Issue 9

M A G A Z I N EAUTUMN 2010 / ISSUE 9 £3.50

VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICSDonna Coonan on the art of rediscovering lost literary gems

CHURCHILL ASWARLORDby Max Hastings

VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICS

SLEEPERSIN THE STACKS

CHURCHILL ASWARLORD

SLEEPERSIN THE STACKSAndrew Lycett on the Library’s espionage collection

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE / ISSUE 9

THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE 3

CONTENTS

5 EDITORIAL LETTER

6 CONTRIBUTORS

9 OVER MY SHOULDERPeter Blegvad describes, in words and pictures, his eccentric enjoyment of theLibrary’s tomes

10 READING LISTBestselling novelist Sarah Waters on thetitles that she found inspiring while researching The Little Stranger

12 ANNUAL LECTURE‘Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord,1940–1945’ by Max Hastings

15 VIRAGO MODERN CLASSICSDonna Coonan and Lennie Goodings offer aglimpse behind the scenes at this enduringlysuccessful publishing list

18 DE GAULLE AND ST JAMES’SJonathan Fenby on the surprising level ofFrench political and social activity around St James’s during the Second World War

22 HIDDEN CORNERSAndrew Lycett traces the history of the espionage novel, and reveals the highlightsof the Library’s collection

25 THE TRADESMAN’S TALEJohnny de Falbe describes a typical day atthe John Sandoe bookshop

26 MEMBERS’ NEWS

31 RESTAURANT LISTINGS

The cartoonist and songwriterPeter Blegvad has an addiction that is only satisfied among the bookstacks...

9

Donna Coonan describes the literary detective approach sheadopts when tracking down forgotten gems for Virago ModernClassics, and Lennie Goodingsrecounts the list's early successes

15

Charles de Gaulle set up the FreeFrench headquarters in CarltonGardens in 1940. The vibrant community in exile also establishedother local bases, from dazzlingjazz nights in the French Club tomore sinister interrogation centres,as Jonathan Fenby reveals.

18

Max Hastings analyses Churchill’srole as a war leader, and arguesthat, despite the criticisms thathave been levelled at him,Churchill’s overwhelming strengthsmerit his position as the country’sfinest warlord

12

Courtesy of St Stephens Club SW1

EDITORIAL LETTER


The boxes of earplugs have gone, and so too the partitions, hard hats

and strange banging noises. We can rejoice at having our lovely

Library back and, more than that, in its most spectacular form for

many a year. I hope, however, that very soon we will take our new

Issue Hall, lightwell, Art Room and all the rest for granted, for above

all the purpose of the Library is as a home for the book, for creativity

and contemplation, for the generation of ideas and inspiration.

That, as reflected in Peter Blegvad’s cover illustration, is very much

the theme of this issue. Mankind has evolved with books but also, as

our illustrator writes in his Over My Shoulder, with the smell of them, which develops with age rather

as with fine wines. Sarah Waters tells us of the books she used while researching The Little Stranger,

her supernatural novel published last year, while from her publisher, Virago, Donna Coonan writes

of what it is like to be an editor of a modern classics list. A different sort of spooky connection is made

by Andrew Lycett in his piece about spy books in the Library, while Jonathan Fenby tells us of his

surprise at the breadth and depth of material he found here while researching his new biography of

General Charles de Gaulle.

Do enjoy all of those articles, as well as Max Hastings’s London Library Lecture on Churchill’s war

years, which he gave at the Hay Festival at the beginning of June. But as you are doing so, and letting

ideas and inspirations take flight, I hope you might also find time to look at the Library’s Annual

Report, which has come to you with this magazine, and at my comments about our finances and

membership trends in the Members’ News section on pages 26–30.

As you will see, the loss of Gift Aid relief on subscriptions has persuaded the trustees to end the freeze

on fees introduced last year and to propose an increase of £40 in the annual fee (to £435), an extra

£3.30 per month (to £36.25) if you pay monthly. We are working hard to find new sources of revenue

to make fee rises less necessary in future, two of which are announced on pages 28 and 29, as well

as keeping costs under tight control. Do help us in this effort, if you can, by finding new members,

for each of whom we are offering a £50 discount on your annual subscription. Finally, I hope to see

many of you at the Library’s AGM on 4 November, when we can discuss finances, memberships and

of course books.

Bill EmmottChairman

FROM THE CHAIRMAN

Published on behalf of The London Library by RoyalAcademy Enterprises Ltd. Colour reproduction byadtec. Printed by Tradewinds London. Published28 September 2010 © 2010 The London Library.The opinions in this particular publication do notnecessarily reflect the views of The LondonLibrary. All reasonable attempts have been madeto clear copyright before publication.

Cover ImageHomo Lector by

Peter Blegvad, 2010.© Peter Blegvad.

EditorialPublishersJane Grylls and Kim JennerEditor Mary ScottDesign Joyce MasonProduction Catherine CartwrightResearcher Emily Pierce

Editorial CommitteeDavid BreuerHarry MountPeter ParkerErica Wagner

AdvertisingJane Grylls 020 7300 5661Kim Jenner 020 7300 5658Emily Pierce 020 7300 5675Development Office, The London LibraryLottie Cole 020 7766 4716Aimee Heuzenroeder 020 7766 4734

Magazine feedback and editorial enquiries should be addressed to [email protected]

New Library opening hours from 1 November 2010,see page 30 for details

CONTRIBUTORS

6 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE

Peter Blegvad JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1992

Peter is a writer, illustrator, songwriter, broadcasterand teacher, born in New York City, living inLondon. His comic strip The Book of Leviathan ispublished by Sort Of Books. He is the presidentof the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics and co-hosts the Amateur Enterprises website(amateur.org.uk) with Simon Lucas.

John de Falbe John de Falbe started working at John Sandoe in1986 and became a director in 1989. The bookshop,opened in 1957, is now one of very few independents in central London. Clients includemany London Library members. He has writtenthree novels, and reviews for the Spectator.

Donna Coonan JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2004

Donna Coonan is Commissioning Editor of theVirago Modern Classics, and is always on thelookout for forgotten gems for this well-established, much-loved part of Virago Press.Donna lives in Kent.

Jonathan Fenby JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2004

Jonathan Fenby has edited the Observer andSouth China Morning Post as well as working forthe Economist, Guardian and Independent. Hehas written 14 books, most recently a biographyof Charles de Gaulle.

Max Hastings JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1975

Max Hastings is the author of 20 books, mostrecently Churchill as Warlord (HarperCollins). Asa journalist he reported conflicts around theworld, experiences recounted in his memoirGoing To The Wars. He was editor-in-chief of theDaily Telegraph for nearly ten years, and spent afurther six as editor of the Evening Standard.

Andrew Lycett JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1988

Andrew Lycett is a biographer and critic. After anearly career as a journalist, specialising in foreignaffairs, he has written the lives of several leadingliterary figures, including Ian Fleming, RudyardKipling, Dylan Thomas and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Sarah Waters JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 2010

Sarah Waters was born in Pembrokeshire in 1966.She is the author of Tipping the Velvet, Affinity,Fingersmith, The Night Watch and The LittleStranger. Three of her novels have been shortlistedfor the Man Booker Prize and two have beenshortlisted for the Orange Prize. She lives in London.

Lennie Goodings JOINED THE LIBRARY IN 1994

Lennie Goodings is the Publisher of Virago Press.She is the editor of, among others, Sarah Waters,Sarah Dunant, Gillian Slovo, Linda Grant andNatasha Walters. She oversaw the publicity andmarketing for Virago for ten years, becameEditorial Director in the 1990s, and has beenEditorial Director and Publisher since 1996.

© Susan Greenhill

© Charlie Hopkinson

How frequently do you use the Library?If I don’t satisfy my craving at least twice

a year I become more than usually petulant.

The screen of my e-book reader is meant

to ‘read like paper, even in bright sunlight’.

But it doesn’t smell like paper. Even

spritzed with the fragrance called ‘Smell

of Books’,™ a connoisseur, an addict, like

me isn’t fooled. Small wonder when you

consider that real book odour is a mixture

of dozens of volatiles exhaled by a book’s

constituent materials. Factor in the subtle

scents imparted over the years by greasy

handling, etc., and you’re dealing with a

very complex bouquet.

What distracts you from your work?I try to be discreet about my vice. I find a

quiet spot among the stacks to indulge.

But I’ve seen others at it; I’m not the only

one. This book-sniffer (right) looks like he

might be reading, until he swoons face

down into his monograph.

What do you think is special about theLibrary? What does it mean to you?Book-sniffing has points in common with

wine-tasting. One can speak of the ‘lingering

note of gunsmoke’ in the smell of a book,

for instance, or describe the aroma of another

as having ‘a core of sea-wrack fading to

new-mown hay at the edges’, terms that a

wine-taster might recognise. I think of the

London Library as having an exceptionally

fine cellar, only of books

rather than bottles.

Interviewed in the

Paris Review, Ray

Bradbury says, ‘A

computer does not

smell. There are two

perfumes to a book.

If a book is new it smells great. If a book is

old, it smells even better. It smells like

ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell.’

Amen to that. Have you smelt a book today?

OVER MYSHOULDERPeter Blegvad, cartoonist, songwriter, amateur, celebratesthe olfactory delights of the Library’s stock

Sweetly fragrant

vanillin, aromatic anisol

and fruity almond-like

benzaldehyde ... terpene

compounds, deriving from

rosin ... contribute to the

camphorous woody smell

of books. A mushroom

odour is caused by other,

intensely fragrant

aliphatic alcohols.

(thenakedscientists.com)

‘

’Is there a Library neighbour you dread?Grunters, coughers? (No names!) Library members tend to be tolerant of

eccentricity. No one has yet commented

when I sit down (right) in the Reading

Room and don a blindfold to enhance my

enjoyment of a stack of great-smelling tomes.

Big smeller.

All illustrations © Peter Blegvad 2010.

Book-sniffer.

Blindfolded sniffer.

Formal sniffer.

Small smeller.


© Charlie Hopkinson

READING LIST

BEHIND THE

The novelist Sarah Waters, whose most recent book The LittleStranger was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, describesthe books she found useful in her research

The Little Stranger (2009) is the second of my novels to be set in the 1940s. But where The Night Watch (2006)looked at London life in wartime, The Little Stranger is set just after the war, in a decaying Warwickshire countryhouse whose gentry owners, the Ayreses, are undermined by social changes – and by sinister supernaturalforces in their own home.

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey(London 1948). Fiction.This novel provided the inspiration for

mine, though The Little Stranger quickly

morphed into a very different kind of

book from the one I’d planned. Tey’s tale

of a working-class girl who claims to have

been abducted and held captive by a

middle-class mother and daughter is

compellingly told, and offers a fascinating

– if rather repellent – glimpse of conservative

British anxieties in the face of post-war

transformation.

Private Enterprise by Angela Thirkell(London 1947). Fiction.From the 1930s to the 1960s Angela

Thirkell published almost a novel a year,

most of them light social comedies, and

each one – as Thirkell herself cheerfully

acknowledged – almost identical to the

other. Like Tey’s, her books are insanely

readable but chillingly conservative in

outlook, and gave me an insight into

mid-century middle-class fantasies and

fears. Private Enterprise sees the county

families of ‘Barsetshire’ battling against

increased rationing, the new Labour

government and uppity workers.

Everything to Lose: Diaries 1945 to1960 by Frances Partridge (London 1985).Biog. Partridge.A welcome, liberal antidote to the

snobberies of Thirkell. Partridge, a member

of the Bloomsbury Group, was one of the

great diarists of the twentieth century.

Along with her husband, Ralph, she also

had a genius for friendship, and her

sensitive, lyrical accounts of their

hospitable post-war life at their Wiltshire

home, Ham Spray, are a marvellous,

informative read.

Caves of Ice: Diaries 1946–1947 byJames Lees-Milne (London 1983). Biog.Lees-Milne.More wonderful diaries, this time

detailing Lees-Milne’s travels around the

UK examining the various crumbling

stately piles being offered by their owners

to the newly formed National Trust.

Lees-Milne’s frequently sniffy assessments

of the houses and their inhabitants are

fabulously gossipy – and form a snapshot

of an extraordinary point in British

social history.

England’s Lost Houses: From the Archivesof Country Life by Giles Worsley (London2002). T. England, Castles &c., 4to.This collection of photographs from the

archives of Country Life magazine is full of

beautiful, poignant images of some of the

most elaborate of the country’s lost, grand

houses. Sweeping staircases, cavernous

salons, walled gardens: the rooms and

structures on display here are like so

many ghosts, perpetually gesturing

backwards to a vanished cultural moment.

Worsley’s text offers a great overview and

analysis of the houses’ decline.

The Night Side of Nature by CatherineCrowe (London 1854). R. Spiritualism. I read many books about the paranormal

in my research for The Little Stranger,

and this early, alluringly titled study was

one of the most engaging. It’s a collection

of reports and anecdotes about ‘prophetic

dreams, presentiments, second-sight, and

apparitions’ – all of which, to their respectful

compiler Crowe, provided evidence of a

spiritual realm that contemporary

Victorian science was just on the thrilling

brink of uncovering.

Poltergeist Over England: Three Centuriesof Mischievous Ghosts by Harry Price(London 1945). S. Occult Sciences.Crowe devotes a chapter of her book to

‘The Poltergeist of the Germans’, but by

1945 psychic investigator Harry Price was

patriotically locating ‘the world's most

convincing Poltergeists’ very firmly in

the UK. Price was a great showman, and

this lively survey of three centuries’

worth of poltergeist activity – including

the Stockwell Poltergeist, the Battersea

Poltergeist and the disturbances at Borley

Rectory, ‘the most haunted house in

England’ – is hard to resist.

A Warning to the Curious and Other Ghost Stories by M.R. James(London 1925). Fiction.As well as books about the paranormal,

I read a lot of ghost stories, and M.R.

James’s economical, understated tales

are about as good – and as unsettling –

as ghost stories get. In the title story of

this collection, an antiquarian gets more

than he bargained for when he attempts

to pinch a holy crown from an Anglo-

Saxon grave ...

BOOK

Winston Churchill is a man whom most of

us feel we know almost as well as our

own families, who possesses the most

instantly recognisable voice in history.

To a remarkable degree, even in 2010 the

period of Winston Churchill’s war

leadership continues to define many

British people’s view of our own

country. He was not only the greatest

Englishman but one of the greatest

Anglo-Saxons of the twentieth century,

of all time. Thousands of people of many

nations have recorded encounters.

Yet much remains opaque, because

he wished it thus. Always mindful of his

role as a stellar performer upon the

stage of history, he became supremely so after being elected

Britain’s Prime Minister on 10 May 1940. He kept no diary

because, he observed, to do so would be to expose his follies and

inconsistencies to posterity. His war memoirs are imperfect

history, if often peerless prose. We shall never know with complete

confidence what he thought about many personalities – for instance

Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Field Marshal Alan

Brooke, the King, his cabinet colleagues – because he took care

not to tell us.

As early as 1914, the historian A.G. Gardiner wrote a shrewd

and admiring assessment of the then First Sea Lord. This concluded

equivocally: ‘“Keep your eye on Churchill” should be the watchword

of these days. Remember, he is a soldier first, last and always.

He will write his name big on our future. Let us take care he does

not write it in blood.’

By the time Churchill became Prime Minister, hours after

Hitler launched his blitzkrieg in France, few contemporaries

doubted his genius. He achieved office because even his political

enemies recognised him as a warrior to the roots of his soul. But

colleagues retained deep fears about his erratic and often reckless

conduct. That he would draw his sword to lead a charge was not in

doubt. But whether the outcome would be a triumph to match

Blenheim and Waterloo, or instead a catastrophe, seemed much

less assured.

By Sunday, 19 May, nine days after he took office, it was plain

that the Allied forces in France faced

defeat. General Ironside, head of the

Army, told Secretary for War Anthony

Eden: ‘This is the end of the British

Empire.’ Eden noted: ‘Militarily, I did not

see how he could be gainsaid.’ Yet it was

hard to succumb to despair, when their

leader marvellously sustained his wit.

That same bleak Sunday, the Prime

Minister said wryly to Eden: ‘About time

number 17 turned up, isn’t it?’ The two of

them, at Cannes casino’s roulette wheel

in 1938, had backed the number and

won twice.

Some aspects of the 1940 story are

still scarcely recognised by historians,

never mind the public. Consider, for instance, the second

Dunkirk, no less miraculous than the first. Churchill’s biggest

misjudgement of that period was his decision to send more

troops to France in June after the rescue of nine divisions from

the beaches. When it was suggested that British units should

embark slowly for Cherbourg, since the campaign was obviously

lost, the Prime Minister said: ‘Certainly not. It would look very

bad in history if we were to do any such thing.’ At every turn,

he perceived his own words and actions through the prism of

posterity. He was determined that history should say: ‘He nothing

common did or mean upon that memorable scene.’ Indeed, in

those days Andrew Marvell’s lines on King Charles I’s execution

were much on his lips. Seldom has a great actor on the stage of

human affairs been so mindful of the verdict of future ages.

As for the British and Canadian troops sent to France after

Dunkirk, only the stubborn insistence of their commander,

Alan Brooke, overcame the rash impulsiveness of the Prime

Minister, and made possible the evacuation of almost 200,000

men who would otherwise have been lost. A key point of that

story, and indeed of the whole history of Churchill’s conduct of

the war, is that he possessed an exaggerated faith in the virtue of

boldness. He believed this alone could determine battlefield

outcomes. Himself a hero, he perceived British history as a pageant

in which again and again British pluck had prevailed against odds.

It was a source of despair to his commanders, that he sought to

resurrect the spirit of Crécy and Agincourt against Hitler’s


FINEST YEARSCHURCHILL AS WARLORD, 1940–1945

Winston Churchill gives the V for Victory sign. © IWM.

LONDON LIBRARY ANNUAL LECTURE, HAY FESTIVAL, 5.6.10MAX HASTINGS


resurrect the spirit of Crécy and Agincourt against Hitler’s

Wehrmacht, probably the most formidable fighting force the world

has ever seen. This was more than his Army could accomplish.

The image of British unity and staunchness in 1940 is broadly

valid. It is not diminished by recognising that more than a few of

the traditional ruling class thought the only rational option after

Dunkirk was to make peace. There was also some defeatism lower

in the social scale. Consider this extract from the diary of a woman

named Muriel Green, who worked at her family’s Norfolk garage.

At a local tennis match on 23 May with a grocer’s deliveryman

and a schoolmaster, the deliveryman said: ‘I think they’re going

to beat us, don’t you?’ ‘Yes,’ said the schoolmaster. He added

that as the Nazis were very keen on sport, he expected ‘we’d still be

able to play tennis if they did win’. Muriel Green wrote: ‘J said Mr

M was saying we should paint a swastika under the door knocker

ready. We all agreed we shouldn’t know what to do if they invade.

After that we played tennis, very hard exciting play for 2 hrs, and

forgot all about the war.’

It was fortunate that, while the horror of Britain’s predicament

was apparent to those in high places, Churchill was visibly exalted

by it. At Chequers on the warm summer night of 15 June 1940,

Jock Colville described how, as tidings of gloom were constantly

received, the Prime Minister displayed the highest spirits,

‘repeating poetry, dilating on the drama … offering everybody

cigars, and spasmodically murmuring: “Bang, bang, bang, goes

the farmer’s gun, run rabbit, run rabbit, run, run, run”.’ In the

early hours of morning when US ambassador Joseph Kennedy

telephoned, the Prime Minister unleashed a torrent of rhetoric

about America’s opportunity to save civilisation. Then he held

forth to his staff about Britain’s growing fighter strength, ‘told one

or two dirty stories’, and departed for bed at 1.30 am, saying to his

staff, ‘Goodnight, my children’. At least some of this must have

been masquerade. But it was a masquerade of awesome nobility.

Nineteen-forty was a bad year for telling the truth. That is to

say, it was hard for even good, brave and honourable British people to

know whether they better served their country by voicing private

thoughts, allowing their brains to function, or by keeping silent.

Logic decreed that Britain had not the smallest chance of winning

the war in the absence of American participation, which remained

unlikely. Churchill knew this as well as any man. Yet he and his

supporters believed that the consequences of accepting defeat were

so dreadful, so absolute, that it was essential to fight on regardless.

Posterity has heaped admiration upon the grandeur of this

commitment. Yet, at the time, it demanded from intelligent men and

women a suspension of reason that some rejected. Captain Ralph

Edwards, director of Naval operations at the Admiralty, wrote in

his diary on 23 June: ‘Our cabinet with that idiot Winston in charge

changes its mind every 24 hours … I’m rapidly coming to the

conclusion that we’re so inept we don’t deserve to win & indeed

are almost certain to be defeated. We never do anything right.’

Churchill’s sublime achievement was to rouse the most ordinary

people to extraordinary perceptions of their destiny. For instance,

Eleanor Silsby, an elderly psychology lecturer living in south

London, wrote to a friend in America on 23 July 1940: ‘I won’t go

on about the war. But I just want to say that we are proud to have

the honour of fighting alone for the things that matter much more

than life and death. It makes me hold my chin high to think, not

just of being English, but of having been chosen to come at this

hour for this express purpose of saving the world … I should never

have thought that I could approve of war … There is surprisingly

little anger or hate in this business – it is just a job that has to be

done … This is Armageddon.’ One morning at Downing Street,

private secretary John Martin opened the door to a woman caller

who wished to offer a $300,000 pearl necklace to the Exchequer.

Told of this, Churchill quoted the poetry of Macaulay: ‘Romans

in Rome’s quarrel,/ Spared neither land nor gold.’

After the fall of France in June 1940, circumstances favoured

Britain more than is sometimes recognised. Defence of the home

island was the one contingency for which the country was well

fitted. The British were fantastically lucky to have got their Army

out of France with only 11,000 dead, against at least 50,000 French

soldiers. The speed of Hitler’s triumph perversely worked in

Britain’s favour. The longer the French campaign had continued,

the heavier must have been the losses – for the same inevitable

outcome. Thereafter, the RAF was well equipped and organised

to meet a bomber assault. It’s amazing that so many people,

including the chiefs of staff, were in such panicky mood that they

expected Hitler to launch an invasion without notice. This would

almost certainly have proved suicidal in the face of a Royal Navy,

which was immensely powerful, outnumbering the Germans by

ten to one. More even than the RAF, the Home Fleet offered a

decisive deterrent to invasion.

Churchill himself, of course, bestrides the story in all his

joyous splendour. It is hard for us, as it was for his contemporaries,

to conceive what it was like to carry the burden of sole responsibility

for preserving European civilisation. MP Harold Nicolson wrote

of the Prime Minister’s remoteness from ordinary mortals. His

eyes were ‘glaucous, vigilant, angry, combative, visionary and

tragic … the eyes of a man who is much preoccupied and is

unable to rivet his attention on minor things … But in another

sense they are the eyes of a man faced by an ordeal or tragedy, and

combining vision, truculence, resolution and great unhappiness.’

There were moments when Churchill was oppressed by loneliness

that only his old friend Max Beaverbrook seemed able to assuage.

But the exaltation of playing out his role gave way, at times, to a

despondency that required all his powers to overcome. In 1940, he

sustained his spirit wonderfully well, but in the later war years he

became prone to outbursts of self-pity, often accompanied by tears.

Acute awareness of the Prime Minister’s load caused his staff

to forgive his outbursts of intemperance. In small things as in

great, he won their hearts. ‘What a beautiful handwriting,’ he told

Jock Colville when the young private secretary showed him a

dictated telegram, ‘but, my dear boy, when I say stop you must

write stop and not just put a blob.’ One day in his car he saw a

queue outside a shop and told his detective to get out and discover

what people were waiting for. When the inspector returned and

reported that they hoped to buy seed for their pet birds, his private


reported that they hoped to buy seed for their pet birds, his private

secretary recorded: ‘Winston wept.’ Most great men, including

Roosevelt, are essentially cold figures, even if they possess a

capacity to simulate warmth. In this as in so much else, Churchill

was most unusual. Though he was a supreme egoist capable of

extraordinary ruthlessness, he also possessed a humanity that

extended even to the people of Germany, although he endorsed the

policy of area bombing. If he had been a less profoundly lovable

man, some of his mistaken enthusiasms and strategic follies might

have been more harshly judged by posterity, as well by his colleagues.

Churchill never doubted his own genius – subordinates often

wished that he would. He believed that destiny had marked him

to enter history as the saviour of Western civilisation, and this

conviction coloured his smallest words and deeds. When a Dover

workman said to his mates as Churchill passed, ‘There goes the

bloody British Empire,’ the Prime Minister was enchanted. ‘Very

nice,’ he lisped to Jock Colville, his face wreathed in smiles. But

he preserved an awareness of himself as mortal clay that touched

the hearts of those who served him, just as the brilliance of his

conversation won their veneration.

The Victorian statesman Benjamin Disraeli said: ‘Men should

always be difficult. I can’t bear men who come and dine with

you when you want them.’ He meant ‘great men’, of course, and

Churchill with his tempestuous moods and unsocial hours

certainly fulfilled this requirement. Alan Brooke was once outraged

when Churchill shouted down the telephone to him: ‘Get off,

you fool!’ It required intercession by the staff to soothe the General’s

ruffled feathers with the explanation that the Prime Minister was

in bed when he called Brooke, and had been telling Smokey the

black cat to stop biting his toes.

The most damaging criticism of Churchill was that he was

intolerant of evidence unless this conformed to his own instinct,

and was sometimes wilfully irrational. Displays of supreme

wisdom were interspersed with outbursts of childish petulance.

Yet when the arguments were over, the shouting done, on important

matters he almost invariably deferred to reason. In much the same

way, subordinates exasperated by his excesses in ‘normal’ times –

insofar as war admitted any – marvelled at the manner in which he

rose to crisis. Disasters inspired responses that compelled recognition

of his greatness. One of his staff wrote of ‘the ferment of ideas,

the persistence in flogging proposals, the goading of commanders

to attack – these were all expressions of that blazing, explosive

energy without which the vast machine, civilian as well as military,

could not have been moved forward so steadily or steered through

so many setbacks and difficulties’.

Once the Battle of Britain was won, the foremost challenge

was to find another field upon which to fight. Thus Churchill owed

a perverse debt to Mussolini, for bringing Italy into the war. The

Italian Army confronted the British on the borders of its African

empire. It would be wrong to suggest that the Italians were bound

to be a pushover for the much smaller British forces in the Middle

East, but they were not remotely in the same class as the Germans.

If the Italian Army had not been available to play 45 minutes each

way on the other side, how else could the British Army have been

employed? As it was, in 1940–1 British morale and prestige briefly

soared, amid a succession of striking victories in Libya and Abyssinia.

But then, of course, the Germans and Japanese entered the

reckoning. From April 1941 onwards, the British Army suffered a

run of defeats – in Libya, Greece, Crete, in Malaya and Burma

and then at Tobruk – which continued until November 1942.

Churchill found himself reduced almost to despair by the sense

that it would avail Britain little if he himself was a hero, if the

civilian population kept its nerve and the Royal Navy held open

the sea lanes, if Britain’s soldiers could not deliver.

To prevail over the Germans, for the rest of the war British –

and American – forces required a handsome superiority of men,

tanks and air support. The Army’s institutional weakness was

overcome only because vastly superior allied resources became

available, and the Red Army killed two million German soldiers.

The British and American peoples owe a large debt to Churchill

for persuading President Roosevelt to join the Mediterranean

campaign in November 1942, and delaying D-Day until it could

be launched on overwhelmingly favourable terms in June 1944.

But in consequence it became one of the cruel ironies of the war,

that most of the bloody business of destroying the tyranny of

Hitler was done by the tyranny of Stalin, with only late and

limited assistance from the armies of the democracies.

By 1944–5, with Russian and American dominance of the

Grand Alliance painfully explicit, Churchill seemed to many of

his colleagues old, exhausted and often wrong-headed. He had

wielded more power than any other British Prime Minister had

known, or would know again. In 1938, he seemed a man out of

his time, a patrician imperialist whose vision was rooted in

Britain’s Victorian past. By 1945, while this remained true, and

goes far to explain his own disappointments, it had not prevented

him from becoming the greatest war leader his country had ever

known. Himself believing Britain great, for a last brief season he

was able to make her so.

Subordinates exasperated

by Churchill’s excesses in

“normal” times marvelled

at the manner in which he

rose to crisis

‘

’

Thanks to the Imperial War Museum for their kind permission touse the photo of Winston Churchill. Their Churchill Lecture Seriesruns until March 2011, and the exhibition Undercover: Life inChurchill’s Bunker until the end of 2013 (iwm.org.uk/churchill).

This is an abridged version of the lecture. The full transcript is

available from the Magazine section of the Library's website.

ince the Virago Modern Classics list was founded in

1978, its aims have been to celebrate women’s lives,

literature and history, and to challenge the sometimes

narrow definition of a classic. This has led to a broad

spectrum of books that we are proud to publish: from

the best of twentieth-century fiction to wonderful volumes of

comedy, letter-writing and memoir, to popular novels that were

the bestsellers of their day.

Our list includes the stylish social satire of Edith Wharton,

the pyrotechnic imagination of Angela Carter, the atmospheric,

murderous stories of Daphne du Maurier,

and the elegiac beauty of Willa Cather.

Other favourites include Elizabeth

Taylor, a writer of great subtlety and

humour, who is a genius at capturing

turbulent emotions that run beneath

a calm façade; Zora Neale Hurston’s

Their Eyes Were Watching God (first

published 1937), a beautiful, trail-

blazing book that is one of the most

important in the canon of African–

American literature; Marilyn French’s

The Women’s Room (1977), a landmark

in feminist literature; and Vera Brittain’s

Testament of Youth (1933), a searing

account of the devastation of the First

World War from a woman’s point of

view. Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of

the Dolls (1966) might not be what

traditionalists would call a classic, but

it is an era-defining book that hailed a

new genre of mass-market fiction and is

still often referred to as the bestselling

novel of all time. Its continued appeal

cannot be denied.

Being the editor of a classics list is

not quite the same as being the editor of a list publishing

contemporary books. Instead of being sent hoards of submissions

by literary agents, I usually have to discover books in other ways.

The Virago Modern Classics list is very collaborative – titles are

often recommended by authors, colleagues or by our readers who

regularly contact us with suggestions. That has been the case

ever since the list began. I think of my job as a little like being

a literary detective: I keep my ear to the ground for writers or

books that are out of print but well regarded, then I have to find

the book. Once read, if I think it will be enjoyed by a modern

audience and successfully published by

us, I attempt to track down the author,

agent or estate to find out who holds

the rights. So there is a fair amount of

sleuthing involved, both before and

after the book is read. I also spend a lot

of time considering who might be a good

introducer for the work, as that can be

a very effective way of relaunching the

book: a reader might not have heard of

Elizabeth Taylor or Mary McCarthy,

but if a popular author like Hilary

Mantel or Candace Bushnell writes

the introduction, it serves as a great

personal recommendation. After that,

my role is much like that of any other

editor – negotiating an advance, making

an offer, working with the design team to

create the right cover, liaising with the

publicity and sales departments, etc. It is

the act of discovering ‘lost’ books and

giving them a new life that makes my

job feel unique.

A question I am often asked by

readers is why we changed the beloved

green jackets. I look back on them

fondly, but we have to keep in mind a contemporary audience

S


VIRAGOMODERN CLASSICSDonna Coonan describes her work at Virago Modern Classics, animprint now in its fourth decade and still dedicated to rediscoveringlost literary gems

Antonia White’s Frost in May, 1978 Virago edition.

fondly, but we have to keep in mind a contemporary audience

and we’d be doing the books a disservice if we didn’t. More books

are published every year, and there has never been as much

competition to make a title stand out. Therefore we have to look

at what design will attract the most readers – we simply cannot

keep a book in print if it doesn’t sell. The green jackets were

once fresh and exciting and were integral to establishing the

list’s identity, but we have to move with the times, and so the

decision was taken to create a distinctive look to complement

each individual author’s style rather than following a generic

design. The great majority of the list is from the twentieth centu-

ry, so these books are accessible, enjoyable and relevant to

readers today, not dreary, earnest old tomes – they are modern

classics, after all, and need to look vibrant. In addition, our titles

are usually placed in the main fiction department of a book-

shop, classics sections having become more scarce, so they have

to hold their own not only against other classics, but against

front-list titles.

Recent notable successes have included Mary McCarthy’s

seminal novel The Group (1963); Barbara Pym, whose modern

champions have included Alexander McCall Smith, Jilly

Cooper and Salley Vickers, all three of whom have contributed

new introductions; and Janet Frame’s An Angel at My Table

(1984), which Hilary Mantel hailed as ‘one of the classics of auto-

biography’. Muriel Spark, a dark, comic genius, has also joined

the list in the last few years. I am constantly looking for lost gems

to add to the list, and many of those books I’ve found in the

London Library.

The Library has always been an invaluable resource for the

Virago Modern Classics. When Carmen Callil needed books for

her newly founded list – and there were a hundred titles

published within the first four years – she turned to the Library.

As she explains: ‘Some hundreds of Virago Modern Classics would

never have seen the light of day without the London Library.

When I started publishing them, I spent many hours, week after

week, month after month, looking at every novel on the Library’s

shelves, taking stacks home, reading them into the night, and then,

coming back for more. The writers whose books are on those

shelves owe a great debt to the London Library, as do we all.’

It is a pleasing discovery that some VMC authors themselves

were members: Rebecca West was Vice-President from 1967–83;

Vita Sackville-West was a member; and there are descriptions of

Rose Macaulay risking her life by using the unsafe ladders

between floors (no longer there!) to get to books more speedily

– and once demanding that all her own works written before

the First World War be removed from the shelves.

A few months after I started my job at Virago I read about a

memoir that sounded as if it could be a possible contender for

publication. However, locating a reading copy was driving me to

distraction. Up until then, I’d managed to buy what I wanted

fairly easily and cheaply online, but this book completely eluded

me. If it wasn’t for a copy I’d found from an American seller on

the internet for the sum of $400 I would have doubted the book

existed at all, but it was too expensive to buy on a whim. I could

have tried the British Library, but I’d have had to read the book


Left to right Elizabeth Taylor’s In a Summer Season (1961), 2006 edition; Mary McCarthy’s The Group (1963), 2009 edition; Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (1959),2010 edition. All new editions by Virago Modern Classics.

I am constantly

looking for lost gems

to add to the list‘

’

on the premises, which I didn’t have time to do, so I considered

that my last resort. I called the London Library to enquire, and a

copy of the book was located and couriered to me that very day.

As easy as that. On that occasion, the book wasn’t worth the

effort of the chase but, since then, my first port of call has been

the London Library. There are very few titles I haven’t been able

to find there and amazingly, considering it is a lending library

after all, there has never been an occasion when the book I

required was unavailable.

A couple of years ago I gave myself the task of putting together

the best possible collection of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s work in

one volume. There are a number of editions of her short fiction

on the market as she is out of copyright, but they all contain very

similar material. I wanted to have both short stories, including,

of course, her masterpiece The Yellow Wallpaper, and extracts

from her fascinating autobiography, which isn’t available in this

country. When I borrowed the London Library’s copy of it, I was

delighted to see that it had been donated by another Virago author,

Elaine Showalter. It was as if my project was fated.

Many people think that being an editor is a dream job because

you get paid to read all day. The first part of that sentence is

true, but the second isn’t: most editors will agree that the majority

of reading is done out of work hours. Therefore, I don’t get the

opportunity to spend as much time at the Library as I’d like.

This is probably a blessing (I say this reluctantly) as otherwise

I’d never get any books published at all. The real joy of the

London Library is actually getting to visit it – willingly getting

lost in the labyrinthine rooms as time seems to stand still. Who

would have imagined that such a serene bibliophile’s haven could

be found so close to Trafalgar Square; that such an important

institute of culture could exist only streets away from the home

of The Phantom of the Opera? Raymond Mortimer summed it up

well: ‘The building is not beautiful, and must have been the first,

I suppose, to disfigure the Georgian elegance of St James’s Square.

But looking upwards and downwards through the half-transparent

floors of the book stack, I feel inside the brain of mankind.’

A few times a year I allow myself the treat of visiting the

Library. I arrive without any idea what I might take home with

me, and that’s a large part of the pleasure. The book stacks are

where I spend my time, wandering up and down, fingering

spines, pulling out books at random and reading a few lines,

hoping I might find a forgotten gem to add to the VMC list. They

aren’t the most resplendent rooms, but they have their own

appeal. And I love the musty smell. Although the walls above the

main stairways are hung with paintings, my favourite images

are stencilled on the walls of the book stacks: the chipped

hands pointing which way to go. On my visit last week, which

I spent in the biography section, I brought home three volumes

of a south-east London memoir set before and during the Second

World War, the autobiography of an early twentieth-century

singer, actress and descendant of slaves, who spent her childhood

in poverty, and the autobiography of a woman who escaped

Russian-occupied East Germany, where she was trying to bring

up her child alone in a defeated nation. Not one of these books

is currently in print but, thanks to them being available and

accessible on the shelves of the London Library, perhaps they’ll

get a second life – it’s been the beginning of many a Virago

Modern Classic.

Early days

When the Virago Modern Classics were founded, I was working

part time for Virago, doing publicity one day a week. I clearly

remember the excitement over the green cover design, the cover

images and the ideas behind the list, but what was thrilling was

the sheer number of writers waiting to be rediscovered. It was as if

a treasure chest – a Pandora’s Box even – had been opened. And

what was also wonderful, was that many of the writers were still

living. Out of the box spilled Rosamond Lehmann (who said she

The Virago team, 1979. Left to right: Harriet Spicer, Carmen Callil, Ursula Owen. © Virago Press.


was delighted to be resurrected); Rebecca West (stern but pleased);

Storm Jameson (bemused, surprised to be alive still); and Antonia

White (our first classic) among so many others. The Virago Modern

Classics very quickly became important. Readers looked out for

the new ones, coming almost monthly at that time; we soon had

special sections in bookshops; and we had fans throughout the

media. Men told me it was cool to have a Virago Modern Classic

on their beside table, students carried them around as a badge

of honour, literary men and women enjoyed them and wrote

suggesting other writers. Women readers were staggered to be

able to find and trace a female literary tradition.

Today – decades later – we keep the flame burning. The Classics

may not have quite the same ooh, ahh discovery impact, but we

continue to refresh our back list with new introductions and

covers, reaching each new generation of readers, and we still do

discover books that should not be out of print and writers who

deserve their place in the Classics: Daphne du Maurier, Mary

McCarthy, Barbara Pym, Muriel Spark, Bessie Head, Jane Rule

are just some of the authors who have recently joined the list.

The Virago Modern Classics remain the flagship of Virago.

Lennie Goodings


hether or not they were aware of it, members

who braved the Blitz to use the Library were

living through Britain’s ‘finest hour’ cheek-by-

jowl with a vibrant foreign community in exile,

which gave birth to a political movement that

has shaped its country to this day. Though no record of such a

sighting exists, a member looking out from the Reading Room

might, quite possibly, have spotted Charles de Gaulle crossing

St James’s Square on his way to a meeting, or returning to his room

at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair where he stayed before moving

to Hampstead with his family in 1942. At 6’5” tall, kitted out in

uniform, highly polished boots, and a képi military hat adorned

with two stars, he would have made a striking figure.

However stormy his relations with the British government,

de Gaulle paid tribute in his memoirs to the kindness of the British

people towards him. Women sent jewels to help him fund the

movement. One early Gaullist recalled how, when the General

walked through the streets of London, men stood to attention or

raised their hats. A Frenchman, who ran the London branch of

Cartier, put his limousine at the General’s disposal and

sometimes acted as his chauffeur.

The General (the capital letter is inescapable) had flown to

England on 17 June 1940 as France collapsed in the face of the

German military onslaught, and soon established himself in an

office building just across Pall Mall, at No. 4 Carlton Gardens.

The block was a new one, but the location had a historical

resonance – it had once been the site of the London home of that

diehard Francophone, Lord Palmerston. As if to ram home the

lessons of history, the cul-de-sac opposite was called Waterloo

Place, and it was not lost on de Gaulle’s hosts that the day on which

he made his celebrated appeal to the French to resists the

Above Poster of de Gaulle’s historic call to resistanceof 18 June 1840. Left De Gaulle broadcast regularly on the BBC, usingthe radio as a potent weapon in his struggle withVichy France. © Corbis.

St James’s was the backdrop for the activities of a vibrant Frenchcommunity in exile with the General at its centre, as JonathanFenby discovered while preparing his recent biography

DE GAULLEAND ST JAMES’S

W

he made his celebrated appeal to the French

to resists the invaders, 18 June, was also

the anniversary of Wellington’s victory

over Napoleon.

De Gaulle’s offices have been partially

preserved, including a great clock set

into wood panelling, against which he

had his leading Free French colleagues

photographed. On the seventieth

anniversary of his broadcast this June,

President Sarkozy visited the Free French

headquarters during a trip to London to

commemorate the Gaullist heritage, which French

presidents have sought to incarnate as part of the core of

the Fifth Republic that de Gaulle founded in 1958.

Those who joined the General in London in the summer of

1940 included the future Prime Minister, René Pleven; the eminent

jurist, René Cassin; and a flamboyant admiral, Émile Muselier,

who staged several revolts against the General and was eventually

banished. Other eminent Frenchmen in London at the time of

the Fall of France, such as André Maurois and Jean Monnet,

preferred to go on to cross the Atlantic rather than remain with

the nascent Gaullist group. The General did not forget; he devoted

a page of his memoirs to listing those who declined to join him.

On his first day in London after flying out of Bordeaux, where

Marshal Pétain had just taken office and was seeking an armistice

with the Germans, de Gaulle lunched in Pall Mall at the RAC Club

as the guest of the British Major-General, Edward Spears, who had

accompanied him from France. He continued to eat there from

time to time, sipping claret, finishing his meal with a brandy

and smoking a cigar. Alternatively, he patronised the Savoy, the

Cavalry Club, the Ritz or the smart restaurant, L’Écu de France,

in Jermyn Street.

There were plenty of other local associations. On the other

side of the square facing the Library was the French Club, where

the Free French socialised, relaxed and listened to musicians

including the jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli; he and his musical

partner, guitarist Django Reinhardt, had been playing in London

at the time France fell (Grappelli stayed while Reinhardt went

home). On St James’s Street, to the west of the square, de Gaulle’s

office bought its wine at Berry Bros.

In Duke Street, an early Gaullist, André Dewavrin, who took

the pseudonym ‘Colonel Passy’ from the underground railway

station near his home in Paris, ran the Free French intelligence

and security service. He fought a running battle with the British

to try to keep from them information that his agents extracted

from France. His interrogators detained French exiles suspected

of working with the Pétain regime, which moved from Bordeaux

to Vichy later in 1940. They were accused of imprisoning suspects

in cellars and beating them up, depriving them of food and water

and interrogating them under bright lights. One such case came to

light just before D-Day, when a Frenchman brought a case against

de Gaulle for torture; the British government bought the man off

at the last moment.

The St James’s connection with de Gaulle continues in the

shelves of the London Library, as I discovered when working on

my recent biography of the man I would class as the greatest

Frenchman of modern times. When I went up to Biography on

the fourth floor of the central stack at the

start of my research in 2008, I was

confronted by an unexpectedly rich

array of material by and about de Gaulle,

running along three shelves. What was

striking was the quantity of books in

French on top of the half-dozen English-

language accounts of the General’s life.

To begin with, there were 21 volumes of

the General’s own writings; or rather, 20 of the

21 published by Plon (volume 8 of his collected letters

and notes covering the key years May 1958–January 1961

is missing). Then there were the biographies, starting with the

first, written in French by his early follower, Philippe Barrès, and

published by the London branch of Hachette in 1941, followed by

the multi-volume works by Jean Lacouture and Eric Roussel

(Lacouture, de Gaulle, 3 vols, 1984–90, English translation, 2 vols,

1993; Roussel, Charles de Gaulle, 2 vols, 2002–7) and the three-

volume accumulation of notes by the General’s former minister,

Alain Peyrefitte (C’était de Gaulle, Paris, 1994–2000), as well as

the rolling series of works by the political journalist, Jean-Raymond

Tournoux (among them Secrets d’État, 1965; La Tragédie du Général,

1967; Jamais dit, 1971), which assembled quotations from the great

man and from those who visited him over the decades, and

included de Gaulle’s observation about the impossibility of

governing a country with 265 different varieties of cheese.

But there were also much lesser known works, each offering

a fresh perspective on the man who sought to keep himself

above the fray, ruling with ‘cold dignity’ and incarnating his nation

and its Republic. Further afield on the third and fourth floors were

the memoirs of French politicians who had worked with or

against him; Free French fighters who saw him in a mythical

mode; and Socialists who distrusted him as a quasi-dictator.

There was also a wealth of material on France during the

General’s long lifetime in both languages, from political and

economic texts to accounts by participants of the debacle of 1940,

as well as references in the memoirs of foreign statesman who

General de Gaulle and Winston Churchill in 1943. © AFP/Getty Images.

The blue plaque at No. 4 Carlton Gardens, SW1, de Gaulle’s headquarters during the Second World War.


The Cross of Lorraine above Colombey-les-deux-Églises,north-eastern France.


met de Gaulle. In As I Saw It: A Secretary

of State’s Memoirs (1991), US Secretary of

State Dean Rusk described meeting him

as being like ‘crawling up a mountainside

on your knees, opening a little portal at the

top, and waiting for the oracle to speak … There

was never any give-and-take – de Gaulle gave

pronouncements from on high, but never any real

discussion; he was there, he would listen – “je vous écoute” – and

would then bid you goodbye.’

While the Library houses a treasure trove of books, most of

my research was, of course, done in Paris and at de Gaulle’s home

village of Colombey-les-deux-Églises in north-eastern France,

where a large Cross of Lorraine looms on the hillside and an

excellent museum retraces his life. The Institut Charles de Gaulle,

in rue de Solférino, on Paris’s Left Bank not only has a complete

collection of works by and about the General, but also allows

researchers to work in the room where he held weekly meetings

of his political party in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Sitting at the huge rectangular table there, I imagined the days

when de Gaulle, apparently cast out by the French, outlined his

vision for the nation in grand terms – or the more visceral occasion

when he stalked down from his first-floor office to upbraid one

of his followers for having dared to talk to the President of the

(Fourth) Republic about forming a government, practically

reducing the poor man to tears. Not even the London Library

can offer such moments to a biographer.

MEMBERS’ OFFER AND NEWS

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Berry Bros. & Rudd, 3 St James’s Street, London SW1A 1EG;tel. 0800 280 2440 (bbr.com/london).

If you are in the area on 28 October 2010, Sotheby’s isholding the sale The Library of an English Bibliophile Part I,the first in a series of sales from one of the finest collections offirst editions ever assembled. The 3,000 books in the collectionare worth £8–10 million. The inaugural sale includes a finepresentation copy of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens,inscribed by the author to his close friend William Macready onNew Year’s Day 1844. The collection also features a copy of thefirst collection of T.S. Eliot’s poems inscribed to Virginia Woolf;a pre-publication, limited edition of Evelyn Waugh’s BridesheadRevisited; a copy of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone in itsoriginal cloth; and older works such as the first collected editionof Shakespeare’s poems, dating from 1640.

Sotheby’s, 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA; tel. 020 7293 5295 (sothebys.com).


HIDDEN CORNERS

SLEEPERS

f the London Library has not already

been used as the setting for a spy

novel, it should have been. One can

imagine all sorts of clandestine goings-on

within its walls: an exchange of secret

documents downstairs at the far end of

the Topography section; a dead drop (or

secret hiding place) behind a copy of the

Annual Register in the main reading room; a

cipher based on a page from a 1848 edition

of Dombey and Son; and, since libraries

are inherently sexy (all that opportunity

for leisurely eyeing up across a room), a

passionate encounter with a sultry honey-pot

agent from Mossad somewhere among the

stacks. (Mossad is Hebrew for the Institute –

not quite the Library, but that would be a good

name for a spy service.) One of the most

memorable characters in John le Carré’s

Smiley stories was Connie Sachs, who had

the invaluable job of looking after the

collection of files known as the Registry or,

otherwise, the institutional library.

The London Library is also rather good

for books – and, for the purposes of this

article, books about espionage – a genre

that has been slightly out of fashion of late.

It enjoyed a golden age during the last

quarter of the twentieth century – roughly,

from the publication in 1974 of F.W.

Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret, whose

revelations about the feats of decryption

by boffins at Bletchley Park during the

Second World War opened the door to

an avalanche of books about secret

intelligence, to a few years after the

collapse of communism in 1989, and

the subsequent drying up of routine

cold-war memoirs and formulaic would-be

Le Carré novels.

Over this period, authors and academics

took the opportunity to focus on two

stories of domestic treachery – one real

(following up revelations about Guy Burgess,

Kim Philby and Donald Maclean in an

effort to identify the fourth and even fifth

men in their ring of ‘Cambridge spies’),

and the other imagined (about how the

head of MI5, Roger Hollis, had been a

KGB agent – the stuff of Peter Wright’s

lively ‘whistle-blowing’ memoir

Spycatcher in 1987). They were helped

by nudges towards the ideal of freedom of

information, epitomised by the Waldegrave

initiative on open government in 1992,

which encouraged the systematic release of

thousands of official documents previously

withheld on grounds of national security.

By the turn of the millennium, external

realities had changed and this period of

intellectual glasnost was drawing to a

close. Despite the popularity of television

programmes such as the BBC drama

series Spooks, the post 9/11 world has not

spawned a similar flourishing of informed

literature about the clandestine war

against al-Qaeda. The secrets are still held

too closely.

These developments are reflected in the

Library’s holdings, where spy literature has

its dedicated classification, S. Spies &c.,

stuck between S. Spectrum Analysis and

S. Sports &c. in the Science and Miscellaneous

section. On these ten shelves you find the

Guy Burgess (1910–63), a diplomat recruited by theRussians as an agent. Keystone/Getty Images.

IAndrew Lycett reveals the results of a detailed surveillance ofthe Library’s espionage collection

IN THE STACKS

Hut 6 Machine Room, Bletchley Park,Buckinghamshire, during the Second World War. © The Bletchley Park Trust.


section. On these ten shelves you find the

workaday histories and memoirs of the

main intelligence services, MI5 and MI6.

For more esoteric material, however, you

often have to look elsewhere, particularly

to the sections devoted to Biography and

to various wars.

Workaday does not mean boring. One

of the most fascinating recent books in any

field has been The Defence of the Realm

(2009), the authorised history of MI5 by

Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew.

The catalogue shows that the Library’s two

copies have a long waiting list, but will

eventually find their way back to these

Spies shelves. With a fine eye for the

ridiculous, this book brings life to a

potentially turgid institutional history, as

it skilfully recounts the Secret Service’s

efforts to protect the state from political,

terrorist and other threats.

Andrew’s earlier Secret Service (1985)

is also recommended, its panoptic approach

made clear in its subtitle, The Makings of

the British Intelligence Community. It sits

well with the many works of Nigel West,

who is neither an official nor an authorised

historian but a former MP (under his real

name Rupert Allason), who clearly has

excellent contacts in the security services,

as well as a terrier-like determination to

uncover the truth. In the 1980s, his histories

MI6: British Secret Intelligence Service

Operations, 1909–45 (1983) and A Matter

of Trust: MI5, 1945–72 (1982) were

remarkable for the new ground they broke.

Even today their revelations take one’s

breath away. Over the intervening years

West has maintained his output of readable

intelligence history, notably in Venona:

The Greatest Secret of the Cold War (1999),

which, drawing on thousands of decrypted

Soviet messages, meticulously teased out

the story of Russian spying in the West,

particularly in relation to the American

atomic energy programme.

West’s Faber Book of Espionage (1993)

is the best modern anthology of spy writing –

well informed and full of riveting material.

Strangely, the only book to rival it as an

intelligence taster, The Spy’s Bedside Book

(1957), by the brothers Greene, Hugh and

Graham (yes, that one) is not in the stacks.

This generic Spies category also

includes books by other specialist spy

writers, such as Chapman Pincher, whose

Their Trade is Treachery (1981) was much

exercised by the Roger Hollis allegations,

as well as some unusual titles with garish

covers in Cyrillic, one of which I made out as

KGB protiv MI-6 by Rem Krasilnikov (2000).

I don’t imagine that these Russian books

are found in many other libraries. (One,

I note, is the gift of Francis Greene, who I

suspect is the son of Graham, as above.)

More to my liking is Michael Miller’s

sparkling history of feuding spies in the

Francophone world between the wars,

which goes under the evocative title

Shanghai on the Metro (1994) – one can

see it as a nouvelle vague film – and James

Bamford’s definitive account of American

signals intelligence, The Puzzle Palace (1983).

One can imagine

clandestine goings-

onwithin the Library

walls: an exchange

of secret documents

at the far end of

Topography

‘

’

In my continuing determination to unearth

a state secret through a subtle reading of

some textual change or dedications, I can

only record the handwritten inscription

in the Library’s copy of this book –

presumably to journalist Linda Melvern

who is acknowledged as one of the

author’s collaborators. Dated 8 May 1983,

it runs: ‘To Linda, with fond memories of

Cheltenham. Just as with the American

edition, this British one benefited from the

tremendous help of the best journalist in

London. All my thanks – again! Love, Jim.’

I am keen on such histories of lesser-

known branches of the secret services.

Having written a life of Ian Fleming (1995),

I am interested in naval intelligence, which

employed James Bond’s creator during

the Second World War. When researching

that book, I was drawn to the work of one

of his wartime colleagues, Patrick Beesly,

who took advantage of access to Ultra,

the raw information gained from decrypted

German radio messages, to write three

fine books about this field, which, true to

form, are found in three different sections

of the Library.

The best is Room 40 (1982), his history

of the Naval Intelligence Division (NID)

during the First World War when, under its

legendary chief Admiral Reginald ‘Blinker’

Hall, it took the lead in decrypting secret

German radio traffic, including the

notorious Zimmerman telegram, which

instructed the German ambassador to

Mexico to offer that country an alliance that

Hugh and Graham Greene’s The Spy’s BedsideBook (1957), 2007 edition. Used by permissionof The Random House Group.


would allow it to regain its lost territories,

north of the Rio Grande. Duly leaked to

Washington, this had the effect of bringing

an outraged United States into the war on

Britain’s side. This is in the H. European

War I section, while two of Beesly’s other

books, a biography of Admiral John Godfrey

(1980), the forceful head of NID during the

Second World War, is in Biography, and

Very Special Intelligence (1977), a history

of the Operational Intelligence Centre,

where the Admiralty tracked German

naval communications, is in H. European

War II.

There is no published official history

of naval intelligence. But in its Topography

section, the Library holds a series of

extraordinarily comprehensive country

guides put together by NID. I recommend

the four volumes relating to Spain and

Portugal, published between 1941 and

1945, a period when the Iberian peninsula

was of great importance to Britain

regarding the Battle of the Atlantic. Note

the statement in the prelims: ‘This book

is for the use of persons in HM Service

only and must not be shown, or made

available, to the Press, or to any member

of the public.’

These volumes doubtless proved useful

to Operation Mincemeat, a breathtaking

feat of deception in which the Allies

convinced the Germans that their invasion

of Europe from North Africa in 1943

would take place through Greece and

Sardinia rather than Sicily. The ruse was

masterminded by an NID officer called

Ewen Montagu, whose account The Man

Who Never Was (1953) is found in H.

European War II. (This followed Operation

Heartbreak, a fictional take on the incident

published in 1950 by Duff Cooper, Lord

Norwich, a wartime minister.) For a

gripping, up-to-date version of events,

which shows there is still mileage in this

genre, try Operation Mincemeat (2010)

by Ben Macintyre.

Montagu’s own story might have been

placed in the Biography section, along with

most lives of spies. Out of many contenders

there, I shall mention a handful. Never

Judge A Man by his Umbrella (1991) is the

delightful memoir from former MI6

man, Nicholas Elliott, who wrote a more

capricious sequel, With My Little Eye:

Observations Along the Way (1993), with

its section of aphorisms, such as Groucho

Marx’s ‘Time wounds all heels’ – meaningful

words for the 007 fraternity, no doubt.

Then there are the lives of the spymasters,

notably The Secret Servant (1988), Anthony

Cave Brown’s painstaking study of MI6

chief Sir Stewart Menzies, and, even better,

The Perfect English Spy (1995), Tom Bower’s

impeccable biography of Sir Dick White,

who headed both M15 and MI6 through

some of their most embarrassing mid-

twentieth-century years.

Also worth the detour is Open Secret

(2001), the autobiography by former MI5

head Stella Rimington. The fact that this is

the only book I have included by or about

a woman is significant: while women have

often been prominent in spying, particularly

in the wartime Special Operations Executive,

they are under-represented in the literature.

Rimington’s novels featuring the MI5

intelligent officer Liz Carlyle are not in

the Library.

Other espionage material is dotted

throughout the collections: books on

Ultra in H. European War II; on signals

intelligence in S. Telegraphy; on surveillance

in S. Police; and on covert media operations

in S. Propaganda. (Here Frances Stonor

Saunders’s Who Paid the Piper?, published

in 1999, is an eye-opening account of

the CIA’s funding of culture during the

Cold War.)

An unexpected description of secret

service work is found in H. European War 1,

where Compton Mackenzie’s Greek

Memories (1932) led its author to be

prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act

as the first person to reveal the existence

of MI6, for which he had worked during

the First World War.

The following year Mackenzie turned

this unwanted experience into a fine

satirical novel about clandestine activities,

Water on the Brain (1933). Another such

entertainment is The Sixth Column: A

Singular Tale of Our Times (1951), in which

Peter Fleming anticipated his brother Ian

as a spy writer, albeit in a farce about the

bureaucracy of the intelligence services.

Come to think of it, a decent contemporary

spoof about espionage is overdue.

Predictably the Library’s Fiction shelves

are well stocked with novels about spies,

from the now faintly ridiculous efforts

of William Le Queux and E. Phillips

Oppenheim, through the more realistic

material of Somerset Maugham (whose

Ashenden of 1928 remains a classic), to

the engaging romances of Ian Fleming

and the brilliant state-of-the-nation

thrillers of John le Carré. For up-to-date

stuff try Typhoon by Charles Cumming

(2009) or anything by the excellent Henry

Porter, starting with A Spy’s Life (2001).

Increasingly, modern spy fiction tries

to say something about the existential

condition of spying, stressing the loneliness,

duplicity and often brutality involved.

For a final word, we might turn to L.

English Drama and Single Spies (1989),

where, particularly in A Question of

Attribution, about the traitor Anthony

Blunt, Alan Bennett ingeniously plays

with the idea that, in espionage as in art,

appearances are not all they seem.

Above, left to right Ewen Montagu’s The Man Who Never Was (1953), 1964 edition (used by permission of The Random House Group); Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? (1999).


about the Civil War.’ ‘There are lots of books about lots of civil wars.’

‘Someone told me about it when I was on holiday.’ ‘Recently?’ ‘In the

summer. Oh, you must know it!’ ‘Hmm. Last summer? Blair Worden?

The summer before? John Adamson?’ ‘We were in Barcelona with the

Finzi-Continis, I’m sure they buy their books here …’ ‘Oh! You mean the

Spanish Civil War? Antony Beevor?’ ‘No, no …’ ‘Was it Paul Preston’s

We Saw Spain Die?’ We hope to get there in the end.

Certain customers will want a straightforward steer, but we know

that others will wish to be left in peace to browse. It is here that our

role as booksellers is most useful, and most rewarding, for it’s up to us

to make the shop an interesting place to visit. This partly depends on

atmosphere but, above all, on our selection of books. On any day we

might get visits from publishers’ reps, our essential links to forthcoming

books. Looking through their folders – or the laptop equivalent – I might

order one, two, five, ten copies of a book; most often, none at all,

rarely more than twenty. But while our stock represents our own tastes,

it also derives from what we have learnt from customers about books

that they have read, but we have not. They may be obscure from a trade

point of view. A recent case in point is The Hongs of Canton: Western

Merchants in South China 1700–1900, by Patrick Conner (2009), a

magnificent history of the European trading houses in China illustrated

with numerous contemporary paintings. Not cheap, but good. It is

easier, and more satisfying, to sell something good that may be expensive,

than to sell something trashy that may be cheap. Most important, it

makes people think that we have interesting books not widely stocked

by other shops, so they will come again. We should have nothing on

our shelves whose value, to someone, we do not understand.

Lunch is a sandwich in the office upstairs, eaten while reading.

Afterwards there will be more deliveries, more sorting, more phone

calls and emails, more buying and more customers – satisfied ones,

I hope. For supplying books to people who care about what they read

is a privilege, and it is fun.

TALEThe writer John de Falbe, a director of independent Londonbookseller John Sandoe, describes his working day

The John Sandoe bookshopin Blacklands Terrace,Chelsea.

When people ask why I don’t cycle in London, I answer tiresomely that

it seems inadvisable to read while on a bike. I take the tube to the shop.

Although conditions aren’t ideal, I’m used to elbows jabbing me or my

book, and thankful for the time. This week it was Nicholas Shakespeare’s

new novel Inheritance, which obligingly name-checks the shop; and,

by bizarre coincidence, an old novel by J.P. Donleavy called The Lady

Who Liked Clean Rest Rooms (1995), whose premise Inheritance shares,

although Shakespeare says Murray Bail gave him the idea.

My former boss, John Sandoe, told me that he enjoyed coming into

the shop every morning of his 32 years there. I’ve been in situ for 24 years

so far, and I feel the same way. The sight and smell of the books is

immediately cheering, and the sense of suspended activity – an oiled

machine ready to resume its business – is exciting. About 24,000 books

are crammed into the tiny premises. Newcomers sometimes suppose

that it is a second-hand shop, seeing no influence from trends in con-

temporary retail design. It is not. The books are new, or – since some

treasures have to wait rather longer for their customer – newish.

My partner, Dan Fenton, usually arrives before me. Lights and

computers are on, dehumidifiers emptied. In summer he has often –

to my shame – already watered the splendid window boxes, which are

provided by our other partner, Stewart Grimshaw. Straight to emails, then,

perhaps a publisher’s catalogue or a little attention to figures. My aim is

to be ready for the shop floor, where I like it best, when Paul and Marzena,

my other colleagues, arrive in time for opening at 9.30 a.m. Not that we

presume on an immediate rush of customers but, with luck, DHL will

already have made our largest delivery of the day, which includes

yesterday’s orders from wholesalers. There may be only six boxes; in

December, there could be forty. They have to be unpacked, booked in

electronically to our stock-control system, and put away. Because of

the constricted space, this can be a bit hectic if there are lots of books

or customers. The printer will spit out slips for special orders, then

customers must be telephoned or – according to instructions – the book

made ready for posting. Packing them goes on throughout the day,

whenever there’s a moment.

Meanwhile, the phone rings or customers come in. Often people

know what they want, but exchanges like this are common: ‘Have you got

that book about the Civil War?’ ‘Which civil war?’ ‘You know, that book

THE TRADESMAN’S

The London Library is delighted to announce that it will be part-nering with this year’s Richmond upon Thames Literature Festival(formerly ‘Book Now’), which runs throughout November. With abrilliant line-up of participants including Clive James, JohnSimpson, Peter Snow and Andrew Graham Dixon, as well as a

RICHMOND UPON THAMES LITERATURE FESTIVALseries of three events programmed by the Library and featuringmembers Daisy Goodwin, Amanda Foreman and Harriet Evans,there's something to cater for all literary tastes. For more informationand tickets visit richmond.gov.uk/literature_festival


MEMBERS’ NEWSUNDERSTANDINGTHE LIBRARY’S FINANCES

In the nature of things, most of our members will not be able toattend the Annual General Meeting on 4 November. We wouldlove to see you, but it is of course true that, if all our nearly 7,000members decided to come, we would have a bit of a problem infitting you all in, even in the beautifully refurbished Library. So,given that this is also the time when our annual report and accountsland through your letterboxes, I thought it might be useful if Iwere to anticipate some of the questions you might think ofasking if you were to come to the AGM. With several monthsstill to go, this is at least to anticipate in the correct sense of theword, rather than its ugly common form as a synonym for expect.

Why have the Trustees decided to propose a 10% increase inannual membership fees?We made this decision at our meeting in July, with a heavy heart.As I reported in my letter to members in May, HMRC’s abruptdecision to remove Gift Aid relief on our subscriptions left a hole inour revenues of £275,000–300,000 a year, which is about 10% ofthe total. We – and more particularly the Library staff – are workinghard to try to make up that shortfall by cutting costs and by findingnew sources of revenue. If we were to cover the loss by a fee risealone, the annual fee would have had to go up by £52, or 13%.If we were to make up for it simply by slashing costs, the Library’sservices would inevitably suffer. Moreover, neither new sources ofrevenue nor cuts in costs would solve the problem quickly. So wedecided that the prudent course, bearing in mind our responsibilitiesunder charity law, would be to use a substantial fee rise to plugthe gap now, and work hard on the other solutions with theaim of limiting any fee rise in the next and subsequent years.

You said last year that ‘future fees will be set to keep ourincome in line with necessary increases in core costs’. Is that still the policy?Yes it is. In 2009, the trustees froze the annual membership feeas an exceptional recognition of the recession and the disruptioncaused by the building works. Nevertheless, costs continued torise, which is why our budget predicted a small deficit, even beforethe Gift Aid decision. As the chart shows, in 2009–10 we had tomake up a loss of £134,480 from our reserves, and in the currentyear and next year the deficits promise to be even bigger.

Averaged over the two years, the new rise is equivalent toroughly 5% a year. If we had raised the fee in 2009 in line withour underlying costs – two-thirds of which come from staff

salaries, which are tied to university pay scales – the rise wouldhave been 5%. This year, ‘Library inflation’ would have implieda further rise of 2%. Taking that into account, our currentproposal represents two years’ worth of such inflation, plus just3% to make up for the loss of Gift Aid relief.

We know this will be unwelcome to many members. But I hopethat you will continue to support us and enjoy the Library’sservices, and that you will consider compensating for the feerise by recruiting one or more new members and thus benefitingfrom the £50 discount. If, as I very much hope and intend,we succeed in recruiting more members as well as in finding moreother revenues and controlling costs, then next year’s rise willstand a good chance of being a modest one, reducing thethree-year average.

How is the membership drive going?A lot better, but it is early days. It was only in May that we beganto offer members a £50 discount off their annual membershipfee for every new member they help us to recruit – more thanneutralising the proposed fee rise. It was only in June and Julythat Phase 2 of the building works was completed, allowing us tore-open the Issue Hall and the St James’s Square entrance, andthen to show off the wonderful new Library to existing andpotential members. It was thus also only in those summer monthswhen we were able to promote the Library extensively in thepress, with splendid coverage in The Times, the Financial Times,the Evening Standard and an editorial ‘In praise of’ us in theGuardian. There was also a lot of coverage in the architecturalmedia, and a nice item on Radio Four’s Today programme.

Nevertheless, June brought us 104 new members, a net gain of62 after deducting withdrawals. We introduced an online joiningfacility at the end of May and nearly half of those who joined inJune did so via our website. July was another strong month, with97 new members, a net gain of 44. As the graph shows, ourtotal membership numbers have begun to increase again for thefirst time since 2007. An important contributor to that trend is thedecline in the rate of withdrawals. As with any organisation, somepeople will leave as members every year, as projects come to anend or circumstances change: a withdrawal rate of about 500–600a year, or about 8% of the membership, seems to be the long-termtrend, but the exceptional fee rise of 2008, the building works,and then the recession, raised the rate to about double that at itsworst. It is thus extremely good news that we have now returnedto more or less normal, but it means that we have to find new

AT THE END OF HIS FIRST FULL YEAR IN OFFICE, OUR CHAIRMANBILL EMMOTT LOOKS AHEAD TO THE AGM

that separate budget. As I hope is well known, Lottie and her teamhave raised a phenomenal £15m, from a standing start in 2004.Our very generous donors typically (and rightly) stipulate that theirmoney must only be used for the capital project, so we cannotshuffle money between the two accounts.

There have, however, been two indirect effects on the Library’smain budget. The first is that, at the outset of the project, theLibrary contributed £5m out of its reserves to pay for the purchase ofT.S. Eliot House (thus, the total project spending so far has been £20m).This was a rare opportunity for the Library to obtain vital extraspace and it had to be seized, but it meant that investment incomeon the money used was no longer available to the main budget.Along with very poor returns on our investments for several years,especially 2008–9, this reduced our annual income from this source.

The second is that the fundraising team’s focus on findingdonations for the building has meant that they were unable todevote much time or many resources to seeking donations tosupport our annual budget. As the team did not exist before thebuilding project was begun, this does not represent a loss ofprevious income. But I suppose one could say that, if we had notbeen working on the building, we might have decided to launcha drive to seek further philanthropic support for our operations.

Why not do so now?That is exactly what we are doing. With Phase 2 complete andthe building mercifully free of dust and drilling, we are startinga new effort to raise more annual revenue from donations. Thepie chart of our sources of income in 2010 (below left) showsthat 10% already comes from donations and from legacies. Thenew Founders’ Circle, announced in this magazine and to belaunched at the end of September, is one of the ways in whichwe intend to increase that contribution substantially.

What about earning money by hiring out the Library for dinnersand receptions, as the National Gallery and other venues do?Naturally, we couldn’t do this while the building work wasunder way. In July, however, we started to show off the Libraryto potential customers and produced a marketing brochure tosend out. I am pleased to report that we have already begun totake bookings for the autumn. Don’t worry, we are not going toturn the Library into a commercial fairground. But if, by letting outour lovely rooms in the evenings, we can earn money to support

to more or less normal, but it means that we have to find newmembers all the time just to stand still, let alone to expand. Netgrowth of 500 new members would add £217,500 to annualrevenues at the new fee level.

Have you thought of offering a greater variety of membershipcategories in order to attract more members?Yes, but two things have restrained us in the past: HMRC’s GiftAid rules, which limited the discounts we could offer to spouses,for example; and the administrative costs that greater complexitywould impose. The second of these remains a restraint, of course,though if we can encourage more people to join online that could infuture be partially overcome. But now that we have been declaredineligible for Gift Aid relief on subscriptions, we are free to thinkmore creatively. During the coming year, we will be reviewingour membership arrangements as broadly and as imaginativelyas we can. Your ideas and proposals would be welcome.

Has the building programme taken money from the normalincome of the Library?As the Librarian and the previous chairman have often said, theanswer is no. A separate capital account was set up for the buildingproject, funds have been raised especially and solely for the project,and the costs of the fundraising team that was set up for thispurpose (headed by Lottie Cole) have been paid for out of

2010 Core Funding Sources (Total income £3,047,843)



Deficit funded from reserves£134,4804%

Deficit funded from reserves£44,5021%Investment income

£296,0779%

Revenue donations and legacies£265,7629%

Membership income(excluding Gift Aid)£2,257,16571%


Gift Aid onmembershipincome£283,4829%


Investment income£183,9106%


Deficit funded from reserves£134,7265%Investment income

£331,55312%




Membership 31 December 2005–June 2010 (new, withdrawals, net)

New annual, reinstated, representative and life members Withdrawals Net



our lovely rooms in the evenings, we can earn money to supportthe services we provide to members, that is what we should do.In a year’s time, I will be able to tell you how successful we havebeen, how many outsiders have come in and admired our building(perhaps tempting them to become members), and how muchmoney we have made from it.

You mentioned poor investment returns. What are you doingabout this?Members have commented at past AGMs on the declining

2010 Core Expenditure (Total £3,182,323) 2009 Core Expenditure (Total £3,121,744)

Buildings and Facilities£616,48719%

Membership£245,7568%

Finance & Administration£461,26114%

Acquisitions£443,35514%

Cataloguing &Retrospective Conversion£397,80413%

Information Technology£196,4366%

Reader Services£505,96216%

Binding,Preservation &Stack Management£315,26210%









value of our investments, which (in common with most otherpeople’s) hit rock bottom in March 2009 in the wake of thefinancial crisis. Fortunately, during 2009–10 we benefited froma large ‘bounce-back’, but given the pressure our budgetsare under this sort of roller-coaster ride is not something weare comfortable with. Over the last few months we’vemoved most of our spare funds into safer holdings that shouldkeep their value while giving us the best possible annualincome for such low-risk investments, but I’m afraid this is agood bit less than we were used to in more buoyant times.

MEMBERS’ NEWS


DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND

Double Elephant FolioMrs T S EliotThe Monument Trust

Elephant FolioColin ClarkLady GettyThe Horace W Goldsmith Foundation

FolioPeter Jamieson

QuartoDr Penelope McCarthy

OctavoLord and Lady EgremontRichard Shuttleworth

DuodecimoJennifer AntillSir Jeremiah Colman Gift TrustThe O J Colman Charitable TrustPeter FirthJames FisherGiles FlintAnthony HobsonJohn Hussey OBEThe J P Jacobs Charitable TrustLogos Charitable TrustHenry McKenzie-Johnston CBSir Jeremy and Lady MorseThe Viscount NorwichThe Orrin Charitable TrustClive Priestley CBMartin and Margaret RileySybil SheanSir Roy StrongThe Tana Trust

SextodecimoDavid AukinStephen BensonProfessor Sir Alan BownessSebastian BrockMargaret BuxtonTrevor ColdreyCurtis Charitable TrustBarbara CurtoysJane FalloonRichard FreemanMichael GainsboroughMartin Haddon

Godfrey HodgsonRosemary JamesThe Rt Hon The Lord Justice LongmoreJohn MadellJohn Massey StewartKevin MurphyW G PlomerSonia PrenticeBrian ReesJanet RenniePeter RowlandSir John SaintyThe Lady Soames DBECaroline De SouzaDr Gerassimos SpathisChristopher SwinsonJerry WhiteAnn WilliamsAnthony WilliamsReverend Anthony Winter

BOOK FUND

CanonMark Storey

ParagonBasil Postan

Great PrimerMichael Hughes in memory of

Ivy Anne HughesThe Maggs Family in memory of

Michael C JonesRicky Shuttleworth

CiceroWendy HeffordJohn MontgomeryColin Stevenson

NonpareilPeter AndersonDr John Barney David Cashdan in memory of

Reverend Samuel CashdanDavid FawkesThe Late Tom JacksonColin LeeDavid MassaCharles McInernyJames MyddeltonAlyson Wilson in memory of Kay Turnbull

BrilliantHis Hon Paul Baker QCMichael DiamondBenjamin DuncanThe Late Ronald EdwardsBill EmmottMr and Mrs HohlerMichael HolmesJohn MitchellThe Hon Mrs Fionn MorganPauline PinderDerek SaulDr Ann SaundersMrs James TeacherJohn Townsend

GENERAL DONATIONS

Ronni AnconaDr Ian ArchibaldNicholas BunkerPaul BunnageSimon Callow CBEThe Late Peter CalvocoressiPeter CaraccioloFaith CookWendy CopeMary DelormeAdam and Victoria Freudenheim Dr Christopher GeorgeSimon GodwinPamela GrahamThe Worshipful Company of GrocersRosalind HaddenDavid HarrisBelinda HaslamRichard HillierHermione Hobhouse MBEAshley HuishReverend Stephen HumphreysRadostina IvanovaC Julian KoenigJules LubbockRobert MacLeodJohn McNallyAlan McNeeBruce PageDr Julian PattisonJune PearsonJohn PerkinsJohn PlaisterDr Robert ReekieIan RobertsProfessor Henry RoseveareJudith SpinneyLouise Stein Marjorie StimmelMark StoreyPatrick WhiteJohn WilliamsAlison Walker in memory of

Claudio Lo BruttoSir Robert Worcester KBE DL

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTSThe trustees are most grateful to all the donors listed below,who have made contributions in the year ended 31 March2010 either for specific purposes or towards the general running costs of the Library:

The Trustees are also grateful to thosewho have made donations to theInternational Friends of The LondonLibrary in support of The London Library,and to those who have continuedcovenants or made arrangements for GiftAid donations to the Library.

Thank you, too, to all those memberswho have supported the Library throughthe use of the Everyclick search engine.

DONATIONS IN MEMORY OF SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON

The trustees are grateful for donationsreceived from the following in memoryof the Library’s Vice-President, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who died on16 March 2009:

Nicholas and Diana BaringElissa BennettHer Grace the Dowager Duchess of

Devonshire DCVOA N DroghedaJ J GrimondKate GrimondG M GroseDavid and Elizabeth SmithNicholas Ward-JacksonCarolyn and Nolly Zervudachi

LEGACIES

The Library received pecuniary legaciesfrom the following deceased membersand friends to whom the Trustees aremost grateful:

Angela DiamondGeorge Girling GrangeSir Nicholas HendersonPaul Eyre HintonHarry Robert HolmesYvonne Le RougetelJohn French SlaterMrs K M Tancock Stephen George Peregrine WardGordon Douglas Western

A substantial grant was also receivedfrom the trustees of the Mrs R M ChambersSettlement.

The literary estates of John Cornforth, Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft, Ian Parsonsand Reay Tannahill have provided incomefrom royalties.

Bill Emmott

The London Library has always been defined both spiritually andfinancially by its independence. Indeed, the Library has managed toremain self-financing throughout its history, thanks to the recognitionby generous men and women of the important role the Library playsin our nation’s literary culture.

The recent removal of Gift Aid relief on membership subscriptions byHM Revenue and Customs, which we have already written to youabout, represents a fresh challenge to our independence, but one weare determined to overcome. We plan to do so by creating a newand – we fervently hope – enjoyable way for philanthropic membersto make their own contribution to keep the Library growing andthriving for the generations that follow.

The Founders’ Circle will come together each year at a literarydinner in the Reading Room and there will also be a variety of special visits to other literary and cultural institutions, privilegedencounters with authors and access to areas of the collection andthe Library not usually seen by members. We very much hope thatyou might like to be one of the members of this very special circle.

There are three levels of annual membership of the Founders’Circle: Dickens, Thackeray and Martineau at £10,000, £5,000 and£1,500 respectively.

FIND OUT MOREIf you are considering joining and would like to hear more aboutthe events planned, please do contact the Development Office on020 7766 4716.

A NEW WAY TO SUPPORT THE LIBRARY –The Founders’ Circle


our lovely rooms in the evenings, we can earn money to supportthe services we provide to members, that is what we should do.In a year’s time, I will be able to tell you how successful we havebeen, how many outsiders have come in and admired our building(perhaps tempting them to become members), and how muchmoney we have made from it.

You mentioned poor investment returns. What are you doingabout this?Members have commented at past AGMs on the declining

2010 Core Expenditure (Total £3,182,323) 2009 Core Expenditure (Total £3,121,744)

















value of our investments, which (in common with most otherpeople’s) hit rock bottom in March 2009 in the wake of thefinancial crisis. Fortunately, during 2009–10 we benefited froma large ‘bounce-back’, but given the pressure our budgetsare under this sort of roller-coaster ride is not something weare comfortable with. Over the last few months we’vemoved most of our spare funds into safer holdings that shouldkeep their value while giving us the best possible annualincome for such low-risk investments, but I’m afraid this is agood bit less than we were used to in more buoyant times.

MEMBERS’ NEWS


DEVELOPMENT APPEAL FUND

Double Elephant FolioMrs T S EliotThe Monument Trust

Elephant FolioColin ClarkLady GettyThe Horace W Goldsmith Foundation

FolioPeter Jamieson

QuartoDr Penelope McCarthy

OctavoLord and Lady EgremontRichard Shuttleworth

DuodecimoJennifer AntillSir Jeremiah Colman Gift TrustThe O J Colman Charitable TrustPeter FirthJames FisherGiles FlintAnthony HobsonJohn Hussey OBEThe J P Jacobs Charitable TrustLogos Charitable TrustHenry McKenzie-Johnston CBSir Jeremy and Lady MorseThe Viscount NorwichThe Orrin Charitable TrustClive Priestley CBMartin and Margaret RileySybil SheanSir Roy StrongThe Tana Trust

SextodecimoDavid AukinStephen BensonProfessor Sir Alan BownessSebastian BrockMargaret BuxtonTrevor ColdreyCurtis Charitable TrustBarbara CurtoysJane FalloonRichard FreemanMichael GainsboroughMartin Haddon

Godfrey HodgsonRosemary JamesThe Rt Hon The Lord Justice LongmoreJohn MadellJohn Massey StewartKevin MurphyW G PlomerSonia PrenticeBrian ReesJanet RenniePeter RowlandSir John SaintyThe Lady Soames DBECaroline De SouzaDr Gerassimos SpathisChristopher SwinsonJerry WhiteAnn WilliamsAnthony WilliamsReverend Anthony Winter

BOOK FUND

CanonMark Storey

ParagonBasil Postan

Great PrimerMichael Hughes in memory of

Ivy Anne HughesThe Maggs Family in memory of

Michael C JonesRicky Shuttleworth

CiceroWendy HeffordJohn MontgomeryColin Stevenson

NonpareilPeter AndersonDr John Barney David Cashdan in memory of

Reverend Samuel CashdanDavid FawkesThe Late Tom JacksonColin LeeDavid MassaCharles McInernyJames MyddeltonAlyson Wilson in memory of Kay Turnbull

BrilliantHis Hon Paul Baker QCMichael DiamondBenjamin DuncanThe Late Ronald EdwardsBill EmmottMr and Mrs HohlerMichael HolmesJohn MitchellThe Hon Mrs Fionn MorganPauline PinderDerek SaulDr Ann SaundersMrs James TeacherJohn Townsend

GENERAL DONATIONS

Ronni AnconaDr Ian ArchibaldNicholas BunkerPaul BunnageSimon Callow CBEThe Late Peter CalvocoressiPeter CaraccioloFaith CookWendy CopeMary DelormeAdam and Victoria Freudenheim Dr Christopher GeorgeSimon GodwinPamela GrahamThe Worshipful Company of GrocersRosalind HaddenDavid HarrisBelinda HaslamRichard HillierHermione Hobhouse MBEAshley HuishReverend Stephen HumphreysRadostina IvanovaC Julian KoenigJules LubbockRobert MacLeodJohn McNallyAlan McNeeBruce PageDr Julian PattisonJune PearsonJohn PerkinsJohn PlaisterDr Robert ReekieIan RobertsProfessor Henry RoseveareJudith SpinneyLouise Stein Marjorie StimmelMark StoreyPatrick WhiteJohn WilliamsAlison Walker in memory of

Claudio Lo BruttoSir Robert Worcester KBE DL

DONATIONS AND BEQUESTSThe trustees are most grateful to all the donors listed below,who have made contributions in the year ended 31 March2010 either for specific purposes or towards the general running costs of the Library:

The Trustees are also grateful to thosewho have made donations to theInternational Friends of The LondonLibrary in support of The London Library,and to those who have continuedcovenants or made arrangements for GiftAid donations to the Library.

Thank you, too, to all those memberswho have supported the Library throughthe use of the Everyclick search engine.

DONATIONS IN MEMORY OF SIR NICHOLAS HENDERSON

The trustees are grateful for donationsreceived from the following in memoryof the Library’s Vice-President, Sir Nicholas Henderson, who died on16 March 2009:

Nicholas and Diana BaringElissa BennettHer Grace the Dowager Duchess of

Devonshire DCVOA N DroghedaJ J GrimondKate GrimondG M GroseDavid and Elizabeth SmithNicholas Ward-JacksonCarolyn and Nolly Zervudachi

LEGACIES

The Library received pecuniary legaciesfrom the following deceased membersand friends to whom the Trustees aremost grateful:

Angela DiamondGeorge Girling GrangeSir Nicholas HendersonPaul Eyre HintonHarry Robert HolmesYvonne Le RougetelJohn French SlaterMrs K M Tancock Stephen George Peregrine WardGordon Douglas Western

A substantial grant was also receivedfrom the trustees of the Mrs R M ChambersSettlement.

The literary estates of John Cornforth, Sir Philip Magnus-Allcroft, Ian Parsonsand Reay Tannahill have provided incomefrom royalties.

Bill Emmott

The London Library has always been defined both spiritually andfinancially by its independence. Indeed, the Library has managed toremain self-financing throughout its history, thanks to the recognitionby generous men and women of the important role the Library playsin our nation’s literary culture.

The recent removal of Gift Aid relief on membership subscriptions byHM Revenue and Customs, which we have already written to youabout, represents a fresh challenge to our independence, but one weare determined to overcome. We plan to do so by creating a newand – we fervently hope – enjoyable way for philanthropic membersto make their own contribution to keep the Library growing andthriving for the generations that follow.

The Founders’ Circle will come together each year at a literarydinner in the Reading Room and there will also be a variety of special visits to other literary and cultural institutions, privilegedencounters with authors and access to areas of the collection andthe Library not usually seen by members. We very much hope thatyou might like to be one of the members of this very special circle.

There are three levels of annual membership of the Founders’Circle: Dickens, Thackeray and Martineau at £10,000, £5,000 and£1,500 respectively.

FIND OUT MOREIf you are considering joining and would like to hear more aboutthe events planned, please do contact the Development Office on020 7766 4716.

A NEW WAY TO SUPPORT THE LIBRARY –The Founders’ Circle

Documents

Issue 9