Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Edward Wilson
12.30 for 1pm, Tuesday 17 March, Lady Violet Room,
National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“Brilliant.” – Daily Telegraph
“Wilson is a master at working the history of the period,” Publishers Weekly USA
Acclaimed as the new John Le Carré, Edward Wilson uses his background as a scholar, soldier and expatriate to create compellingly authentic novels of espionage in the Cold War. Wilson, who has won praise from the Times Literary Supplement as well as The Mail on Sunday, is a rare example of a literary novelist with wide popular appeal.
In novels such as The Envoy, The Midnight Swimmer and The Darkling Spy, his fictional characters blend seamlessly with real historical ones, and his novels evoke a shadow world where love and betrayal exist side by side and nothing is certain. His most recent book, The Whitehall Mandarin, was published in 2014.
Edward Wilson was born on the waterfront in Baltimore, Maryland and grew up with a taste for foreign places and adventures. After serving in Vietnam, he renounced his US citizenship and settled in the UK. He has lived in Suffolk since 1976.
Literary Fitzrovia Pub Crawl
Tuesday 15 December, 2.30–6pm
This year’s Authors’ Club pub crawl focuses on Fitzrovia, that curious enclave north of Soho that was one the haunt of Orwell, Dylan Thomas, Anthony Burgess and many other writers.
Conducted by John Walsh, author, columnist and team captain on Radio 4’s literary panel game The Write Stuff, it starts at the Fitzroy Tavern, where a drunken Dylan Thomas would give away poetry written on beer mats to any pretty woman, and where George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw and Augustus John, among many others, would gather to drink, argue and inspire each other.
We then move on to: the Marquis of Granby, where Dylan Thomas wrote “Death of the King’s Canary” with John Davenport. TS Eliot and Orwell also drank here, and the pub has links to Dickens and Woolf.
The Wheatsheaf. Dylan Thomas met his wife Caitlin here; Orwell threw up over the bar; and the legendary writer Julian Maclaren-Ross drunk himself to death on his publishing advance in here. The Newman Arms was Orwell’s regular, and is believed to be the model for the Proles’ pub in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
And finally, the Duke of York, which apparently inspired the violence in A Clockwork Orange – but fear not: it is now the loveliest little pub.
The event is free, but please book here: https://
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Naomi Foyle
12.30 for 1pm, Tuesday 18 November, Lady Violet Room,
National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place,
London SW1A 2HE
“Among the best of recent SF” – The Guardian
We are delighted to welcome as our November lunch gues the acclaimed SF author and poet Naomi Foyle. Her first novel, Seoul Survivors, a cyber-thriller set in South Korea, was published by Jo Fletcher Books in 2013. Her second SF novel, Astra, the first book in the Gaia Chronicles series – a Science Fantasy series set in a post-fossil fuel world – appeared from JFB in 2014 and will be followed in 2015 by the sequel, Rook Song.
Naomi is also the author of several poetry pamphlets and two full collections, The Night Pavilion, a 2008 Poetry Society Recommendation, and The World Cup (2010) both from Waterloo Press.
Originally trained in theatre, she has collaborated with artists, musicians and filmmakers on projects including the prize-winning video poem Good Definition (2004) and several spoken word CDs. She is the librettist of the award-winning bouffon opera Hush (Theatre Passe Muraille, Toronto 1990), and has also written a short verse drama, The Strange Wife, produced by the Bush Theatre in 2011.
Naomi Foyle was born in London and grew up in Hong Kong, Liverpool and Saskatchewan. After spending the late nineties working in South Korea and travelling in Central America, Asia and Australia, she now lives in Brighton a pebble’s throw from the sea.
The charge for the two-course lunch (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card. To avoid disappointment, please make your booking no later than Friday 14 November.
Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Meike Ziervogel
Tuesday 28 October, 12.30 for 1pm
“Meike Ziervogel is becoming one of the most interesting figures in the contemporary British and European world, not just because she is a publisher of imagination and daring, but a writer of grace, forensic precision, and power.” — Nicholas Lezard
“A taut and compelling drama about the place of the elderly in family life and about how, in one way or another, it’s the destiny of the old to be hidden away.” — Isabel Wolff
For our October lunch we are delighted to welcome Authors’ Club member Meike Ziervogel to discuss her latest novella, Clara’s Daughter (Salt Publishing).
Michele is a successful businesswoman with a troubled private life. She has a high-powered job, a family, a husband, yet she is defined by a term of possession: she is ‘Clara’s daughter’. When Michele moves her mother into the basement, her husband slams the door and disappears into the night.
Devastating in its psychological insights, Clara’s Daughter reveals unnerving truths about relationships on many levels, which build steadily from the tense, silent spaces between the unfolding of main events. A beautifully-crafted, cinematic novella, Clara’s Daughter is at once startling and moving.
Meike Ziervogel is the founder and director of Peirene Press, an award-winning UK publishing house. Her debut novel Magda was published in 2013 to critical acclaim. It was shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize, and was nominated as a book of the year 2013 by the Observer, Irish Times and Guardian readers. Meike lives in London with her husband and two children.
The charge for the two-course lunch (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card. To avoid disappointment, please make your booking no later than Friday 24 October.
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Ghost Stories for Hallowe’en
7pm, Wednesday 29 October
How better to celebrate Halloween than in the company of the Authors’ Club amid the oak-panelled grandeur of the National Liberal Club? As twilight gathers around the turrets and spires overlooking the Thames, treat yourself to a shudder of delicious suspense as Suzi Feay hosts an evening of ghost stories by her invited guests.
After Suzi opens the night’s uncanny offerings with a ghost story of her own, poet Steven O’Brien will explore the Celtic Otherworld, and author Lynn Shepherd investigates the haunting of Shelley.
After an interval to fortify your spirits with strong liquor, prepare to be chilled to the marrow by ghost stories from the award-winning master of the macabre Chris Priestley and Christopher Fowler, bestselling author of the Bryant and May thrillers.
Definitely not for those of a nervous disposition…
Tickets cost £10 for members/concesions, £15 for non-members, and can be booked online only – there will be absolutely no ticket sales on the door:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/ghost-stories-for-halloween-tickets-13484551657
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The Authors’ Club at War, 1914–18
Presented by C.J. Schüler, with readings by David Moorst and Matt Canny
Tuesday 4 October, 12.30 for 1pm
“Shells falling on a church: these make a huge ‘corump’ sound, followed by a noise like crockery falling off a tray – as the roof tiles fall off… Screams of women penetrate all these sounds… I saw two men and three mules killed by one shell… When I was in hospital a man three beds from me died very hard, blood passing thro’ bandages and he himself crying perpetually, ‘Faith! Faith! Faith!’.” (Ford Madox Ford to Joseph Conrad, 1916)
“When this war’s over nobody is going to worry, six months afterwards, what you did or didn’t do in the course of it… Within a year disbanded ‘heroes’ will be selling matches in the gutter.” (Ford Madox Ford to Wyndham Lewis, 1915)
Like every other community in all the combatant nations, the Authors’ Club was profoundly affected by the First World War. Some 300 members, including Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington and Lord Dunsany, saw active service, and recorded their experiences; 25 members were killed in action; one, holidaying in Luxemburg when the war broke out, was interned by the Germans; while others, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and E.W. Hornung, the creator of Raffles, lost sons or close relatives.
To mark the centenary of the First World War, Authors’ Club chairman C.J. Schüler will review the Club’s experience to the conflict both at home and at the front, describe the involvement of several leading members in a secret government propaganda department, and reveal the clandestine meetings of Lloyd George’s War Cabinet that were held on its premises.
The actors David Moorst and Matt Canny will read from the powerful work written in response to the conflict by Thomas Hardy, Kipling, Ford, Aldington, Dunsany and others. In poetry and prose, they reveal the differing responses – patriotic, disillusioned, cynical or despairing – of some of the leading writers of the age to a conflict that would change their world forever.
Tickets cost £10 for members/concesions, £15 for non-members, and can be booked online only – there will be absolutely no ticket sales on the door:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-authors-club-at-war-191418-tickets-13887204001?aff=erelexporg
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The Politics of Reviewing
Nicholas Spice and Lucy Popescu in discussion, chaired by Rosie Goldsmith
Wednesday 15 October, 7pm
In his essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer”, George Orwell paints a humorous picture of a haggard figure in a moth-eaten dressing-gown, surrounded by dusty papers, cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea, struggling to write 800 words on five totally unrelated books with “the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up and down the stairs”.
Is this image of the reviewer still true today? Is it possible to make a living by reviewing books? And, in an age of book blogging and readers’ reviews on Amazon, do we still need professional reviewers?
In this Authors’ Club discussion, chaired by the broadcaster Rosie Goldsmith, Nicholas Spice, publisher of the London Review of Books, and book reviewer Lucy Popescu will explore these and other issues, such as why certain books are reviewed in the national press and not others; who gets to review them, and why; and what is the reviewer’s function – to draw readers’ attention to good books they might otherwise overlook, to provide a balanced assessment of the latest book by a literary giant, or to debunk the pretentious? And is it easier, as Dorothy Parker said, to criticize a bad play or a bad book than to praise a good one?
Nicholas Spice has been publisher of the London Review of Books – Europe’s best-selling literary magazine – since 1982, and has written on topics such as fiction, classical music and psychoanalysis.
Lucy Popescu is the author of The Good Tourist (Arcadia), a guide to ethical travel, has edited anthologies for English PEN, and reviews books for the Independent, the Independent on Sunday, the TLS, The Tablet and Tribune.
Rosie Goldsmith is chair of the European Literature Network. As a BBC broadcaster, she travelled the world, from Libya to East Timor, covering events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall. She has presented flagship BBC radio shows including Front Row, Open Book, A World In Your Ear and Crossing Continents.
Tickets cost £10 for members/concesions, £15 for non-members, and can be booked online only – there will be absolutely no ticket sales on the door:
http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-politics-of-reviewing-tickets-13509548423?aff=erelexporg
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Charles Spencer
12.30 for 1pm, Tuesday 16 September, Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“Accomplished and gruesome… a seamless, pacy and riveting read, underpinned by the depth of scholarship for which Charles Spencer is renowned.” – Alison Weir
We are delighted to welcome the best-selling historian Charles Spencer to talk about his latest book, Killers of the King: The Men Who Dared to Execute Charles I (Bloomsbury). It tells the dramatic story of what happened to the regicides after the Restoration, when a vengeful mopping-up exercise was put into place. It is a gripping, at times moving account of the fates of the fourscore men who dared to kill a king.
Charles Spencer studied modern history at Magdalen College, Oxford, and is the author of Blenheim: The Battle for Europe (shortlisted for History Book of the Year, National Book Awards), Prince Rupert: The Last Cavalier and Althorp: The Story of a House. Lord Spencer worked for 10 years as a foreign reporter for NBC News, and also hosts an annual literary festival at Althorp in Northamptonshire; devoted to history, it is now in its 11th year.
The charge for the two-course lunch (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card. To avoid disappointment, please make your booking no later than Friday 12 September.
Women and War
Elisa Segrave and Virginia Nicholson in discussion, chaired by Anne Sebba
7pm, Tuesday 23 September, Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
During the two world wars, women of all classes entered the workforce for the first time, in many cases doing jobs hitherto done only by men. Young women who had been in domestic service left it, never to return, to do jobs in munitions factories, shops, as car mechanics, land girls and drivers.
As a social historian, Virginia Nicholson has explored the impact of both wars on women’s lives. The slaughter of the First World War left a generation of two million ‘surplus women’ who had to reinvent themselves, economically and emotionally. The Second World War demonstrated that women of all ages – in the services and on the Home Front – were cleverer, more broad-minded and more complex that even they themselves had thought.
Elisa Segrave focuses on her mother Anne’s war diaries, in which she found a very different person from the needy and helpless one she had known: a competent and responsible woman of whom she could be proud, who had worked in intelligence and at Bletchley Park. After she was demobbed in 1945, however, she never worked again – something that her diaries make clear she regretted.
ELISA SEGRAVE is the author of The Diary of a Breast, about her battle with cancer, and the novel Ten Men (both published by Faber.) She writes for many newspapers and magazines, including the London Review of Books, the Guardian, the Independent and The Lady. The Girl from Station X: My Mother’s Unknown Life (2014) is published by Aurum.
VIRGINIA NICHOLSON is the author of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900–1939 (Viking 2002), Singled Out: How Two Million Survived Without Men after the First World War (Penguin 2007), and Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace 1939–1949 (Penguin, 2011). Her Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes will be published in 2015 by Viking Penguin.
ANNE SEBBA is a biographer, writer, lecturer and journalist, the author of nine non-fiction books, including Battling for News: Women Reporters from the Risorgimento to Tiananmen Square (1994). Her most recent book is That Woman: The Duchess of Windsor and the Scandal That Brought Down a King (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2011).
Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Sara Wheeler
Tuesday 17 June, 12.30 for 1pm in the Lady Violet Room,
National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“One secret of first-person travel writing is the presence of the narrator as a good companion… Sara Wheeler has had it from the off. You want to travel with her.” (Roger Hutchinson, The Scotsman)
“Bracing and ebullient… a fresh and unforgettable picture of the country we have been steadily falling out of love with; a second act indeed.” (Frances Wilson, Sunday Telegraph)
We are delighted to welcome as our June guest the acclaimed travel writer Sara Wheeler. After journeying to the planet’s polar extremes for her previous books, Sara Wheeler rediscovered America 35 years after her first Greyhound trip across the country.
Part biography, part travelogue, O My America! (shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Dolman Prize) traces the journeys of six tough-minded, pioneering women who, at a time when the world expected them to disappear politely, sought a new life in a land where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, there are “no second acts”.
In the midst of her own midlife crisis, Wheeler follows in the footsteps of Fanny Trollope, mother of Anthony and author of the biting Domestic Manners of the Americans; the actress Fanny Kemble, who shocked the nation with her passionate indictment of slavery; the prolific pamphleteering economist Harriet Martineau; the homesteader Rebecca Burlend, who had never before been more than 12 miles from her Yorkshire village; Isabella Bird, whose many ailments remained in check as long as she was scaling the Rockies; and the novelist Catherine Hubback, niece of Jane Austen, who deposited her husband in a madhouse and rode the brand-new rails to San Francisco.
Born in Bristol and educated at Brasenose College, Oxford, Sara Wheeler spent seven months in Antarctica in 1995 as writer in residence with the US Polar Program. She is the author of eight books, including Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica, an international bestseller chosen by Beryl Bainbridge as one of the best books of the year, Travels in a Thin Country: A Journey through Chile, a finalist for the Thomas Cook Award, and The Magnetic North: Notes from the Arctic Circle, hailed by the Independent as “one of the greatest travel books of our time”. She is also a regular contributor to Condé Nast Traveller, The Times and the New York Times.
The charge for the two-course lunch (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Christopher Fowler
Tuesday 27 May, 12.30 for 1pm in the Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club,
1 Whitehall Place, London SW1
‘An award-winning novelist who would make a good serial killer’ – Time Out
Christopher Fowler is the award-winning author of over 30 novels and 12 short story collections. His latest books are The Bleeding Heart, the latest of his Bryant & May mystery novels, which record the adventures of two Golden Age detectives investigating impossible London crimes, and the memoir Film Freak.
A self-confessed movie obsessive, Fowler spent many years working in film, creating movie posters, trailers and documentaries. At the age of 26, he founded the Creative Partnership, a company that changed the face of film marketing. He has handled films such as Reservoir Dogs, Trainspotting, Goldeneye, Moulin Rouge and 28 Weeks Later, and worked with Mike Leigh, Martin Campbell and Peter Greenaway, and on countless Hollywood blockbusters.
He has written for everyone from Kenneth Williams to Michael Caine, the Spice Girls, Pierce Brosnan, Julie Walters, John Cleese and Eric Idle. He has scripted comedy and drama for the BBC, including Radio One’s first live broadcast drama in 2005, and has a weekly column in The Independent On Sunday called ‘Invisible Ink’.
Christopher has achieved several pathetic schoolboy fantasies, releasing a really horrible Christmas pop single, working as a male model, writing two London stage shows, posing as the villain in a Batman graphic novel Man-Bat, running a Soho night club, appearing in the Pan Books of Horror, and standing in for James Bond. After living in France and the USA he now lives in King’s Cross, London and Barcelona.
The charge for the two-course luncheon (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, please print off and fill in the booking form on the NLC website, and post it to National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London, SW1A 2HE. Alternatively, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card. To avoid disappointment, please make your booking no later than Friday 23 May.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
Tuesday 18 March, 12.30 for 1pm in the Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club,
1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“Richly evokes Elizabethan and Jacobean language … while at the same time putting a post-modernist spin on the tight and enthralling plot. I used to be dubious about alchemy and antiquarianism, but the wit and excitement of this first novel breathes new life into them.”
– Tom Paulin
“Eyre has written a sumptuous, sensual tale of beauty and vanity; it’s crying out for a TV adaptation.” – The Bookseller
“Persistently bizarre, fecund, technically inventive, funny – and oddly touching.”
– Jonathan Meades
For our March lunch, we are delighted to welcome Hermione Eyre, whose dazzlingly inventive and original first novel Viper Wine is published by Jonathan Cape on 13 March.
At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine.
One of the most beautiful women of her age, Venetia Stanley has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.
The novel takes us backstage at the whispering court of Whitehall to reveal a marriage in crisis and a country on the brink of civil war. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, 17th-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.
A former child actress and croupier, Hermione Eyre read English at Hertford College, Oxford. She was a staff writer and TV critic at the Independent on Sunday, before becoming contributing editor and chief interviewer at the Evening Standard’s ES magazine, where her subjects have included Cherie Blair, Juliette Binoche, Nancy Dell’Olio, Rupert Everett, Placido Domingo and Joanna Lumley. She co-wrote, with William Donaldson, The Dictionary of National Celebrity (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2005).
The charge for the two-course luncheon (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of club wine is £27.50 per person. To book, please print off and fill in the booking form on the NLC website, and post it to National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London, SW1A 2HE. Alternatively, phone 020 7930 9871 or email secretary@nlc.org.uk. Payment can be made by cheque, bank transfer or debit card. To avoid disappointment, please make your booking no later than Friday 14 March.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
‘Ismailov belongs to the tradition of Russian satirical novelists, from Gogol to Bulgakov and Platonov.’ – The Independent
As our February lunch guest, we are very honoured to welcome Hamid Ismailov, BBC writer in residence and the author of The Dead Lake, published this month by Peirene Press in a fine translation from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield. This terse and haunting novel combines a fairytale love story with the disastrous environmental legacy of the Cold War and the folklore and myth of Central Asia.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Deborah Moggach
Tuesday 14 January, 12.30 for 1pm
Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“This warm, funny and generous romp of a novel is a delight.” (Cathy Moore, The Independent)
“Nobody writes as well about the stirrings of elderly loins… The joy lies in the delightful characters and the wry, pin-sharp commentary on their shenanigans. Bliss.” (Kate Saunders, The Times)
Long-standing members will remember Deborah Moggach’s judicious, perceptive and kindly adjudication of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award in 2004, and we are absolutely delighted to welcome her back as our lunch guest this month.
Her latest novel, Heartbreak Hotel, is a captivating social comedy that continues the adventures of Russell Buffery, aka Buffy, a boozy, charming, feckless and three-times married veteran actor first encountered in The Ex-Wives. Having unexpectedly inherited a run-down theatrical boarding house in a small town in Wales, Buffy hits on the bright idea of drawing on his personal experience by running a series of residential “Courses for Divorces”. Needless to say, not everything turns out as planned, with delightfully comic consequences…
Her debut You Must Be Sisters appeared in 1978, since when she has published a further 16 novels, including Seesaw (1996), and the acclaimed historical novels Tulip Fever (1999), set in 17th-century Amsterdam, and In the Dark (2007), which takes place in London at the end of the First World War. These Foolish Things (2004), which charts the fortunes of a group of British pensioners “outsourced” to a retirement hotel in India, was adapted as the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, with an all-star cast including Judi Dench, Maggie Smith and Bill Nighy.
Deborah Moggach is also an accomplished scriptwriter: in addition to adapting several of her own novels for the screen, she has also adapted Pride and Prejudice as a film starring Keira Knightley, for which she received a BAFTA nomination, and Nancy Mitford’s Love in a Cold Climate for the BBC.
The charge for the two-course luncheon (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of red or white club wine is £27.50 per person. Please book no later than Monday 13 January either by downloading the booking form from the NLC website and posting it to the National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE, by emailing secretary@nlc.org.uk, or by telephone on 020 7930 9871.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Piu Marie Eatwell
12.30 for 1pm, Tuesday December 17, The Lady Violet Room, National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
“Blowing away the cliched perception of our neighbours… A fine read.” The Sun.
“Bracingly factual… tackles egregious stereotypes head-on.” Daily Mail.
“An intriguing portrait of just how much France has changed… the perfect antidote for the disconnect between what modern-day France is really like and how we romantically perceive it.” Spectator.
The centuries-old love-hate relationship with our closest neighbour has spawned a plethora of myths and stereotypes. In recent years our stock of received wisdom about the French – land of the sophisticated lover, the wine-fuelled lunch, the Gitane-puffing philosopher, the hairy female armpit and the rebarbatively squalid toilet – has been replenished by a new generation of lifestyle myths: that French women don’t get fat, that French children don’t throw food, that their countryside has been colonized by Boden-clad, Volvo-driving Brits.
In They Eat Horses, Don’t They?, Piu Marie Eatwell explores the background to, and the contemporary evidence for, 45 such myths. She finds that many of them are simply false, and that even those that are broadly true are rather more complicated than at first sight. In the course of her thorough – and thoroughly entertaining – investigations, we discover there is more to our enigmatic Gallic neighbour than 365 types of cheese, and that the reality of modern French life is very different from the myths that we create about it.
Piu Marie Eatwell studied English at Oxford University (obtaining a congratulatory First Class degree). She worked for some years in London as a television researcher and producer for the BBC and independent production companies, working on a wide range of documentary films and series including Cyberspace (ITV’s The South Bank Show), The Europeans (Channel 4), The Monarchy Debate (BBC 2) and Witness (Channel 4). She subsequently trained as a barrister, and worked first in the chambers in London, and then for international law firms in London and Paris. She now writes and teaches at a leading bilingual school in France. Piu is married to a lawyer, divides her time between England and France, and has three children. She speaks fluent French.
The charge for the two-course luncheon (main course, sweet and coffee) and a glass of red or white club wine is £26.50 per person. Please book no later than Friday 13 December either by downloading the booking form from the NLC website and posting it to the National Liberal Club, Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE, by emailing secretary@nlc.org.uk, or by telephone on 020 7930 9871.
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Simon Garfield
12.30 for 1pm, Tuesday November 19, Blacks, 67 Dean Street, London W1
“Wonderful . . . Apart from its author’s erudition and stylishness, the great strength of this book – the aspect of it which conveys most poignantly what we are losing as letter writing becomes a thing of the past – lies in Garfield’s use of a correspondence between two unknown people.” (Diana Athill, Literary Review)
“Garfield’s masterstroke is to intersperse his historical sections with a series of letters written by an ordinary British couple . . . With Chris and Bessie it is the sheer, unclouded openness that captivates . . . his book is a shining success.” (John Carey, The Sunday Times)
At a time when email would seem to have condemned the art of letter-writing to history, To the Letter tells the story of our remarkable journey through the mail. From Roman wood chips discovered near Hadrian’s Wall to the wonders and terrors of email, Simon Garfield explores how we have written to each other over the centuries and what our letters reveal about our lives.
Along the way he delves into the great correspondences of history, from Cicero and Petrarch to Jane Austen and Ted Hughes (and Keats, Virginia Woolf, Kerouac, Anaïs Nin and Charles Schulz), and traces the very particular advice offered by bestselling letter-writing manuals. He uncovers a host of engaging stories, including the tricky history of the opening greeting, the ideal ingredients for invisible ink, and the sad saga of the dead letter office. As the book unfolds, so does the story of a moving wartime correspondence that shows how letters can change the course of life.
To the Letter is a wonderful celebration of letters in every form, and a passionate rallying cry to keep writing.
Simon Garfield’s previous books include The Nation’s Favourite: The True Adventures of Radio 1, Mauve, Just My Type, which explores the history of typographic fonts, and On the Map. He has written for The Independent, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer, and was named Mind Journalist of the Year in 2005.
£27.50 for a two-course lunch including wine and coffee. To book, go to www.garfieldlunch.eventbrite.co.uk or email cjschuler@authorsclub.co.uk
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Miranda Seymour
Tuesday 15 October, 12.30 for 1pm
Blacks, 67 Dean Street, London W1D 4QH
“Noble Endeavours expands like an accordion, stories opening into more stories, and the whole propelled by prose that is lean and intricate… A noble endeavour, indeed.” – Frances Wilson, Daily Telegraph
“Loving kindness, merry talent, an unfazed optimism and joy-of-life provide the keynotes of Noble Endeavours.” Richard Davenport-Hines, The Observer
It is with great pleasure that we welcome back a long-standing friend of the Authors’ Club, Miranda Seymour, to discuss her latest book, Noble Endeavours. As the centenary of the First World War approaches, it examines the close relations – political, cultural, social and personal – that once existed between Britain and Germany, and seeks to discover how and why the love affair between the two nations went so horribly wrong.
Subtitled “The Life of Two Countries in Many Stories”, it draws a rich and absorbing picture of Anglo-German relations through the lives of individuals, from the closely interconnected royal and imperial families to migrant workers, taking in diplomats, artists, musicians and political refugees. Setting aside bitterness and national stereotypes, it celebrates the mutual affection and sympathy that once characterised relations between the two countries.
Miranda Seymour is one of Britain’s most distinguished, prolific and versatile writers. Her previous work includes nine novels, children’s books, biographies of Mary Shelley, Robert Graves, Bloomsbury hostess Ottoline Morrell, ‘Chaplin’s Girl’ Virginia Cherrill and the ‘Bugatti Queen’ Hellé Nice, and the PEN-Ackerley award-winning memoir In My Father’s House.
£27.50 for a starter, main course, a glass of wine and coffee. Booking: http://seymourlunch.eventbrite.co.uk
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Authors’ Club Lunch
with
Nicholas Lezard
Tuesday 17 September, 12.30 for 1pm
Blacks, 67 Dean Street, London W1D 4QH
“His elegant excursion into the post-marital emotional wasteland is sweetened with an almost Wodehousian sense of the preposterous” (Jane Shilling, Evening Standard)
“The intelligent person’s idea of a feckless sleazeball.” (Nicholas Blincoe, The Telegraph)
We are delighted to welcome Nicholas Lezard to talk about his wildly funny, tragic-comic memoir Bitter Experience Has Taught Me.
In 2007, Nicholas was unceremoniously ejected from the family home and forced to live the life of a student in a grubby shared house in Marylebone known affectionately as The Hovel. From being the adult father in a household with three children he had to relearn the art of living in a shared home, as if he was a student all over again, mustering his scant resources to pay child support while maintaining an entirely essential wine habit.
He hopes this account, assembled from his popular Down and Out column in the New Statesman, will be a comfort and an inspiration to all feckless male dolts in similar positions. And an Awful Warning for those who are, as yet, not.
Nicholas Lezard is a literary critic for the Guardian and also writes for the Independent. His previous books include The Nolympics: One Man’s Struggle Against Sporting Hysteria.
£27.50 for a starter, main course, a glass of wine and coffee. Booking: http://lezardlunch.eventbrite.co.uk
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Dolman Prize 2013
Tuesday 24 September, 6.30–8.30pm
Hatchards, 187 Piccadilly, London W1J 9LE
The winner of the 2013 Dolman Prize for the best book of travel literature will be announced on 24 September at an evening reception at Hatchards bookshop in Piccadilly. The award will be presented by the chair of judges, the leading British travel author and publisher Barnaby Rogerson. Members and guests welcome.
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Soho Literary Festival
Presented by The Oldie
Wednesday 25–Sunday 29 September
Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, London W1D 3NE
This year’s Soho Literary Festival, just up the road from Blacks, opens with a one-off special event: The Betrayal of Oscar Wilde, an open discussion between actor Rupert Everett, Sir David Hare and Oscar Wilde’s grandson Merlin Holland. Further speakers include Lionel Shriver, Ruby Wax, Quentin Blake and Soho stalwarts such as the Private Eye team celebrating Private Eye Cartoons and Craig Brown, A N WIlson & Co with their sellout show Comedy & Parody.
Other highlights include Dan Snow on the history of Syria, Damian Barr and Phyllida Law on writing memoirs, and Authors’ Club member Meike Ziervogel, Rachel Johnson and Anne Sebba on WAGS in the Third Reich.
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