Novelists From England

"I've heard people say, ‘Well, history is protected at the top Russell Group universities’. But that is a really dangerous route to go down. Are we saying that if people don’t get 3As, they don’t deserve to do history? It should be a degree that is open to all, and that means it must be available to those who want to study locally. Otherwise we might as well be going back to the Victorian period when this sort of university education was only for elite men."

"History is so important. It explores and tells us who we are. We should be doing more of it as a country, not less."

"In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other."

"Large families were really in fashion [in Victorian England], they were seen as a status symbol, they were seen as an example of how the man was very virile. The reality was that, like Victoria, people were pregnant repeatedly. Every three months or so they might fall pregnant, so the average woman was pretty much pregnant or about to be pregnant for most of her early married life."

"A country with a sense of purpose should encourage free speech and debate, but instead we have a Conservative whip on a strange mission to audit university teaching on Brexit. Pretty McCarthyite. And on the other side, confusion about who should and shouldn't be allowed to speak. We should nurture great minds of the future, not tunnel their vision."

"We have some of the greatest photographs of all time cemented in our [the United Kingdom's] national identity, but we don't have the whole picture. Our understanding of history and the country is shaped by the images the survive."

"‘He's promised to see a psychiatrist — but I'm not very optimistic about that. I only ever knew one psychiatrist. Funny chap. If ever a man was in need of psychiatric treatment it was him.’"

"...he'd come round to the view that Freud would have been a far more valuable citizen if he'd stuck to his research on local anaesthetics."

"He hated suicides. ... Was suicide just the coward's refuge from some black despair? Or was it in its way an act of courage that revealed a perverted sort of valour? Not that, though. So many other lives were intertwined: no burdens were shed — they were merely passed from the shoulders of one to those of another."

"‘Me and the wife always eat 'em (fish and chips) off the paper - seems to taste better somehow.’ ‘They say it's the newsprint sticking to the chips ... By Jove, your wife's right, Lewis. I'll never eat them off a plate again.’"

"‘It seems you like your coffee half and half, sarge ... half in the cup and half in the saucer.’"

"He passed the blonde just as she turned her head, and he blinked hard. What a world we live in! for the lovely blonde had a lovely beard and side-whiskers down to his chin. Interesting thought ..."

"We landed at the Ferry House, and struck off into the woods full of globe flowers by the lake side, and of yellow poppies by the wood wall; of hyacinths beneath the trees; of the curved crozier heads of the sprouting bracken; of young foxglove spathes, thick, downy, and as yet flowerless; of tufts of mountain fern like Indians' head-dresses; of trailing brambles and yet more delicate sprays of wild-raspberry; of bird's-eye, blue and lustrous, of violets and wood-sorrel; of lady's-mantles, green, gold-spotted; of delicate wind-flowers and starry stitchwort,—full of all manner of sweet wood-flowers; and then, returning, we saw two large carts and two large horses put into the ferry-boat, which a man nearly as large rowed leisurely across, according to the mode and manner of the place."

"In re-reading these pages I am now more than ever convinced that I have struck the right chord of condemnation, and advocated the best virtues and most valuable characteristics of women. I neither soften nor retract a line of what I have said."

"In her early writings in the 1840s and 1850s she had been an ardent supporter of women's rights and even free love, and had received particular notoriety with her shocking 1851 novel Realities. In her middle years, however, she modified her radical views, and her novels such as The Rebel of the Family (1880) reflect her growing conservatism and ambivalence about women's rights."

"I was an only child and grew up in a cottage in the Oxfordshire countryside. I was thrown very much on my own resources which consisted of books, books and more books. I used to think I was very deprived by this experience but now I think the opposite. The books I read lying on my bed filled up my imagination and they are the fuel for my creativity now."

"It’s weird looking back that I was so certain I couldn’t write. Not fiction. At the time that I had that view, in my 20s and 30s, I didn’t think that it was because I was the grandson of J.R.R. Tolkien, although I think now that that was the reason. I don’t know what’s changed. I think it’s possibly confidence."

"Of the quality of Mr. Blackwood's genius there can be no dispute; for no one has even approached the skill, seriousness, and minute fidelity with which he records the overtones of strangeness in ordinary things and experiences, or the preternatural insight with which he builds up detail by detail the complete sensations and perceptions leading from reality into supernormal life or vision. Without notable command of the poetic witchery of mere words, he is the one absolute and unquestioned master of weird atmosphere; and can evoke what amounts almost to a story from a simple fragment of humourless psychological description. Above all others he understands how fully some sensitive minds dwell forever on the borderland of dream, and how relatively slight is the distinction betwixt those images formed from actual objects and those excited by the play of the imagination."

"Blackwood took large risks and sometimes blundered, but at his best he delivered a greater number of magisterial shudders than more refined writers in the genre ever attempted."

"(...) The whole setting of this Moravian school was so beautifully simple that it lent just the proper atmosphere for lives consecrated without flourish of trumpets to God. It all left upon me an impression of grandeur, of loftiness, and of real religion... and of a Deity not specially active on Sundays only."

"It is a mercy one cannot see the future. In that New York misery, present and to follow, had I known that some fifteen years later I should be my own master, living more or less “like a gentleman,” earning my livelihood, though a very bare one, by writing, I could never have faced what I did face. Any value that may have lain in the experiences would certainly have been missed, at any rate. If one knew that the future promised better things, there is no patience in human beings that could hold and wait for it; if, on the other hand, it promised worse, I have met no courage that could bear the present. Those who preach “live in the present only” have common sense on their side."

"Events, moreover, which brought big changes into my life had always come, I noticed, from outside, rather than as a result of definite action on my own part. A chance meeting in a hotel-bar set me reporting, a chance meeting with Mullins landed me on the Times, a chance meeting with Angus Hamilton in Piccadilly Circus led to my writing books, a chance meeting with William E. Dodge now suddenly heaved me up another rung of life into the position of private secretary to a millionaire banker. To me it has always seemed that some outside power, but an intelligent power, pulled a string each time, and up I popped into an entirely new set of circumstances. This power pushed a button, and off I shot in a direction at right angles to the one I had been moving in before. This intelligent supervision I attributed in those days to Karma. In the mind, though perhaps with less decision there, it operated too. A book, a casual sentence of some friend, an effect of scenery, of music, and an express-lift mounts rapidly from the cellar of my being to an upper story, giving a new extended view over a far, a new horizon. Much that puzzles in the obscurity of the basement outlook becomes clear and simple. The individual who announces the sudden change is unaware probably how vital a role he plays in another’s life. He is but an instrument, after all."

"She screamed before she realized what she did — a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet made so little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood grouped all round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green, spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture. They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild yet thick, moving and turning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft rustling."

"Here on the table is a book of such a sort as does from time to time appear, making, one supposes, no particular pretence to fame, and yet exceedingly well done, because it is instinct with this national power, and everyone who has a shelf for the horrible in his library will welcome it and give it its place."

"Algernon Blackwood (1869—1951) wrote magnificent tales of visionary horror (The Wendigo, The Willows), superbly modulated stories of black magic (Ancient Sorceries, Secret Worship), perfectly constructed ghost stories (The Empty House, Keeping His Promise, The Listener)."

"Did she know what it was for a man to come to that point in his life when he found it impossible to touch the body of his own wife? To look at it; and to feel nothing. Not to desire it, at all, when the flesh was inert and dead and meaningless? To have the act of love become (with one's own wife) the most meaningless of all acts?"

"I didn't, I thought, really like her, for really she wasn't the sort of girl to whom I was usually attracted. I'd always thought that the girls who appealed to me most were the rather energetic, rather vigorous, rather healthy girls I saw on the tennis courts or on the beach. The girls who swam well, and whose skins were beautifully tanned, and who had broad shoulders. The girls who looked well in white. The girls with clear, straightforward eyes. The girls who laughed a great deal. I'd always thought I preferred a girl like that, and it was only an unfortunate set of circumstances which prevented me from meeting one."

"There was a noisy rush of water from the bathroom, and she appeared, ready for the evening, a smile she had chosen, I thought, from a small collection of smiles she kept for occasions like this, fixed upon her face."

"Alone; it was the one active passion I had left now, the only real obsession. I had acquired, I hoped, with the passage of the years, the bad years, a measure of patience, and I thought of myself as being somewhat tight-mouthed, and even persevering, virtues I had always so conspicuously lacked, and I thought the time was at last gone when I had exhausted myself with futile rebellions. The rebellions seemed now, from this cool distance, this slight eminence I had achieved, silly and wasteful, and it was cunning that now struck me as the valuable quality to have, the distinctive characteristic. There had been so much blind impetuosity in the past; there had been so many indiscriminate wounds inflicted; I had lacerated myself as well as others so unhappily so many times. Now I fought, or it seemed to me I was fighting, a much sounder although a much more limited and more circumspect war: it consisted mostly of careful withdrawals, of very conscious retreats."

"The railway hit Harrow on the Hill in 1880 and it’s been downhill ever since, culminating in one of those formless red brick shopping centres which artfully combines a complete lack of aesthetic quality with a total disregard for the utilitarian function for which it is built."

"Here the bland 1930s art deco stylings of the station gave way to the horror that was the 1980s where every public building was deliberately crafted to look as much like a urinal as possible."

"“I wasn’t eavesdropping,” I said. “I was gathering intelligence.”"

"“Nice,” said Abigail. “Very plausible.” “Yeah, but just because it’s plausible doesn’t mean it’s true.”"

"I’ve always believed that my dad is right about one thing—your life is your solo and whatever song you choose to sing you only get to do it once."

"“Peter,” said Tyburn. “I need you to stop just pretending to be clever and actually be clever.”"

"Nightingale has always been reluctant to let me loose on the library and I must have frowned or something because he went on, “My worry with you, Peter, is not what you would learn but that, should you go into the library, you might never emerge again.”"

"A promise is a promise, or as Nightingale put it, “either your word is good or it’s worthless.”"

"I didn’t dare ask because we have an unspoken agreement—I don’t question what she does on my computer when I’m out and, in return, she doesn’t murder me in my sleep."

"Ask not for whom the buck stops, I thought, it stops for thee."

"“Somebody’s lying,” I said, which got me a look of amused indulgence from Stephanopoulos and a snort from Seawoll. Of course somebody was lying—we were the police—somebody was always lying to us."

"The main purpose of an administrative meeting is to establish collective guilt for whatever fuck-up arises out of its decisions."

"After a slow start the police have taken to mobile technology in a big way—mainly because it means you can pretend to work anywhere: at home, the canteen, the local boozer."

"Police doctrine is, even if you’re waiting for someone to do something violent to your suspect, you should de-escalate the situation because at the very least a peaceful solution produces a ton less paperwork."

"“Flexible,” I said. “Meaning we’re making it up as we go along.”"

"Hyde Park Corner is what happens when a bunch of urban planners take one look at the grinding circle of gridlock that surrounds the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and think—that’s what we want for our town."

"The house was neat and well cared for, but to my eye the Heywoods were losing the battle against the four-year-old agent of entropy who was living with them"

"Now, personally, I’d have been happier driving an armored personnel carrier in through the front door. But since we’re the Met, and not the police department of a small town in Missouri, we didn’t have one."

"When you’re four, forever and ever can mean yesterday."

"“Desperate people do desperate things,” said Spencer-Talbot. “Perhaps if we all did more to make things less desperate, then perhaps there would be less violence.”"

"“This is a terrible work,” I said. “Why did you do it?” “The usual reasons,” said the Magister. “I told myself it was piety and duty to the Church, but a thousand years of contemplation will batter down the doors of one’s own delusions.”"