Precipice by Robert Harris

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is a fascinating window into what feels very much like a lost world. The world of Edwardian Britain, of house-parties and of decadence and entitlement.

It is an age where the political class was a breed of amateurs. No 10 is still primarily a home, a residence, not an office with a flat attached. The letters Asquith writes are extra-ordinary, as is their survival which allows them to provide the factual core around which Harris spins this tale.

It is interesting to have this perspective on Churchill and his association with the failure of Gallipoli, not the hero of the Second World War, although in many ways Harris hints that the characteristics that undid Churchill then would be the same characteristics that actually shaped his later triumph.

But I think we should focus our attention on Venetia Stanley, surrounded by a cast of powerful men, she is the one the shines off the page. She has a life of the highest privilege, and yet as a women in that era there were constraints on her – her class clearly gave her agency far greater that most women around her, but even so there were limitations on her.

Although the greatest marvel is perhaps the postal service, that they were not exchanging daily letters but multiple letters a day – almost unimaginable as letter writing fades for us as other instance modes of communication dominate and the postal service limps and whimpers in the background.

Winning Words Chosen by William Sieghart

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This collection from 2012 brings together a wide selection of poems – many familiar but good to read them again…

I put tabs in:

The Hug by Thom Gunn

Hinterhof by James Fenton

Voice by Ann Sansom

Waving by Pat Boran

My Brilliant Image by Hafez

Two Cures for Love by Wendy Cope

Envying Owen Beattie by Sheenagh Pugh

The Way Things Are by Roger McGough, mainly for the line “A drowning Dadaist with not appreciate | the concrete lifebelt.”

The Trees by Philip Larkin

Count That Day Lost by George Elliot

Pushing Forty by Alison Fell

Church Going by Philip Larkin

Happiness by Raymond Carver

Killing Time by Alan Bennett

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

At a 100 small pages of large print this has been labelled a novella, but without wishing to split hairs is more a short story, or perhaps even the sketch for something intended to be worked up into the developed version – did Bennett send it to his publisher with a note asking them what they thought of the thing he was working on and rather than providing feedback they just forwarded it to the printer.

The ensemble cast is made up of a rich mix of characters, and each gets a moment to shine. The trip to the crematorium which the residents of Hill Topp treat like a bunch of wayward school children is probably the strongest scene, and the distinctions between Hill Topp and Low Moor provide some tension. Woodruff the flasher and his gay Son provide a lot of potential that never really gets unpacked. And then the arrival of COVID seems underplayed. Which when the mystery of Jigsaw-puzzler Miss Rathbone’s past is finally revealed it doesn’t have the impact it should.

As an aside, it credits the endpapers as being “adapted from a French Petit Pois label c.1920” which is not something you see everyday, I didn’t know the Petit Pois labels were a “thing”, but a search quickly found some suggestions, of which this one was probably the referenced inspiration https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/a0/bd/3ca0bdf0b2d4bc021504a9c4afd37de0.jpg

Arrows of Desire by Nick Job

https://the-modernist.org/collections/books

At some point shortly after Rail Express Systems had been sold and become part EWS I acquired a copy of their Design Manual, and it was an epiphany when this kid that liked trains saw clearly the beauty of good design, especially when applied across an entire corporate identity.

In the era of privatisation the many examples of poor liveries and branding on the railway have taught us how much of an achievement the BR Corporate Identity really was – it was not an inevitability. We also see that in this “digital” age everyone can be their own graphic designer – central control of a corporate identity is harder and harder to maintain.

I was in two minds about whether I should get this book, owning a copy of the Facsimile of the Corporate Identity Manual, that Nick Job had a hand in bringing to publication, and original ring-binder volumes of the same, plus more than one book on BR’s design history.

But no regrets in getting my sister to give it to me as Christmas present – the focus in on the Double Arrow, its use and abuse not only by BR but as the ongoing symbol of the railway in this country.

Nick shares his knowledge with a wit that would draw in even those (peculiar people) not already obsessed by trains and / or mid-20th Century design.

He She They Us edited by Charlie Castelletti

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers 

This is a greatest hits collection of Queer Poems, printed in generous print allowing the poems to breathe on the page.

Lots of familiar names in the collection, indeed a decent number of poems I have read elsewhere, by that Fourteen Poems or poets on pamphlets and collections.

A lot of tags in this, including…

A Room of Firsts and Skin Tags by Karl Knights

Invisible Boy by Matthew Haigh

Girl Guides by Jo Morris Dixon

Words and Music by Colette Bryce

The Moon is Trans by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

An ode to trans bodies by Cal Brantley

On the Run by Nicoletta Poungias

Queer Magic by Theo Parish

Not Quite Yet by Chloe Smith

The Law Concerning Mermaids by Kei Miller

We Are Librarian by So Mayer Briefly, there were books by Jessica Verdi

Here Be by Harry Josephine Giles

Pride by Travis Alabanza

The Unstill Ones by Miller Oberman

These play with myth – which is very much what I am into at the moment – I felt that the collection built on itself. It wasn’t a single poem that got to you but the growing sense of the body of work.

I liked that it took English myth as a starting point – something that has often been sidelined.

Roundabout of Death by Faysal Khartash

Buy it from Bookshop.org and support local booksellers  

This is a mix of dramatic events and the absolutely everyday – and I think that is one of its most important messages – in the midst of Syria being torn apart people still had lives they were living – shopping to buy, washing to do, etc.

We follow an ordinary man just trying to get through life – this is not a story about the high drama and heroic acts of war, it is the other side of that story – but I would say no less heroic.