lithe, it stood for a moment in the full sunlight – a year-old fox, round-headed and velvet-footed.  Then it slid into the shadows.  [A sentence without adjectives or adverbs!  Mary, my dear, are you feeling quite yourself?] A shrill whistle came from the interior of the wood, and the fox bounded towards it.

“Where you bin? [oh, Heaven preserve us.]  You’m stray and lose yourself, certain sure!” [“certain sure?”  REALLY?] said a girl’s voice [or, indeed, ‘said a girl‘], chidingly motherly.  “And if you’m alost [oh no…], I’m alost; so come you whome. [no, ‘whome’ isn’t a typo.  In case you were wondering.  I wish it were.]  The sun’s undering [I wonder if Mary Webb had ever spoken to someone from the countryside?], and there’s bones for supper!” [YUM.]

[I finished off the dialogue spoken by the girl’s voice, but – truth be told – it was at that ‘You’m’ that I made my decision not to read on.  Isn’t this simply everything appalling you ever thought the rural novel might be?  Perhaps it gets better, perhaps I am doing Ms. Webb an injustice.  I, for one, certainly shan’t be finding out.]

 

 

With The Hunted – Sylvia Townsend Warner

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Do you ever wish a book had been published a bit earlier?  I imagine a few people lamented that the first dictionary was issued just weeks after they’d struggled with spelling ‘sincerely’ at the end of a letter, or mourned that British Birds and How To Spot Them came out mere days after that flock of yellow-crested (or was it crested-yellow?) hornspippets descended.

Well, I’m feeling that way about With The Hunted – the selected non-fiction writings of Sylvia Townsend Warner, recently published by Black Dog Books (their website here.)  If it had come out earlier, it would have saved me a LOT of time scrabbling through enormous, dusty old journals, hunting out articles by Warner, photocopying interviews from books, etc. etc…. But, truth be told, I had great fun doing that.  And now it is available for everyone to read!  Thank you Black Dog Books for sending me a review copy.

With The Hunted really is a goldmine.  I haven’t read it all yet, but I’ve read enough to know that it is an astonishingly varied and fascinating companion to Warner’s novels – indeed, I have something of a chequered relationship with Warner’s novels, and might find the writings selected here more consistent.

It includes so much!  Remember how much I enjoyed her pamphlet on Jane Austen?  It’s in With The Hunted!  I greatly enjoyed an interview from Louise Morgan’s 1931 volume Writers at Work, which enchantingly begins ‘”I wish,” said Sylvia Townsend Warner, “that I could tell you I wrote standing on one leg.  Then you’d have something really entertaining and original to say about me!”‘  It’s included!  Her speech on ‘Women as Writers’ which re-popularised Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own – it’s there!  Everything from an essay on her grandmother’s experience of the countryside (‘iniquities she had thought of as rare vestigial occurrences in crime-sheets persisted and were taken as a matter of course among these cottage homes of England’) to her views on Daniel Defoe (‘there are some books, as there are some personalities, which one can open anywhere and be sure of an interest.  This, I knew, was one of them’) is here in this exceptionally wide-ranging volume.  418 pages never contained such infinite variety.

And then there are all the beguiling essays and reviews that I have yet to read!  The titles leap out to me.  I want to read ‘Are Parents Really Necessary?’ immediately; I cannot imagine what could lie behind ‘Not To Be Done in May.’  And then there are pieces on Saki, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens, Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter – what riches!

Peter Tolhurst – the editor of With The Hunted – cannot be thanked enough.  Not only will this book prove invaluable to future scholars of Sylvia Townsend Warner, who will not have the paper trail I had whilst writing my thesis chapter on Warner, but it is for anybody who has any interest in Warner’s novels, or indeed in early twentieth-century literature.  In this extensive collection we see Sylvia Townsend Warner as literati and as countrywoman, casting her eye over her contemporaries and Victorian literary greats, yet also the minutiae of everyday life and everyday concerns, with the same perception and humour.

Whether you love Warner or have never read her before, I think this is a wonderful resource to keep on the shelf, dip into, dip into, dip into – and marvel at.

Five From the Archive (no.6)

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This week I wanted my Five From The Archive (where I revisit old reviews from my blog – it’s been a while, so some of you might not know about it!) to be novels about families.  Obviously that encompasses many, many novels – so I decided to be a little more specific, and insist that they have a relative of some sort in the title.  Makes it more fun to pick them!  Here are my five – as always, let me know which you’d suggest…

Five… Books about Family

1.) Sisters By A River (1947) by Barbara Comyns

In short: The surreal account of Barbara Comyns’ childhood by the Avon in Warwickshire, paving the way for her later, equally surreal, novels.

From the review: “Tales of ugly dresses and bad haircuts are told in the same captivating, undemonstrative style as those of Grannie dying and Father throwing a beehive over Mother. If this motley assortment of remembrances were made-up… well, I don’t think they could have been. Such a bizarre childhood, so of its time, and yet utterly fascinating.”

2.) Travels With My Aunt (1969) by Graham Greene

In short: Meeting his Aunt Augusta at his mother’s funeral, Henry is caught up in her bizarre (and often illegal) cavorting around the globe.

From the review: “But the characters have the same indomitable spirit, eccentric manner, and amusingly unpredictable speech. The success of Greene’s novel, for me, is through character – through Augusta and Henry’s conversations, where two wholly different characters meet and travel together.”


3.) Parents and Children (1941) by Ivy Compton-Burnett

In short: A typically Ivy Compton-Burnett novel – sprawling family, endless brilliant dialogue, and occasional doses of rather surprising action.

From the review: “Life-changing events are encompassed by lengthy, facetious discussions – gently vicious and cruelly precise, always picking up on the things said by others. Calmness permeates even the most emotional responses, and ICB’s writing is always astonishing in its use of dialogue.”

4.) My Cousin Rachel (1951) by Daphne du Maurier

In short: Philip’s cousin Ambrose goes to Italy, marries Rachel, and (er, spoiler) dies – leaving Philip, and the reader, in doubt regarding Rachel’s culpability or innocence…

From the review: “The novel has a lot in common with Rebecca – and not just the setting. The same intrigue, power, and issues about what is left unspoken in relationships. […] My Cousin Rachel is brilliantly successful in the sense that I have never left a novel so uncertain as to a character’s guilt or lack of it – and either interpretation seems quite valid.”

5.) Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) by Barbara Trapido

In short: Katherine is an ingenuous 18 year old when she meets the Goldman family, but living alongside this enchanting (but bewildering) assortment of people – most of whose names begin with J – helps propel her into adulthood.

From the review: “Katherine herself it is difficult not to like, if only for this: ‘I reverted, as I do in moments of crisis, to rereading Emma, with cotton wool in my ears.'”

Over to you!

The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

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I think I might have been the last person to watch The Lizzie Bennet Diaries – I was certainly the last person in my nuclear family to do so – but perhaps some of you are new to electricity, and I was second last.  Penultimate, if you will.  And so I’ll tell you about it.

I imagine a good 95% of people who stumble across my blog will have read Pride and Prejudice (got my eye on you, Simon S.), and a fairly high percentage will also have seen an adaptation of some variety.  By my count, I’ve seen two films, one TV series, one Bollywood adaptation, and one play – and that’s only the tip of the iceberg for what’s out there.  But The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is one of the most innovative ‘takes’ on Pride and Prejudice yet – it’s done as a series of vlogs.  (For those not in the know, ‘vlog’ is ‘video blog’, which – in turn – is ‘video web log’.  Phew.)

In videos that last about five minutes, ‘Lizzie Bennet’ (a graduate student) recounts her life to camera, mostly being annoyed by her overbearing mother, ambushed by her OTT sister Lydia, and agonising over the love life of her sister Jane.   It’s not just Lizzie – Jane and Lydia appear sometimes, alongside Charlotte Lu (her Asian-American best friend), Caroline Lee and (ahem) Bing Lee.  No sign of William Darcy yet…

It’s done rather brilliantly, and certainly all we Thomases are fans.  It follows the novel pretty precisely, albeit with a modern spin on things.  The arrival of the militia morphs into some visiting swimming teams; the entailment of the house becomes threats about having to sell the house because of the financial crisis; Mr. Collins is a businessman, and Catherine de Burgh is his financial backer…  And the characters translate perfectly, especially Lydia.  What else would she be but a self-indulgent popular cheerleader-type, enthusiastically high-fiving people all over the place?

My favourite moment so far?  That Kitty is, in fact, a cat – and, as Lydia says, “Kitty follows me about everywhere.”

Here’s the first episode (if it embeds properly).  If you want to watch more, click here.  37 instalments in, most of the novel is still ahead of us – long may it continue!

A Bristolian Weekend

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I’ve just come back from a lovely weekend with my brother – and, very to my surprise, and the surprise of everyone who heard me moaning for the past seven years, I actually got a little into the Olympics, and was genuinely chuffed when Mo won the running thingummy.  Who’d have thought?  It’ll fade, no doubt.

More importantly, I also bought some books in Bristol… and here they are, taken (rather obviously) on my bed, I’m afraid:

(Clockwise, starting top left)

Two Worlds and Their Ways – Ivy Compton-Burnett
I do already have this; I bought it to offer as a giveaway when I read it.  So, watch out for that!

No.3 – Lady Kitty Vincent
I was rather surprised to find this, since I thought nobody else read Lady Kitty Vincent.  I rather enjoyed her books last year, and have kept an eye out ever since, but this one doesn’t seem to be available at all on Amazon or Abebooks.  Worth £2.49 of my money!

The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge
Spurred on by Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week!

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
I laughed my way through this brilliant tour de force, but didn’t have my own copy – and it’s definitely one I’ll re-read.

The West Pier – Patrick Hamilton
I’ve still only read one Hamilton novel, but it was one of the best novels I’ve ever read, so I’m happy to add to the Hamiltons on my shelf.  I don’t think I’d even heard of this one.

Herland – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
I’ve been meaning to read this Amazonian utopia (dystopia?) for years, and was glad to stumble across a copy.  And I had a nice chat with the bookshop owner (who, on a previous visit, had told me that he loved Persephone Books) – he, entertainingly, told me that he’d once painted his bedroom yellow after reading The Yellow Wallpaper.  A brilliant novella, yes, but not one which would lead me to re-decorate in yellow…

Brighton Rock – Graham Greene
My book group is doing this next month…

The Persimmon Tree and other stories – Marjorie Barnard
I don’t know anything at all about this, but the blurb sounded intriguing.  And I’m not a person who leaves VMCs untroubled on a bookshelf…

So, there we go!  It’s always great to spend time with my brother, and even better when he traipses after me around bookshops.  He even bought three books himself.  Perhaps he’ll let you know what they were in the comments…

As always – thoughts?  Have you read any, etc. etc.?  I’d love to know.

 

Song for a Sunday

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When you see this, I’ll be in Bristol with Colin – he might be talking to me, or he might be watching the Olympics – I hope you’re all having lovely weekends too!

Goldfrapp are (I think) best known for up-tempo, disco-type songs (are they?) but this track, A&E, is wonderfully calming and very appropriate for a Sunday Song.  Enjoy!

Art in Nature – Tove Jansson

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I’ve probably mentioned before my envy of those readers who can eagerly await the latest novels from their favourite writers, doubtless following them on Twitter and keeping an eye out for their appearances on late-night BBC programmes, etc. etc.  Well, I don’t have any of that.  All the authors I love are dead.  But one thing I do look forward to with joy is Sort Of Books commissioning more translations of Tove Jansson’s books, mostly under the excellent translating skills of one Thomas Teal.  These are slowly and steadily emerging, so that I can track their arrival with the same keenness which others (I presume) await tid-bits from @margaretatwood.

The latest-translated Tove Jansson book was published in 1978 as Dockskåpet which, I have no reason to doubt, is rendered into English as Art in Nature.  It is a collection of short stories, with ‘Art in Nature’ as the first.  Usually I have to be in the right mood to tackle a volume of short stories, but there are two short story writers – Jansson and Katherine Mansfield – whom I found so good that I will love them whenever I pick them up, whatever mood I am in.

As usual, Jansson rather defies any attempt to spot a unifying theme.  The blurb has opted for ‘witty, often disquieting’ in which Jansson ‘reveals the fault-lines in our relationship with art, both as artists and viewers.’  It is true that there are a number of artistic people who crop up in these stories – from a cartoonist to an actress, from the painter of trains to the constructor of miniature furniture – but Jansson’s gaze is, as usual, turned upon the wider canvas of humanity itself.  It always feels a little pretentious to say that Jansson’s topic is human behaviour, because isn’t that what all writers and artists use as their topic? – but someone Jansson seems more perceptive and more precise in her examination, so that the matters of plot and setting fall away beside the details of human life she unveils.

But that is too vague for a review.  It’s how I always feel about Jansson’s writing, but it doesn’t really help you know how this collection differs from any of her others, does it?  Well, Art in Nature contains two of my favourite Jansson stories yet.  One is ‘A Sense of Time’ which is about a boy and his grandmother – the grandmother has lost her sense of time; she will wake him up at 4am to give him his morning coffee, or insist that he goes to sleep in the middle of the afternoon.  It’s a rather clever little story, more reliant on beginning-middle-end than Jansson usually is.  It also includes a little sentence which helps illustrate what I like about Jansson’s subtlety:

Grandmother let her thoughts move on to John, wondering in what way he’d grown old.
I loved that she didn’t write ‘whether or not he’d grown old’, or even ‘how old he’d grown’, but ‘in what way he’d grown old’.  It immediately makes me think of all the possible ways of growing old; how Grandmother has identified different manifestations of age in her different friends; her experience of aging.  Lovely.  My other favourite story was ‘The Doll’s House’, where Alexander begins to build a model house, gradually excluding his partner Erik.  It’s all very gentle and slow and observant.  It feels appropriate that Katherine Mansfield should have written a story with the same name, albeit a very different story.  Here’s another instance of a small matter of phrasing revealing Jansson’s cleverness (I’m assuming the Swedish does the same):

The house rose higher and higher.  It had reached the attic, now, and had grown more and more fantastic.  Alexander was in love, almost obsessed, with the thing he was trying to create.  When he woke up in the morning, his first thought was The House, and he was instantly occupied with the solution to some problem of framing or a difficult staircase or the spire on a tower.
The word ‘almost’!  It turns the story on its side, a little.  I had prepared myself, by then, for a tale of obsession – for the reductio ad absurdum narrative of a man whose life is taken over.  And indeed that quality is there, in the background, but that ‘almost’ shows how measured Jansson always is.  These are still recognisable people; their actions and reactions are unlikely to be extraordinary or irrational.

Here’s another excerpt, from the story ‘White Lady’, about three women going for drinks together and reminiscing:

Regina said, “Green, white, red, yellow!  Whatever you’d like.”  She laughed and threw herself back in her chair.

“Regina, you’re drunk,” Ellinor said. 

Regina answered slowly.  “I hadn’t expected that.  I really hadn’t expected that from you.  You’re usually much more subtle.” 

“Girls, girls,” May burst out.  “Don’t fight.  Is anyone coming to the ladies with me?” 

“Oh, the ladies’ room, the eternal ladies’ room,” said Ellinor.  “What do you do there all the time?  The whole scene was like something from an early talkie, with too much gesturing.  It wasn’t a very good film; the direction was definitely second-rate.  “Just go,” she said.  I want to look at the fog on the ceiling.”
Jansson excels at depicting awkwardness, disappointment – particularly the disappointment between expectation and actuality.  Which is ideal for creative subjects, of course, as well as the tensions between friends and relatives.  Whenever Jansson writes about illustrators (as she does at length in The True Deceiver, for example) it is tempting – if reductive – to read her own experience with the Moomins into them.  In ‘The Cartoonist’, the popular cartoonist of weekly comic strip Blubby absconds:

“It was their eyes,” said Allington without turning around.  “Their cartoon eyes.  The same stupid round eyes all the time.  Amazement, terror, delight, and so on – all you have to do is move the pupil and an eyebrow here and there and people think you’re brilliant.  Just imagine achieving so much with so little.  And in fact, they always look exactly the same.  But they have to do new things all the time.  All the time.  You know that.  You’ve learned that, right?”  His voice was quiet, but it sounded as if he were speaking through clenched teeth.  He went on without waiting for a reply.  “Novelty!  Always something new.  You start searching for ideas.  Among the people you know, among your friends.  Your own head is a blank, so you start using everything they’ve got, squeezing it dry, and no matter what people tell you, all you can think is, Can I use it?”
How much did Jansson recycle from her own life?  How much did she feel her own ability to depict amazement, terror, delight, and so on – whether with pen or paintbrush – was redundant?  Possibly not at all; possibly Allington is just a character in a story.  I don’t know.  But she certainly had no need to feel inadequate – in fact, considering how many of these stories are about creativity, I suspect she did recognise the value of the creative arts, and she is one of my favourite practitioners of them.

There were two or three stories in Art in Nature which didn’t work for me – one about a monkey, a couple longer ones towards the end which seemed to meander a bit – but I have enough experience with Jansson to suppose that I’d probably enjoy them more another time, or under different reading conditions.  For the most part, this collection is yet another arrow in a quiver of exceptionally good books.  Do go and pick this up, or any of her previous books (although people tend like Fair Play least) if you have yet to try this wonderful writer.  And thank you, Thomas Teal and Sort Of Books for continuing to make her novels and short stories available to an English-speaking audience.  Long may you keep doing so!  As Ali Smith says, on the back over, ‘That there can still be as-yet untranslated fiction by Jansson is simultaneously an aberration and a delight, like finding buried treasure.’

Here’s an odd question…

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How do you all fancy being my Research Assistants for the afternoon?!

For my next chapter, I need to quote a 1920s middlebrow novel or two where a character talks about sex, and says ‘We’re all just animals, really’, or anything like that.  The sort of sentence I’ve read dozens of times in novels of the period, but now can’t remember any at all.

If you can think of one off the top of your head, that would be amazing – otherwise perhaps you could keep your eyes open, and let me know??  Anything published around the 1920s (shortly before or after is fine) which isn’t high modernist – oh, and is British – would be absolutely wonderful.

Thanks, folks!