'Historical research proves to be a real theme of the night' - Jill Dawson & Kate Mosse at the Friends Meeting House

Friends Meeting House, home of the pacifist Quakers, seems at first glance to be a rather incongrous setting for two of Britain’s foremost novelists to discuss their latest novels, both of which are set around the time of World War One. In Jill Dawson's novel, The Great Lover she creates a picture of the poet Rupert Brooke which contrasts with the fictional voice of a seventeen year old maid, with whom he forms a relationship. Kate Mosse's new novel, The Winter Ghosts, is set just after the war and centres on a young man trying to come to terms with the loss of his older brother.

In fact, Friends Meeting House turned out to be an excellent venue, both in terms of being surprisingly capacious yet retaining a feeling of intimacy with the speakers, and also in its relationship to the subject matter of Mosse’s novel in particular, in which she tells us she was moved to write a novel about the huge loss of life in World War One and the difficulties facing young men in being allowed to grieve.

The two writers prove to be an interesting contrast to each other, both in terms of their writing and presentational styles – and even their choice of outfit, Dawson in a cocktail dress and Mosse in jeans! Mosse is vivacious and witty, distracting the audience from early problems with the microphone by loudly proclaiming that she wouldn’t be needing one and beginning her talk by complementing a lady on the front row on her footwear.

Jill Dawson breaks the ice by telling us how much she enjoys getting the chance to meet readers and find out how they have responded to her work. Her presentational style is more reserved but open, and hugely engaging. She gives us a spine-tingling reading of a section from the The Great Lover where the poet Rupert Brook and her fictional character Nell, kiss for the first time.

During the question and answer session, Dawson speaks of the extensive research which she had carried out into the life of Brooke including reading nine biographies, as well as letters and Brooke’s little known travel writings and even visiting Tahiti, where Brooke had spent some time before the war. She compares the voice which she has given Brooke to an “impressionistic painting” which, whilst not giving the true likeness of a photograph, could capture the true nature of the subject.

Historical research proves to be a real theme of the night, as Kate Mosse also speaks with passion about her desire to give a narrative to untold historical events and describes herself as a “pedant” when it comes to research. She told us of the many years she spent researching her books Labyrinthe and Sepulchre as well as The Winter Ghosts - and her determination to know as much as possible about the period she was writing about, even if she didn’t use all of the research in her books.

In response to a question asked by Festival Director Cathy Bolton, Mosse describes the differences between commercial fiction, in which she explained that “plot is everything”, and literary fiction, where the priority is the ideas and the way in which the story is told. As Mosse herself points out, this was an apt description of the contrasts between her own novels, where the plot is of central importance, and those of Dawson - who has also published poetry - with her beautiful and evocative use of language.

With Hilary Mantel winning the Booker Prize less than two weeks ago, Bolton is compelled to ask Mosse – who founded the Orange prize for women’s fiction as a reaction to all male Booker shortlists – if she felt that the Orange prize had influenced the shortlisting of other awards. Mosse is modest in her response, but tipped us off that she has written a piece for Saturday’s Guardian on this very subject! Dawson interjected and suggested that the Orange Prize had had a huge impact on the recognition of women in writing.

The evening is rounded off with an insight into the reading habits of successful authors. In response to an audience member’s question of what the authors themselves enjoy reading, Mosse revealed that she likes to read crime and thrillers, as the way in which they are put together is a “good lesson”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she also enjoys military history, again giving us a reminder of her devotion to research.

Dawson on the other hand told us that, when writing a novel, she reads non-fiction relating to her subject matter, as she feels that she can’t “lose herself in someone else’s fictional world” when she is trying to create her own. With the critical praise heaped upon Dawson’s creation of Brooke’s voice, it is obviously a method which works well for her!



Kath Horwill was formerly Head of History at a large comprehensive in Bury. She writes the blog Parklover.

Dame Joan Bakewell reminisces over afternoon tea

The French restaurant in The Midland Hotel is a fitting setting for Dame Joan Bakewell to discuss her first novel, All The Nice Girls. With fleur-de-lys wallpaper, luxurious chandeliers and ornate rugs, the place, like the erudite speaker widely known for being one of the first female TV journalists in the UK, oozes sophistication. And watching over proceedings, aptly, is a portrait of Madame de la Sabliere; a woman revered across 17th-century Europe for her own great learning and scholarly pursuit.

Self-styled ‘voice of older people’ and recently seen defending older women newsreaders, Bakewell – smiling and resplendent in a yellow-buttoned jacket, black shawl and grey trousers – starts by explaining her reasons for only just getting round to writing her first novel, at the age of 76. 'It’s revenge on my English teacher,' she says, detailing her love of literature as a teenager and telling how 'I yearned to be a writer' – until the teachers at Stockport High School For Girls told her it was 'a daft idea'. This draws laughter from the audience, many of whom are from a similar generation. So, instead of becoming a writer, Bakewell went on to study economics, then history, before becoming a journalist. She confides that young people should have their creativity and imagination fostered, so that the notion of being a writer is not dismissed from their minds.


Bakewell now turns to the roots of All The Nice Girls, the idea for which developed when she was in her attic rummaging through her old belongings. First, she happened upon some love letters from her adolescent years, exclaiming, 'Gosh! Love letters are boring!', and imparting to us that the reason for this is the repetition of the word 'love' in such notes. More importantly, however, she discovered some documents relating to the British Ship Adoption Society during World War II from when her school had 'adopted' a ship.

This got her thinking how there must have been 'undercurrents in this story', more than meets the eye, so she set about looking into the background of the Ship Adoption Society at the National Maritime Museum, perusing documents that seemed untouched for eons: 'Dust all over them and bound by strings'. Following her journalistic instincts, she did as much research as she could, visiting the Western Approaches Museum in Liverpool to swot up on the essential details needed to write historical fiction and leaving with the decision: 'I'm going to make one of my characters a Wren!' Bakewell says she was so enraptured by what she had learned about the women serving in the Women’s Royal Naval Service that she wanted to convey a story from their perspective. She also became interested in the British mercantile fleet and the threat from German U-boats to merchant seamen in the Atlantic, and this comes across in the novel's tangible ominous feeling. As if to prove she really has done her homework, Bakewell sets about reeling off statistics about WWII before reading two excerpts from All The Nice Girls. The first passage is the moment the headmistress announces that 'the school is going to adopt a ship'; the second is the poignant moment when the ship’s captain and the school’s headmistress meet, right here in The Midland.

Next, Bakewell discusses the dialogue in the novel and explains how she found the language used by sailors in WWII slightly difficult to grasp, joking: 'I’m English of course, but all the colloquialisms!' Indeed, one maritime historian she spoke to apparently even said, 'They won’t let you publish that!' Having been a youngster in the era during which All The Nice Girls is set was an advantage, says Bakewell, and she also drew on the memories of others who lived through the war. She compares this to Hilary Mantel's Man Booker Prize winner Wolf Hall, which is set almost 500 years before All The Nice Girls. Bakewell admits she 'copied the best!' in terms of small details, and laughter ensues.

Bakewell has held the audience’s attention throughout the afternoon; not even the din of crockery being thrown about in an adjacent room distracted anyone. And as she wraps up the talk to indulge in some fresh tea and scones, she is still enthusing about writing: 'I hope it proves infectious.'

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Mohsin Iqbal is a freelance tech writer and blogger. Read his blog Sabres Length At Peterloo here.

The evolution of a scientist: Ruth Padel at The Manchester Museum

Much has been written about Ruth Padel of late. The poet who claimed the coveted Oxford Professor Of Poetry title had little time to celebrate her new job: just days into the role, a media storm broke. She was accused of mustering a smear campaign against her nearest rival for the post, Derek Walcott, and forced to resign.

After such a public furore, many would have scuttled off to lick their wounds in solitude. But Padel, like her great-great-grandfather, is clearly made of sterner stuff. Within days of announcing her resignation in May, she stepped out at the Hay Festival to read Survival Of The Fittest, a poem from her latest book, Darwin: A Life In Poems. The wicked irony of the poem’s title surely wasn’t lost on anyone.


It is from this book that Padel takes her readings at The Manchester Museum tonight. A cross between historical record, social documentary and family memoir (Charles Darwin is the great-great-grandfather in question), Padel’s book of poetry, which mixes her words with Darwin’s own, is easily so absorbing that any question about what did or didn’t happen at Oxford earlier this year fades into an irrelevance.

In some ways, Darwin: A Life In Poems does what it says on the tin. But rather than simply retell the scientific story, Padel reveals the emotional side to a man whose career was shaped by the women in his life: his mother; his daughter, Annie, and, above all, his beloved wife, Emma.

So we hear that Darwin began collecting things as a young boy in response to his mother’s death. Collecting, Padel tells us, can be used ‘to assert control over what is unbearable’. It is a ‘system against loss’, something that Darwin would cling to as he began to develop the theory of evolution by natural selection – and to comprehend what the survival of the fittest really meant. If ‘the fit will be preserved’, he realises with horror, it means the weak – sick children such as ten-year-old Annie – will not and cannot survive. And as Darwin’s evolutionary work developed, Padel tells us that his belief in the afterlife withered. Although Emma continues to hope ‘for reunion after death’, Darwin does not; in notes found after his death, he writes, ‘When I am dead, know I have kissed and cried over this, many times’.

Padel herself is an assured and confident reader. She knows her stuff when it comes to Darwin’s biography and demonstrates a frightening grasp of the subject matter that both fascinated and tormented the scientist (she’s a Fellow of The Zoological Society Of London, and it shows). She approves of the venue: the Museum’s mammals hall – stuffed with animals that are themselves stuffed and imprisoned within Victorian glass boxes – is a fitting setting in which to hear the words of a man who spent his life similarly collecting animals, insects, flora and fauna. And the Museum is in the midst of a Darwin ‘festival’ that marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of the scientist; several times, Padel encourages us to visit the photography show that features the same South American landscape recorded in Darwin’s The Voyage Of The Beagle.

Padel rounds up by describing the reaction to Darwin’s publication of On The Origin Of Species. Within a year, she tells us, the Church Of England had accepted Darwin’s theory, with one fan even expressing delight in moving from a belief that God made the world in seven days to one where ‘God makes the world make itself’. Which is a neat way to end the reading, demonstrating just how skilled at intellectual evolution us humans are – we’re all too adept at retrofitting new ideas into old and flawed arguments.

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Susie Stubbs is the editor of creativetourist.com and also writes Travels With My Baby, which won Blog Of The Year at the 2008 Manchester Blog Awards.

Frolicing like Sheba: A surreal history of sex (with many gaps) from Martin Amis, Carol Mavor & Will Self

And so here we are in the lofty environs of the Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama (a large lecture theatre that appears to have stray pieces of decking glued to the walls at random intervals) to hear Prof Martin Amis, Prof Carol Mavor (author, most recently, of the book Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott) and author Will Self discuss Literature and sex.

Amis (looking smaller and older than ever before, but crackling with wit and erudition all the same) kicks off proceedings by quoting his father, Kingsley Amis, who said that sex in literature couldn't be done as it 'deuniversalises' your character (sex, Amis implying, being such a personal act that all of your characters foibles will distance them from the reader). Amis fils is in accord with his dad and claims sex is disastrous in literature - 'you can't write about good sex' - in the same way that you can't write about dreams ('or only for a line or two'). He quotes Henry James, 'Tell a dream, lose a reader'. What you can do, Amis continues, is write about bad sex. The main thrust of his talk, then - if you'll forgive the pun - centres on a surreal history of sex in anglophile literature 'with many gaps'. Amis then takes us on a tour, from Chaucer through Gawain the Green Knight (with its 'recurring scenes of sexual temptation') to Shakespeare's Sonnets (themselves 'a kind of a peak for writing about sex') before arriving at 'a disassociation of sensibility' (poets no longer able to think and feel at the same time) that the Romantics tried and failed to fix (although Byron and Keats came close, Amis posits, citing a hilarious instance of Larkin's marginalia to Keats' 'Lamia': in 'Lamia', Keats wrote 'and into her Dream he Melted' to which Larkin wrote, 'You mean he fucked her?'). The tour then dallied a little in the country of Dicken's Hard Times (in particular a visit by Louisa Gradgrind to her 'utilitarian' father, in which she attempts to discuss her marriage, drawing his attention to some huge chimneys outside the window, saying, Father, at night flames shoot out, only for her father to say I don't see the relevance - Amis says he can't help but wonder if Dickens felt as Louisa's father did), Eliot's Middlemarch & Austen's Pride & Prejudice (Amis jokily said 'if the novel has a fault it's that we don't get a 30 page sex scene'). From here we pass Smollett and Richardson (for whom girls can't have sex unless they're drugged) through Hardy to Lawrence - who obviously got in a lot of trouble as far as Lady Chatterly's Lover, The Rainbow, Women in Love & a later poetry collection called Pansies was concerned. Amis said, 'I think Lawrence is tremendously groundbreaking but never got anywhere with sex. His sexual unions were just like fights, and all became tremendously antagonistic.' Post-Lawrence, however, writing about sex suffers another blow - absolute freedom (what Self will later go on to call 'the death of affect', from JG Ballard, and which comes down to 'the naming of parts'). Stuttering past Updike (whose approach, to the audience's great amusement, Amis cited as being the equivalent of sending 'a Japanese film crew into the bedroom'), Amis arrives at Nabokov's Lolita - the book around which much of the evening's debate centres. Nabokov was 'consistently good' when it came to writing about sex and Lolita was his 'great flower', in which sex is both 'slightly comic and macabre'. Later in the evening, in response to questions, Amis unpicks Nabokov's own relation to Lolita, and how writing about sex with a young girl cast a shadow over everything else he did, a shadow that can be seen in the fragment of a novel, The Original of Laura, to be published later this year. Writing about sex, though, Amis concludes, is a 'great corrupting thing' akin to 'the brothelgoer's mad power' - choice - 'and the novelist has infinite choice', itself 'a fat corrupting thing'.

Professor Carol Mavor then provided a sort of abstract interlude in which (looking something like Crystal Tips, of Crystal Tips & Alistair fame, with the voice of an Americanised Julie Burchill) she talked about the letter O in sexual literature (which may sound like a racy episode of Sesame Street but - given the reliance on strange images flashed up on a screen - was actually closer to a race through the album covers of the Pixies), before Will Self (lounging back in his seat like a bearded Daniel Day Lewis, spoiling for a fight) sallies forth, first responding to Mavor's reference to Proust ('Proust becomes sexier when you realise Albertine is Marcel's Belgian chauffeur Albert') and then to Martin Amis, saying he can't concur with either, 'practically, because we'd have nothing to talk about, but also generally, because it is possible to write well about sex.' Self mis-quotes from Solomon's Song of Songs (referring to a beard like a pile of wheat when in fact the beard 'is as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers' and the belly 'is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies') as he rolls the words 'Biblical sex' around his mouth like a lozenge. 'The erotic is metaphoric,' he said, 'it's always about more than cocks and cunts' - but therein lies the problem: 'It's become permissible to write about anything' which has created a 'crisis about writing sex'. Later, in response to a statement on censorship from one of the audience, Self goes much further, saying that the problem isn't one of censorship, it's the fact that there are too many voices competing for attention. 'It's hard to avoid naming parts - you look recherche if you don't,' Self continues, but male and female writers these days are 'full of what Freud called 'full genitality'' (apparently, Self digresses, Freud stopped having sex at 45 - perhaps, he wonders, that is something we should all do). What is most offputting, Self says, is 'a sense of writers getting their jollies'. From here, we are treated to Self's views on Ulysses (a novel that was 'way out there in terms of top quality literary wank scenes', Leopold Bloom's wank scene being 'well worth wading through the rest of the book for') and Lolita, once more (which 'manipulates the reader's own desire'). Touching on the more controversial aspects of Lolita, Self claimed these days 'Nabokov would be damned for ludicrous sesquipedalianism', constantly bothered by journalists asking if he'd swallowed a dictionary before he wrote (much as Self himself has been bothered by this question). At this point in proceedings, Self said he would 'slide out of the encumbrance of discourse...' to great laughter, 'only to re-enter, fired up anew...'

The evening concluded with a series of questions from the audience, circling shark-like around the issue of Humbert Humbert and whether a writer should be 'allowed' to give voice to characters who have feelings that now may be reprehensible to us (Amis said, 'Writing is freedom' but that, particularly in the case of Nabokov - 'sex is a destablising, deuniversalising force'). The one image to be taken away from the evening, though, is this: early on in the evening, Self said there were a number of literary criminals given to writing bad sex; during question time, Self said that Sebastian Faulks was one such writer (Self had had to read Faulk's Bird Song - for research, you understand - and felt Faulks was all trussed up in his tweeds). What Faulks needs to do, Self said was 'frolic like Sheba'. I imagine, as the audience made their way home, frolicing like Sheba was high on the agenda...

- Peter Wild

‘There’s More to Life than Books, You Know…’

It used to be, when the NME was worth reading, that the NME letters page was a hotbed of debate. I say a hotbed of debate. Week to week, letters ran like posthumous dispatches from some raging frontline: on the one hand you had ‘those who would rise up to defend Morrissey from real and/or perceived slights’ and on the other you had… well, anyone else. That was largely how Morrissey fans saw the world – either you were with them or against them. And if you were against them, woe betide you! Talk about death by a thousand metaphysical slings and arrows.

Such exchanges were at the forefront of my mind when I started in on Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fiction inspired by The Smiths. I’d had a bit of a dusting up as a result of the first book in the series (Perverted by Language, which saw Fall frontman Mark E Smith tearing up copies of my book onstage) and the last thing I needed was hordes of Smiths fans camped outside my house telling me (in no uncertain terms) why my plan to have writers use Smiths song as the jumping off point for an anthology of short stories was not a wise one.

Still and all, it didn’t deter me. From time to time as the book came together, I’d poke my chubby nose around the door of various Smiths and Morrissey sites to see if news of the book had percolated their way yet (and once, just once, I glimpsed exactly what I expected, lots of youngsters saying ‘Oh’ and ‘Woe’ and ‘Whyever wouldst someone consider-est such a thing ast this?’). Conveniently, however, that was as bad as things got. On the whole, since the publication of the book, we’ve had nothing but goodwill. The fact that Paint a Vulgar Picture is an anthology comprising stories by a bunch of different people means that readers are unlikely to like everything (such is the nature of a compilation, right?) – but if they like a bunch of stories? Well, I’m happy…

As the reaction has been ‘quite’ to ‘very’ good, we’ve decided to sneak out from under the radar where we normally reside and do something of a night at Salford Lad’s Club as part of the inestimable Manchester Literature Festival. For £5 (or £3 concessions), you get the up and coming stylings of James Hopkins, the valiant home-town return of Jeff Noon, the blazing urban swish of Helen Walsh and the twisted suburban fantasies of the mighty Catherine O’Flynn. And what’s more, if you’re that way inclined, you can also treat yourself to one of the famous Manchester Music Tours, a two hour minibus tour that starts and ends at Salford Lad’s Club.

Between you and me, you’d be a fool to miss out on what will simply be the highlight of the Manchester literary calendar this year…

Paint a Vulgar Picture: Fictions inspired by The Smiths Featuring James Hopkin, Jeff Noon, Catherine O'Flynn, Helen Walsh & Peter Wild

Saturday 24th October, 8pm
Salford Lads Club, St Ignatius Walk
(off Coronation Street) Salford, M5 3RX
(Bus No. 33 or 63 from Piccadilly Gardens)
Tickets £5 / £3 concessions
Book on 0843 208 0500

You can also incorporate one of the famous Manchester Music Tours into your visit. This 2 hour minibus tour will start from Salford Lads Club at 4.30pm and costs £10. To book a place please email mozbus@aol.com or call Phill on 0784344 6397.

Peter Wild, editor of Paint a Vulgar Picture

Short Weekend Ticket Offer

This year’s Manchester Literature Festival gives special focus to the short story via the Short Weekend featuring leading exponents of the form sharing stories inspired by science, The Smiths, political exile, and above all what it is to be human, as well as the announcement of the inaugural £10,000 Manchester Fiction Prize. We realise that you are going to be spoilt for choice over this weekend, so, to make things a little easier on your pockets we are offering readers a fantastic joint ticket offer on the following four events, which all take place at the Friends Meeting House on the afternoon of Saturday 24th October:

When It Changed: Science-into-Fiction Anthology launch with Geoff Ryman, Patricia Duncker, Liz Williams, Dr Tim O’Brien & Prof Steve Furber (1 – 2.30pm)

Bernard MacLaverty & Atef Abu Saif (3 – 4pm),

Hassan Blasim & David Constantine (4.30 – 5.30pm)

Chris Beckett (winner of this year’s Edgehill Short Story Prize) & James Lasdun (6 – 7.30pm)

All 4 events can be booked for the total price of £10 / £6 (students and other concessions) by phoning 0843 208 0500 and quoting “MLF Short Weekend Offer”.

Writing Manchester

If you are in the city centre over the next month we urge you to check out this unique exhibition, covering fifty years of writing in Greater Manchester, which has a growing reputation as the independent publishing capital of the North. Based on archival research by a major university project called ‘Moving Manchester’, the Writing Manchester exhibition profiles the city’s most influential writers, publishers and writing organisations (most of whom have featured in the Manchester Literature/Poetry Festival over the years) as well as providing an overview of the city’s literary trends and specialisms.

As part of the Moving Manchester project, John Siddique (who is appearing at this year’s MLF Northern Salt event) has been commissioned to write a series of poems on the theme of immigrant lives – you can check these out at the online gallery and see John performing his commissioned poems alongside Jackie Kay as part of a Creative Arts Day at the Whitworth Art Gallery on Saturday 12th September.