In January 1990, the Sunday Telegraph launched “In the Second-Hand Bookshops,” a new series of mini-features in which a British writer was invited to spend up to £25 on three old books. It ran a year and not only highlighted dozens of used book shops around the country but allowed the writers a chance to mentions some unexpected and often neglected selections. Here are some of their lesser-known choices:
- • Martin Booth (7 January 1990):
- Jesuits Under Fire by T. F. Ryan, SJ (1944): “The gripping yet laid-back narrative of the Fathers at the fall of Hong Kong.”
- • Ludovic Kennedy (14 January 1990):
- Wyndham and Children First by John Egremont né Wyndham (Harold Macmillan’s ennobled Private Secretary) (1968): “A very witty, rather shambling figure, he had been a contemporary of mine at Eton and a brilliant editor of the Eton College Chronicle.”
- • Ruth Rendell (21 January 1990):
- Sundry Creditors by Nigel Balchin (1953): “About workers and management in an engineering firm in the Fifties. Balchin has dated but not where he writes about timeless things, the places in the heart. Is any publisher reissuing his books? A revival seems due.”
- • Barbara Cartland (4 February 1990):
- The Great Lucifer by Margaret Irwin: “A portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh. I had forgotten the drama of Lady Raleigh receiving her husband’s head in a red velvet bag. She kept it on her windowsill until she died 28 years later.”
- • Patrick Gale (11 February 1990):
- Les Girls by Constance Tomkinson (1956): “An enchanting account (once considered somewhat risqué) of a nice girl’s experience as a ‘hoofer,’ discovering the Continent and the Ways of Men while on tour with a troupe of hearty English beauties.”
- • Geoffrey Moorhouse (18 February 1990):
- Russian Music and its Sources in Chant and Folk-Song by Alfred J. Swan (1973): “Swan compresses a long lifetime’s scholarship into one volume, which cost me a mere £5.”
- • Anthony Powell (25 February 1990):
- Contarini Fleming by Benjamin Disraeli (1832): “The last in Benjamin Disraeli’s trilogy [the first were Vivian Grey and Alroy] was the author’s own favourite. The fact that, published in 1832, it was subtitled ‘A Psychological Romace’ at once marks it out as exceptional for the period.”
- • Chris Pettit (4 March 1990):
- The Leather Boys by George Eliot (Gillian Freeman) (1961): “The film was one of the more interesting curiosities of the 1960s, a British biker picture with a fine, louche performance from Dudley Sutton.”
- • Peter Vansittart (11 March 1990):
- Success by Lion Feuchtwanger (1930): “I started to read it in 1939 but, midway through, lost it. Now at last I can finish it. I remember it as a multi-storied work concerning post-1918 Bavaria, displaying disgruntled monarchists, grasping Reds, idealists, conmen and comedians entangled within the power struggles of dangerous people prone to ‘mountain-madness’ — which later almost destroyed them.”
- • Ronald Blythe (18 March 1990):
- The Arrow and the Sword by Hugh Ross Williamson (1947): “The author, with his thesis that Becket and Rufus the Red King were the willing sacrificial victims of a heretical cult, tells a wily detective tale, very learned, very witty, very murderous.”
- • John Keegan (25 March 1990):
- A Tourist in Africa by Evelyn Waugh (1960): “Not vintage Waugh, but it is one of his rarer books and worth having for that reason. Waugh had gone to East Africa to get away from the English winter to a region of the world he liked anyhow, partly to renew acquaintance with Daphne Acton, who in real life was the earthly love of Father Ronald Knox, whose biography Waugh wrote, and in Waugh’s fiction was Barbara Sothill of Put Out More Flags.”
- • Jessica Mann (1 April 1990):
- Night Falls on the City by Sarah Gainham (1967): “This is part of a brilliant, underrated trilogy set in Vienna before, during and after the war. I long to find copies of the other volumes [A Place in the Country (1969) and Private Worlds (1971)].”
- • Terence de Vere White (15 April 1990):
- Baldwin, Being Dialogues on Views and Aspirations by Vernon Lee (1886): “A book of dialogues. Vernon Lee (1856-1935) was an authority on Italian art who became a port of call if you were distinguished. I have followed here down many an index…. My fascination with her dates from her row with Henry James. He was at his floppiest, encouraging her to write. She was modest — and then there was an explosion. The lady wrote a novel, Vanitas, in which James was the chief character. He looked as if his boots were too tight.. Henry wrote off to William [James, his older brother] saying that none of the family must have anything to do with this ‘tiger-cat.’ William found Miss Lee brilliant and thought Henry exaggerated her offence. They all became friends again eventually.”
- Baldwin is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Michael Shelden (22 April 1990):
- Indian Life in Town and Country by Herbert Compton (1904): “The author writes about foreign parts in a spirit of absolute innocence, finding sweetness and light wherever he goes, and making all travel seem as easy as a jaunt round the corner.”
- Indian Life in Town and Country is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Francis Wyndham (29 April 1990):
- A Voyage in Vain by Alethea Hayter (1973): “A reconstruction of Coleridge’s voyage to Malta in 1804, which I had read with great pleasure when it came out…. It is disgraceful that this writer’s books are not in print.” [Hayter’s best, A Sultry Month, is back in print from Faber & Faber.]
- • Anthony Daniels (6 May 1990):
- The Battle of Basinghall Street by E. Phillips Oppenheim (1938): “It is the story of how Lord Marsom, the immensely rich Jewish manufacturer of Woolito, a synthetic wool of gorgeous colour, is outwitted by Lord Sandbrook, the languid and elegant hereditary peer who is appointed to the board of Woolito for decorative purposes. By upholding a set of values in which to be comme il faut is more important that cleverness, it unintentionally helps to explain Britain’s slide into utter mediocrity.”
- • Antonia Fraser (13 May 1990):
- Henry VIII by A. F. Pollard (1902): “Pollard’s works are now, I suppose, classics, in the sense that although now superseded in terms of modern research, they remain the books to which scholars constantly refer if only to disagree with Pollard yet again.”
- Pollard’s Henry VIII is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Peter Quennell (20 May 1990):
- Clarendon: Selections from the History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars (1953): “The author, Lord Chancellor to Charles I and Charles II, was a master of the English language, whose brilliant series of personal portraits include a magnificent tribute to his arch-enemy Oliver Cromwell.”
- • Penelope Lively (27 May 1990):
- London by Walter Besant (1892): “Picked up on a whim and largely out of sentiment because Walter Besant was the founding father of the Society of Authors. A prolific writer of fiction, a critic and a journalist, his London is a chatty, anecdotal survey, short on hard scholarly stuff, but no matter.”
- London by Walter Besant is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Joanna Trollope (3 June 1990):
- The Other House by Henry James (1896): “I have a lote-hate relationship with Henry James (necessarily unilateral) and have never read this novel. It is a lovely thick-papered, wide-margined copy, so let’s hope I haven’t acquired a tenner’s worth of hatred.” [The Other House is now available from NYRB Classics.]
- • Richard Adams (17 June 1990):
- Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes by John Phillips, with engravings by Birket Foster (1888): To a Lakeland lover, this has a poignant, wordsworthian flavour of the district 100 years ago and a wonderfully paradoxical atmosphere, a mixture of what has changed (alas!) and what has not — the lakes and the mountains.”
- Black’s Picturesque Guide to the English Lakes is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Norman Lewis (24 June 1990):
- Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Spain by Richard Ford (1845): “Besides essential information, this book offers a cornucopia of wonderfully entertaining British disapproval of foreign scenes and entertainments. Thus, of the incomparable Seman Santa {Holy Week] in Seville: ‘Making every allowance for difference of education and temperaent, the most liberal-minded tourist will hardly avoid the impression that these ceremonies are for the most part undignified and childish.'”
- Volume 1 and Volume 2 of Murray’s Handbook for Spain are available on the Internet Archive.
- • David Hollway (8 July 1990):
- The Rookery Nook by Ben Travers (1923): “It never occurred to me that Ben Traverrs’s farces had been novels before they were put on the stage. Of course the dialogue was compressed for the stage version and the chat does go on a bit, but Travers was no mean descriptive writer, perfectly capable of making the impossibilities of the farce seem wholly probable.”
- • Isabel Colegate (22 July 1990):
- Hannah More and Her Circle by Mary Alden Hopkins (1947): “That remarkable 18th-century character was not only a successful playwright and poet, friend of Garrick, Doctor Johnson and Horace Walpole, but established a chain of Sunday schools throughout the wilder parts of the Mendips, where the children of the reputedly savage miners of the North Somerset coalfield could learn to read.”
- • Jeanette Winterson (26 August 1990):
- Barabbas by Marie Corelli (1911): “Corelli, the backbone of the circulating libraries, wildly famous, remorselessly ridiculed and a terrifying precursor of Jeffrey Archer and Barbara Cartland in one, retired to Stratford and was often to be seen gliding down the Avon in her gondola.”
- Barabbas is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Alan Judd (2 September 1990):
- Jew Süss [also published as Power] by Lion Feuchtwanger (1926): “An exotic tale of power and Jewishness and a textbook for all who seek to rise through bureaucracies.”
- • Christopher Hibbert (23 September 1990):
- The Smith of Smiths by Hesketh Pearson (1934): “Not the best biography of Smith — a better has been written by Alan Bell — but it contains all the memorably funny Smith remarks: for instance, to Miss Berry, ‘I have seen nobody since I saw you, but persons in orders. My only varieties are vicars, rectors, curates and every now and then (by what of turbot) an archdeacon.'”
- • Angela Huth (7 October 1990):
- My Mistress, the Empress Eugenie by Madame Carette (1889): “Not by some scurrilous lover but by the Empress’s ‘private reader.’ With a daughter named after the Empress, I am always on the look-out for books about that ‘much-loved’ lady. Carette, while no major biographer, is an observer and writer of a far higher grade than Crawfie. For £6, I bought a very merry memoir — humorous detail and caustic opinion combine to give a sparkling picture of court life that only one close to the Empress could have recorded.”
- My Mistress is available on the Internet Archive.
- • Max Davidson (25 November 1990):
- The English Rogue, Described in the Life of Meriton Latroon by Richard Head (1665/1928): “This outrageous rake’s progress ran into trouble with the censors when it was first published in 1665 and its author the Irishman Richard Head, took umbrage when readers assumed the book’s scandalous adventures were autobiographical. I am a sucker for old-fashioned tongue-in-cheek books which announce the chapter contents at the beginning (‘How he was married and what kind of thing was his wife’) and this one is sumptuously printed and illustrated.”
- The English Rogue is available on the Internet Archive (there are numerous copies, but the 1928 edition is in one volume and easiest to read).
- • Selina Hastings (16 December 1990):
- Foreigners, or the World in a Nutshell by Theodora Benson and Betty Askwith (1935): “I bought it for Nicholas Bentley’s flawless and funny illustrations. But then I became mesmerised in an appalled sort of way by the text, an Englishman’s tongue-in-cheek view of the inhabitants of Abroad. Tongue-in-cheek, maybe, but what was considered a jolly joke in 1935 would cause one to be bound over today. (I need only refer you to p.119, on ‘Negroes.’)”
- • A. S. Byatt (23 December 1990):
- Bulwer: a Panorama. Edward and Rosina 1803-1836 by Michael Sadleir (1931): “I find lesser-known Victorian figures fascinating for novel-writing, and especially books like this with lots of little, inconsequential facts. It opens with an enticing description of its hero, Bulwer-Lytton, ‘pert, foolish, romantic, pathetic, mean, pretentious, doggest, admirable.'”
- • Kenneth Baker (30 December 1990):
- The Minister by Maurice Edelman (1961): “The novel tells of a Minister who aspires to take overr from the very ill Prime Minister, but he is brought down by a direct lie that he tells at the Despatch Box. This was amazingly prescient: Tory Mps were to go through a similar experience just two years later.”
- • Philip Ziegler (6 January 1991):
- Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1966): “His book of travels in Northern Greece includes his memorable account of life in the rock-top monasteries of the Meteora. It includes, too, one of his most beguiling set-pieces: taking tea with Byron’s great-granddaughter, Lady Wentworth, at her Arab stud in Sussex. Leigh Fermor’s uncanny mastery of words brings this beldame to life, i all her extravagance, absurdity and glory.”
- • Nikolai Tolstoy (10 February 1991):
- Your Money or Your Life by Jacques le Goff, translated by Patricia Ranum (1988): “An account of how the medieval church came to terms with usury. Capitalism, it seems, arose in part because bankers were gradually reprieved from Hell, being assigned instead the medieval equivalent of an open prison: Purgatory.”
- • Nina Bawden (17 February 1991 and apparently the last):
- Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean (1947): “My own copy of this marvellous bookw as stolen by one of my dear friends years ago. Maclean’s spellbinding account of the State trial of Bukharin, along with his own splendid wartime adventures, eased the misery of an economy night-flight home.”
