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A Very Notting Hill Revolution

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Launching a literary journal in 1974, it turns out, was not all that different to launching one in 2020. You needed two conditions: a pool of talented writers and money.

For Emma Tennant, the descendant of Scottish aristocrats, there was no problem fulfilling the first condition. “I’ve just met Jimmy Ballard,” she writes on the first page of The Burnt Diaries, her account of running a small literary magazine while embarking on a torturous affair (is there any other?) with the poet Ted Hughes, then widely seen as complicit in Sylvia Plath’s suicide.

“Don’t Talk About Sylvia.”

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‘If I left England,’ Ted says, and chooses the most melodious of his many tones of voice to deliver the punchline, ‘I have a feeling England would collapse. We’re a little tribe here, you know, with the Queen looking after us. Where would I go?’

The Quickest Way to Lose Money

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The art director Julien Rothenstein talks about the trials and tribulations of designing a literary journal in 1970s Britain. What were your first impressions of Emma Tennant? Julian Rothenstein: After I met Emma, within three days I was driving around in her ancient Mercedes Benz with The Supremes blasting out of the sound system. I […]

Keep Out

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Back in early spring, when morgues in Italy were running out of space, and people were still coming to blows over toilet paper at the supermarket, Iain McKell returned to the fisherman’s cottage he was renting in Weymouth, an English seaside resort, to find a note pushed through his door: “You should not be in Weymouth, go back to where you live.”

Ten Timeless Beach Reads

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From André Leon Talley’s The Chiffon Trenches to Emily Henry’s aptly-named rom-com, Beach Read, there are plenty of just-published books that are ripe for reading poolside, preferably with a daiquiri in hand. But there are also page-turning reads that never get old, some even attaining the venerable status of literary classic. We plundered the One […]

Ten Books Chosen by Ten Black Notables from Lupita Nyong’o to Ta-Nehisi Coates

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In this tragic year in which the failures of the America’s promise to its citizen have been made abundantly clear, we have looked in our archives to identify ten books by Black writers chosen by Black notables. All should be required reading.

The 1970s Book Club is Here

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Vote for ten books you want to read (or reread) from the year in which the Concord made it’s maiden flight,  the Beatles disbanded, and Apollo 13 aborted its mission to the moon.   Last year we launched our first book club, reading 10 books first published in 1969. This year we’re moving on by […]

Children’s Author of the Month: Wanda Gag

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About the time that A.A.Milne began writing his tales of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin, and 12 years before the arrival of Curious George, the Minnesotan artist Wanda Gag, the daughter of impoverished immigrants from Bohemia, was quietly, almost inadvertently, launching a revolution in book publishing. Her first title, Millions of Cats, the oldest […]