Juliet Nicolson | The Spectator columnists & writers

A call to farms: how a London barrister rediscovered her agricultural roots

Farming threaded its way through the fields, mud, hedgerows and lifeblood of the people who made up Sarah Langford’s childhood. But her grandfather, ‘an oak of a man’ with his high-waisted trousers and ‘smelling of butter, honey and dust’, occupies no romantic sepia image in her memory. A tenant farmer, proud to have provided for the local Hampshire population during the second world war, he remains in the author’s mind a figure unfaded in achievement and identity. Having spent her early adult years as a successful London-based barrister, Langford and her husband were bringing up their two young sons with hard pavement beneath their feet until a sudden job loss and a wipe-out fire changed their lives. The family’s arrival ‘by accident’ to manage a small Suffolk farm coincided with a national farming revolution taking place, even within the rich, pliable fields surrounding their newly rented cottage.

A vroom of one’s own: how I loved my old Mini

Almost 100 years ago the writer Virginia Woolf advised women to find themselves a room of their own: a refuge away from the busy, crowding demands of life, where they could focus instead on themselves and write, think, be. At a time of austerity, when space is at an expensive premium and when post-pandemic empty nests have been re-occupied by returning offspring and spare rooms newly identified as shared office space, I have found an alternative sanctuary. For the past 20 years or so my refuge was my car, acquired with the first real money I ever earned as a writer. My Mini offered me an unconditional escape during the milestones, the turbulence, the highs and lows of two decades. It was an unchanging place of stability and comfort, seeing me through the challenge of house moves, of becoming successively an orphan, a wife (for the second time) and a grandmother.

Abandoned for a bogus guru – Lily Dunn’s harrowing family memoir

Sins of My Father begins with an ending. Describing her 61-year-old parent’s final desperate flight from a life of vibrant glitter, creativity and affluence, Lily Dunn reveals the extent to which it was simultaneously riddled with devastating addiction. After alcoholism, drugs, money and sex played their destructive role, her father (who is never given a first name) died incontinent, with shoes that ‘let the rain in’, having subsisted on a diet of vodka and scones and, due to the removal of all his teeth, with a mouth that had ‘turned in on itself, a perpetual downward curve of misery’, a smile reversed. Many years earlier the six-year-old Lily was seen to ‘forget’ her smile when the godlike paternal figure of her universe abandoned her, along with her mother, brother and the family home in London, to join his own god-figure in a commune in India.

My mother’s secret life was a Dickensian horror story

What happens to a child raised without love? This is the agonising question that the American lawyer Justine Cowan braces herself to address in a memoir that seeks to explain her relationship with Eileen, her monster of a mother. As her parent’s gaunt figure lay in hospital, vanishing within the fog of a disease that had robbed her of ‘a few words here, a memory there’, Justine forced herself to say the words that she thought her mother wanted to hear. However, long devoid of empathy for someone whose behaviour had baffled, undermined and almost destroyed her, Justine knew a false expression of love was ‘balm for a dying old woman’. Continuously held up as inadequate, thoughtless and ungenerous, and forced to wear a strange, shapeless, brown serge shift because she was so ‘fat’, Justine’s Californian childhood had revolved around a regime of music and elocution lessons, diets, and discipline designed to emulate her mother’s bemusingly hazy aristocratic upbringing in Britain.

Diplomatic daughters go behind the scenes at Yalta

From Downing Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, history’s powerful inter-family influencers, whether spouses or children, have long operated behind weighty political front doors. With an unerring eye for the revealing detail, Catherine Grace Katz has uncovered a fascinating generational back-story to the Yalta summit of February 1945. The three varyingly spirited daughters of Churchill, Roosevelt and Averell Harriman who accompanied their world-leading fathers to the freezing bleakness of the Crimea to thrash out terms for ending the second world war all played their crucial role. As Churchill and his second daughter Sarah crossed the Crimean steppe to the sulphurous muddy peninsula in the Black Sea they drove through countryside where ‘nearly all the buildings lay in scorched ruins’.

Bringing up Benzene: Charlie Gilmour adopts a magpie

One day a baby bird falls from its nest into an oily scrapyard in Bermondsey, south London and seems unlikely to survive. As the writer Charlie Gilmour and his set-designer fiancée Janina (Yana) find themselves scrutinised by the tiny creature’s ‘gemstone eyes’ they become caught up in an unexpected urge to save the fledgling’s life. As part of the unglamorous, much maligned, even feared Corvid species, Charlie’s foundling magpie, with its sinister ‘undertaker tails’ is not an obvious pet. And yet Charlie has ‘never felt so seen by an animal’. Growing out of this strange first encounter is a magical book of exhilarating complexity, the story of blood, bird shit, tears and hope. They name the bird Benzene, after the iridescent blue and gold coat that is reminiscent of the petrochemicals into which it had originally tumbled.

A passionate wartime love story is rescued from oblivion

Once in a while, just at the right moment, a truly gorgeous real-life love story appears out of the blue, or in this case out of a chance purchase on eBay. Thanks to a serendipitous sequence of connections, including a perspicacious dealer and a fast-moving literary agent, the wonderful (and super-latively edited) seat-of-the-pants romance of Eileen Alexander and fellow Cambridge student Gershon Ellenbogen has been saved from oblivion. Having survived a serious car accident on the eve of the second world war with her only-just-platonic friend Gershon at the wheel, Eileen begins writing him some of wartime’s funniest, most unexpected and possibly unintentionally sexiest letters as she reports on her convalescence.

Beyond SAD

As travel writer, nature writer, memory retriever and, I would add, prose-poet of mesmerising lyricism, Horatio Clare is a celebrant and observer of what is lovely, less lovely and sometimes, thankfully, absurd in the world. But Clare has come to fear winter. Recently the season has sapped his emotional and creative energy, masking his joy in living things, rarely in mankind but in everything that might alert him to the vibrancy and beauty of a wintry countryside. He has not always felt this way, but over the past few years, life in the north of England — amid the increasing absence of light, the claustrophobia of the Yorkshire moors and the relentless black rain that ‘makes you feel as if you are living in a tunnel under the sea’ — has led him to wrestle with something more challenging than persistent seasonal affective disorder.

Listing or sinking?

The arrival at a new foreign posting for a junior diplomat’s wife in the first half of the last century was no glamorous picnic, as she grappled with a ceremonial sword in a golf bag, three months supply of toothpaste, a crate of hot water bottles and enough safety pins for every emergency. Born in 1915, and having lived in Brussels, Paris, Latvia, Persia and China as a diplomat’s daughter, Elisabeth Knatchbull-Hugessen, aged 24, married Gerry Young, a man from her father’s profession. With marriage she continued the familiar routine of packing and unpacking, and arriving at, and departing from, different countries. As the unpaid ‘two-for-the-price-of-one’, she accompanied Gerry on postings to 1940s Spain during the aftershock of the Civil War; to Beirut in 1944, riddled with Anglo-French tensions; to exotic but politically riven Rio in 1947; and finally to the glamour of Paris in 1956.

Listen with Auntie

The camouflage-painted, smoke-blackened entrance to London’s 1940s Broadcasting House, moated with sandbags and battered by bombs, provided its staff with a refuge from attack. Inside, a gender-segregating blanket divided the employees’ emergency dormitory in two. But such propriety masked the energy, idiosyncrasy and influence that ballooned within the Portland Place walls during the wartime years. From the morning of 3 September 1939, when Neville Chamberlain used the wireless to announce that Britain was at war with Germany, the same day that the Alexandra Palace indefinitely shut down all television broadcasting, radio became the nation’s indispensable source of up-to-the-minute information. Although the Houses of Parliament and London’s poshest clubs had initially banned the use of the relatively newfangled machine, at the outbreak of war Britain’s wireless listeners numbered around 40 million (if you included those who listened in pubs) out of a population of 48 million.

The best Brontë

Fans of the novels and poems written by the sibling inhabitants of Haworth Parsonage always have a Top Brontë. Fame-seeking Charlotte and mysteriously reclusive Emily usually grab the limelight. My father reread Emily’s only novel every five years, annotating his student copy of Wuthering Heights and monitoring his opinions depending on how his own love life was going. He shared his choice with the playwright and journalist Samantha Ellis, until the day she read Anne’s final letter, and was taken aback as its sudden significance ‘catches at my heart’, making her wonder about the less wowed, less known, youngest sister. This wonderful biography begins at a disadvantage. All but five of Anne’s letters are missing.

The world in limbo

In 1919 the economist and sometime prophet John Maynard Keynes left the glittering ballroom of Versailles feeling profoundly despondent. The treaty that determined the political geography of a postwar world inspired in him a fearful sense of inevitability. The punitive conditions imposed on Germany would be too harsh for the country to tolerate for long. One junior delegate in Paris observed: ‘There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed with the terms.’ This was a world not only united by the devastating results of the Spanish ’flu epidemic, responsible for the deaths of five times as many as had lost their lives in the war, but by political and religious fragmentation that was already endemic.

More sinned against than sinning

The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock with fever but also with fear. Would the jury, assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpredecentally sensational two-week trial, find him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or, instead, stark raving mad? Elizabeth Foyster, a historian and senior lecturer at Clare College, Cambridge, was alerted to this enthralling, almost unbelievable true story with the caveat that the vastness of the material in Lambeth Palace archives concerning a scarcely remembered trial of a hugely wealthy, relatively obscure aristocrat had deterred anyone else from attempting to make sense of it.

Great halls, last balls

Contrary to popular myth, the exuberant flame of life in the English country house was not extinguished by tears at the end of the Great War. And in his deliciously jaunty and wonderfully knowledgeable book, Adrian Tinniswood, social historian and country house authority, also upturns the story that huge numbers of Britain’s loveliest houses disappeared in the 1920s and 1930s, either through lack of heirs, despair, neglect or the stranglehold of taxation. He describes how instead, with ‘new aesthetics and new social structures’, the clubby, elitist, joyful prewar way of life adapted and became even more vibrant after the Armistice. In part, the yearning for a sense of rootedness had become more urgent than ever.

A box of delights | 11 February 2016

How could you possibly justify a whole book about buttons? How could the mention of a humble wooden toggle, a diamond clasp, a ‘blue side buckle’ inspire such an unusual and irresistibly delightful account of more than a century’s worth of women’s lives? You might wonder. But as Lynn Knight sorts her way through her Victorian grandmother Annie’s old treasures, a rich hoard of buttons of infinite shapes, sizes and textures, all packed into an old sweet tin, the smell of the lemon-scented geranium in Annie’s house comes hurtling through the door of her mind and returns her with a technicolour clatter to childhood. This is a book to make you smile, a story luminous with nostalgia. Knight discovers that the handling of a button, the sight of a button, the sound of the rattle of a button, revives whole landscapes of memory.

Sex, rebellion, ambition, prejudice: the story of 1950s women has it all

Although the young women of the 1950s hovered on the cusp of change, many did not know it. Valerie Gisborn was the exuberant 15-year-old daughter of ‘a sharp-tempered, anti-social’ mother riddled with ‘neurotic restrictiveness’. But Valerie had fallen in love. She had met Brian in 1949 at the local ballroom in Leicester, her sole permissible social excursion of the week. Prevented from continuing her education by parents who insisted she earn her living at the city’s knitwear factory, Valerie’s early ambition to start her own business was crushed by the demotivating monotony of her job. Romance offered an emotional if not a physical escape. But the humiliating slap in the face that Mrs Gisborn gave Valerie when she spotted Brian kissing her in the street is as shocking to read about as it must have been to receive.

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