Podcast appearances and mentions of Frances Wilson

My guest in this week's Book Club podcast is the biographer Frances Wilson, whose new book Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark was recently lauded in these pages as "mesmerising" and "a revolutionary book". She tells me how she immersed herself in the spooky life and peerless art of the great novelist, and why a conventional biographical treatment would never have been adequate to a subject for whom fiction and reality twined in unexpected and disconcerting ways.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: podcast@spectator.co.uk

It's been said that Muriel Spark's career was not so much a life as a plot, and she did indeed repeatedly reinvent herself, closing one chapter of her life and opening another, regardless of how many friends and business associates she abandoned along the way. This month the Slightly Foxed team were joined by Muriel Spark's biographer Martin Stannard, and Spark enthusiast Emily Rhodes of Emily's Walking Book Club, to discuss the work of this highly original and somewhat forgotten writer and learn how Muriel first invited Martin to write her biography and then did her best to prevent it seeing the light of day. Born in 1918, Muriel grew up in a working class family in Edinburgh – the setting for her most famous novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was based on a charismatic teacher at her own school. At the age of 19 she closed that chapter of her life by marrying an older maths teacher, Sydney Oswald Spark, known (appropriately) thereafter as SOS, and going with him to Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where their son Robin was born. Unfortunately it soon became obvious that Sydney had severe psychiatric problems and in 1943 Muriel left husband and son and returned to London where she began her career as a novelist. Several times shortlisted for the Booker Prize, and much admired by Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Muriel produced 22 novels, most of them drawing on events in her own life. Everyone at the Slightly Foxed table had their favourites, including The Girls of Slender Means, A Far Cry from Kensington, Loitering with Intent, and Memento Mori, a clear eyed and also very funny look at old age. Everyone agreed on the brilliance of her writing with its dark humour, preoccupation with the supernatural and with the presence of evil in unlikely places. Her life was equally fascinating, moving from poverty to great wealth and success, and from the shabbier parts of London to intellectual life in New York centred on The New Yorker magazine, to which she became a contributor. In 1954 she was received into the Roman Catholic church and for some time she lived in Rome, relishing the glitter of Italian high society, finally settling in Tuscany with her friend Penelope Jardine, where she died in 2005. Summer reading recommendations included Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan, Death at the Sign of the Rook by Kate Atkinson, Homework by Geoff Dyer and Of Thorn and Briar by Paul Lamb. Martin also praised Electric Spark, the new – and very different – biography of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson. For episode show notes, please see the Slightly Foxed website. Opening music: Preludio from Violin Partita No. 3 in E Major by Bach Hosted by Rosie Goldsmith Produced by Philippa Goodrich

Frances Wilson has written biographies of Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, D.H. Lawrence, and, most recently, Muriel Spark. I thought Electric Spark was excellent. In my review, I wrote: “Wilson has done far more than string the facts together. She has created a strange and vivid portrait of one of the most curious of twentieth century novelists.” In this interview, we covered questions like why Thomas De Quincey is more widely read, why D.H. Lawrence's best books aren't his novels, Frances's conversion to spookiness, what she thinks about a whole range of modern biographers, literature and parasocial relationships, Elizabeth Bowen, George Meredith, and plenty about Muriel Spark.Here are two brief extracts. There is a full transcript below.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?And.Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now.TranscriptHenry: Today, I am talking to Frances Wilson. Frances is a biographer. Her latest book, Electric Spark, is a biography of the novelist Muriel Spark, but she has also written about Dorothy Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, DH Lawrence and others. Frances, welcome.Frances Wilson: Thank you so much for having me on.Henry: Why don't more people read Thomas De Quincey's work?Frances: [laughs] Oh, God. We're going right into the deep end.[laughter]Frances: I think because there's too much of it. When I chose to write about Thomas De Quincey, I just followed one thread in his writing because Thomas De Quincey was an addict. One of the things he was addicted to was writing. He wrote far, far, far too much. He was a professional hack. He was a transcendental hack, if you like, because all of his writing he did while on opium, which made the sentences too long and too high and very, very hard to read.When I wrote about him, I just followed his interest in murder. He was fascinated by murder as a fine art. The title of one of his best essays is On Murder as One of the Fine Arts. I was also interested in his relationship with Wordsworth. I twinned those together, which meant cutting out about 97% of the rest of his work. I think people do read his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. I think that's a cult text. It was the memoir, if you want to call it a memoir, that kick-started the whole pharmaceutical memoir business on drugs.It was also the first addict's memoir and the first recovery memoir, and I'd say also the first misery memoir. He's very much at the root of English literary culture. We're all De Quincey-an without knowing it, is my argument.Henry: Oh, no, I fully agree. That's what surprises me, that they don't read him more often.Frances: I know it's a shame, isn't it? Of all the Romantic Circle, he's the one who's the most exciting to read. Also, Lamb is wonderfully exciting to read as well, but Lamb's a tiny little bit more grounded than De Quincey, who was literally not grounded. He's floating in an opium haze above you.[laughter]Henry: What I liked about your book was the way you emphasized the book addiction, not just the opium addiction. It is shocking the way he piled up chests full of books and notebooks, and couldn't get into the room because there were too many books in there. He was [crosstalk].Frances: Yes. He had this in common with Muriel Spark. He was a hoarder, but in a much more chaotic way than Spark, because, as you say, he piled up rooms with papers and books until he couldn't get into the room, and so just rented another room. He was someone who had no money at all. The no money he had went on paying rent for rooms, storing what we would be giving to Oxfam, or putting in the recycling bin. Then he'd forget that he was paying rent on all these rooms filled with his mountains of paper. The man was chaos.Henry: What is D.H. Lawrence's best book?Frances: Oh, my argument about Lawrence is that we've gone very badly wrong in our reading of him, in seeing him primarily as a novelist and only secondarily as an essayist and critic and short story writer, and poet. This is because of F.R. Leavis writing that celebration of him called D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, because novels are not the best of Lawrence. I think the best of his novels is absolutely, without doubt, Sons and Lovers. I think we should put the novels in the margins and put in the centre, the poems, travel writing.Absolutely at the centre of the centre should be his studies in classic American literature. His criticism was- We still haven't come to terms with it. It was so good. We haven't heard all of Lawrence's various voices yet. When Lawrence was writing, contemporaries didn't think of Lawrence as a novelist at all. It was anyone's guess what he was going to come out with next. Sometimes it was a novel [laughs] and it was usually a rant about-- sometimes it was a prophecy. Posterity has not treated Lawrence well in any way, but I think where we've been most savage to him is in marginalizing his best writing.Henry: The short fiction is truly extraordinary.Frances: Isn't it?Henry: I always thought Lawrence was someone I didn't want to read, and then I read the short fiction, and I was just obsessed.Frances: It's because in the short fiction, he doesn't have time to go wrong. I think brevity was his perfect length. Give him too much space, and you know he's going to get on his soapbox and start ranting, start mansplaining. He was a terrible mansplainer. Mansplaining his versions of what had gone wrong in the world. It is like a drunk at the end of a too-long dinner party, and you really want to just bundle him out. Give him only a tiny bit of space, and he comes out with the perfection that is his writing.Henry: De Quincey and Lawrence were the people you wrote about before Muriel Spark, and even though they seem like three very different people, but in their own way, they're all a little bit mad, aren't they?Frances: Yes, that is, I think, something that they have in common. It's something that I'm drawn to. I like writing about difficult people. I don't think I could write about anyone who wasn't difficult. I like difficult people in general. I like the fact that they pose a puzzle and they're hard to crack, and that their difficulty is laid out in their work and as a code. I like tackling really, really stubborn personalities as well. Yes, they were all a bit mad. The madness was what fuelled their journeys without doubt.Henry: This must make it very hard as a biographer. Is there always a code to be cracked, or are you sometimes dealing with someone who is slippery and protean and uncrackable?Frances: I think that the way I approach biography is that there is a code to crack, but I'm not necessarily concerned with whether I crack it or not. I think it's just recognizing that there's a hell of a lot going on in the writing and that, in certain cases and not in every case at all, the best way of exploring the psyche of the writer and the complexity of the life is through the writing, which is a argument for psycho biography, which isn't something I necessarily would argue for, because it can be very, very crude.I think with the writers I choose, there is no option. Muriel Spark argued for this as well. She said in her own work as a biographer, which was really very, very strong. She was a biographer before she became a novelist. She thought hard about biography and absolutely in advance of anyone else who thought about biography, she said, "Of course, the only way we can approach the minds of writers is through their work, and the writer's life is encoded in the concerns of their work."When I was writing about Muriel Spark, I followed, as much as I could, to the letter, her own theories of biography, believing that that was part of the code that she left. She said very, very strong and very definitive things about what biography was about and how to write a biography. I tried to follow those rules.Henry: Can we play a little game where I say the names of some biographers and you tell me what you think of them?Frances: Oh my goodness. Okay.Henry: We're not trying to get you into trouble. We just want some quick opinions. A.N. Wilson.Frances: I think he's wonderful as a biographer. I think he's unzipped and he's enthusiastic and he's unpredictable and he's often off the rails. I think his Goethe biography-- Have you read the Goethe biography?Henry: Yes, I thought that was great.Frances: It's just great, isn't it? It's so exciting. I like the way that when he writes about someone, it's almost as if he's memorized the whole of their work.Henry: Yes.Frances: You don't imagine him sitting at a desk piled with books and having to score through his marginalia. It sits in his head, and he just pours it down on a page. I'm always excited by an A.N. Wilson biography. He is one of the few biographers who I would read regardless of who the subject was.Henry: Yes.Frances: I just want to read him.Henry: He does have good range.Frances: He absolutely does have good range.Henry: Selina Hastings.Frances: I was thinking about Selina Hastings this morning, funnily enough, because I had been talking to people over the weekend about her Sybil Bedford biography and why that hadn't lifted. She wrote a very excitingly good life of Nancy Mitford and then a very unexcitingly not good life of Sybil Bedford. I was interested in why the Sybil Bedford simply hadn't worked. I met people this weekend who were saying the same thing, that she was a very good biographer who had just failed [laughs] to give us anything about Sybil Bedford.I think what went wrong in that biography was that she just could not give us her opinions. It's as if she just withdrew from her subject as if she was writing a Wikipedia entry. There were no opinions at all. What the friends I was talking to said was that she just fell out with her subject during the book. That's what happened. She stopped being interested in her. She fell out with her and therefore couldn't be bothered. That's what went wrong.Henry: Interesting. I think her Evelyn Waugh biography is superb.Frances: Yes, I absolutely agree. She was on fire until this last one.Henry: That's one of the best books on Waugh, I think.Frances: Yes.Henry: Absolutely magical.Frances: I also remember, it's a very rare thing, of reading a review of it by Hilary Mantel saying that she had not read a biography that had been as good, ever, as Selina Hastings' on Evelyn Waugh. My goodness, that's high praise, isn't it?Henry: Yes, it is. It is. I'm always trying to push that book on people. Richard Holmes.Frances: He's my favourite. He's the reason that I'm a biographer at all. I think his Coleridge, especially the first volume of the two-volume Coleridge, is one of the great books. It left me breathless when I read it. It was devastating. I also think that his Johnson and Savage book is one of the great books. I love Footsteps as well, his account of the books he didn't write in Footsteps. I think he has a strange magic. When Muriel Spark talked about certain writers and critics having a sixth literary sense, which meant that they tuned into language and thought in a way that the rest of us don't, I think that Richard Holmes does have that. I think he absolutely has it in relation to Coleridge. I'm longing for his Tennyson to come out.Henry: Oh, I know. I know.Frances: Oh, I just can't wait. I'm holding off on reading Tennyson until I've got Holmes to help me read him. Yes, he is quite extraordinary.Henry: I would have given my finger to write the Johnson and Savage book.Frances: Yes, I know. I agree. How often do you return to it?Henry: Oh, all the time. All the time.Frances: Me too.Henry: Michael Holroyd.Frances: Oh, that's interesting, Michael Holroyd, because I think he's one of the great unreads. I think he's in this strange position of being known as a greatest living biographer, but nobody's read him on Augustus John. [laughs] I haven't read his biographies cover to cover because they're too long and it's not in my subject area, but I do look in them, and they're novelistic in their wit and complexity. His sentences are very, very, very entertaining, and there's a lot of freight in each paragraph. I hope that he keeps selling.I love his essays as well, and also, I think that he has been a wonderful ambassador for biography. He's very, very supportive of younger biographers, which not every biographer is, but I know he's been very supportive of younger biographers and is incredibly approachable.Henry: Let's do a few Muriel Spark questions. Why was the Book of Job so important to Muriel Spark?Frances: I think she liked it because it was rogue, because it was the only book of the Bible that wasn't based on any evidence, it wasn't based on any truth. It was a fictional book, and she liked fiction sitting in the middle of fact. That was one of her main things, as all Spark lovers know. She liked the fact that there was this work of pure imagination and extraordinarily powerful imagination sitting in the middle of the Old Testament, and also, she thought it was an absolutely magnificent poem.She saw herself primarily as a poet, and she responded to it as a poem, which, of course, it is. Also, she liked God in it. She described Him as the Incredible Hulk [laughs] and she liked His boastfulness. She enjoyed, as I do, difficult personalities, and she liked the fact that God had such an incredibly difficult personality. She liked the fact that God boasted and boasted and boasted, "I made this and I made that," to Job, but also I think she liked the fact that you hear God's voice.She was much more interested in voices than she was in faces. The fact that God's voice comes out of the burning bush, I think it was an image for her of early radio, this voice speaking, and she liked the fact that what the voice said was tricksy and touchy and impossibly arrogant. He gives Moses all these instructions to lead the Israelites, and Moses says, "But who shall I say sent me? Who are you?" He says, "I am who I am." [laughs] She thought that was completely wonderful. She quotes that all the time about herself. She says, "I know it's a bit large quoting God, but I am who I am." [laughs]Henry: That disembodied voice is very important to her fiction.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's the telephone in Memento Mori.Frances: Yes.Henry: Also, to some extent, tell me what you think of this, the narrator often acts like that.Frances: Like this disembodied voice?Henry: Yes, like you're supposed to feel like you're not quite sure who's telling you this or where you're being told it from. That's why it gets, like in The Ballad of Peckham Rye or something, very weird.Frances: Yes. I'm waiting for the PhD on Muriel Sparks' narrators. Maybe it's being done as we speak, but she's very, very interested in narrators and the difference between first-person and third-person. She was very keen on not having warm narrators, to put it mildly. She makes a strong argument throughout her work for the absence of the seductive narrative. Her narratives are, as we know, unbelievably seductive, but not because we are being flattered as readers and not because the narrator makes herself or himself pretty. The narrator says what they feel like saying, withholds most of what you would like them to say, plays with us, like in a Spark expression, describing her ideal narrator like a cat with a bird [laughs].Henry: I like that. Could she have been a novelist if she had not become a Catholic?Frances: No, she couldn't. The two things happened at the same time. I wonder, actually, whether she became a Catholic in order to become a novelist. It wasn't that becoming a novelist was an accidental effect of being a Catholic. The conversion was, I think, from being a biographer to a novelist rather than from being an Anglican to a Catholic. What happened is a tremendous interest. I think it's the most interesting moment in any life that I've ever written about is the moment of Sparks' conversion because it did break her life in two.She converted when she was in her mid-30s, and several things happened at once. She converted to Catholicism, she became a Catholic, she became a novelist, but she also had this breakdown. The breakdown was very much part of that conversion package. The breakdown was brought on, she says, by taking Dexys. There was slimming pills, amphetamines. She wanted to lose weight. She put on weight very easily, and her weight went up and down throughout her life.She wanted to take these diet pills, but I think she was also taking the pills because she needed to do all-nighters, because she never, ever, ever stopped working. She was addicted to writing, but also she was impoverished and she had to sell her work, and she worked all night. She was in a rush to get her writing done because she'd wasted so much of her life in her early 20s, in a bad marriage trapped in Africa. She needed to buy herself time. She was on these pills, which have terrible side effects, one of which is hallucinations.I think there were other reasons for her breakdown as well. She was very, very sensitive and I think psychologically fragile. Her mother lived in a state of mental fragility, too. She had a crash when she finished her book. She became depressed. Of course, a breakdown isn't the same as depression, but what happened to her in her breakdown was a paranoid attack rather than a breakdown. She didn't crack into nothing and then have to rebuild herself. She just became very paranoid. That paranoia was always there.Again, it's what's exciting about her writing. She was drawn to paranoia in other writers. She liked Cardinal Newman's paranoia. She liked Charlotte Brontë's paranoia, and she had paranoia. During her paranoid attack, she felt very, very interestingly, because nothing that happened in her life was not interesting, that T.S. Eliot was sending her coded messages. He was encoding these messages in his play, The Confidential Clerk, in the program notes to the play, but also in the blurbs he wrote for Faber and Faber, where he was an editor. These messages were very malign and they were encoded in anagrams.The word lived, for example, became devil. I wonder whether one of the things that happened during her breakdown wasn't that she discovered God, but that she met the devil. I don't think that that's unusual as a conversion experience. In fact, the only conversion experience she ever describes, you'll remember, is in The Girls of Slender Means, when she's describing Nicholas Farrington's conversion. That's the only conversion experience she ever describes. She says that his conversion is when he sees one of the girls leaving the burning building, holding a Schiaparelli dress. Suddenly, he's converted because he's seen a vision of evil.She says, "Conversion can be as a result of a recognition of evil, rather than a recognition of good." I think that what might have happened in this big cocktail of things that happened to her during her breakdown/conversion, is that a writer whom she had idolized, T.S. Eliot, who taught her everything that she needed to know about the impersonality of art. Her narrative coldness comes from Eliot, who thought that emotions had no place in art because they were messy, and art should be clean.I think a writer whom she had idolized, she suddenly felt was her enemy because she was converting from his church, because he was an Anglo-Catholic. He was a high Anglican, and she was leaving Anglo-Catholicism to go through the Rubicon, to cross the Rubicon into Catholicism. She felt very strongly that that is something he would not have approved of.Henry: She's also leaving poetry to become a prose writer.Frances: She was leaving his world of poetry. That's absolutely right.Henry: This is a very curious parallel because the same thing exactly happens to De Quincey with his worship of Wordsworth.Frances: You're right.Henry: They have the same obsessive mania. Then this, as you say, not quite a breakdown, but a kind of explosive mania in the break. De Quincey goes out and destroys that mossy hut or whatever it is in the orchard, doesn't he?Frances: Yes, that disgusting hut in the orchard. Yes, you're completely right. What fascinated me about De Quincey, and this was at the heart of the De Quincey book, was how he had been guided his whole life by Wordsworth. He discovered Wordsworth as a boy when he read We Are Seven, that very creepy poem about a little girl sitting on her sibling's grave, describing the sibling as still alive. For De Quincey, who had lost his very adored sister, he felt that Wordsworth had seen into his soul and that Wordsworth was his mentor and his lodestar.He worshipped Wordsworth as someone who understood him and stalked Wordsworth, pursued and stalked him. When he met him, what he discovered was a man without any redeeming qualities at all. He thought he was a dry monster, but it didn't stop him loving the work. In fact, he loved the work more and more. What threw De Quincey completely was that there was such a difference between Wordsworth, the man who had no genius, and Wordsworth, the poet who had nothing but.Eliot described it, the difference between the man who suffers and the mind which creates. What De Quincey was trying to deal with was the fact that he adulated the work, but was absolutely appalled by the man. Yes, you're right, this same experience happened to spark when she began to feel that T.S. Eliot, whom she had never met, was a malign person, but the work was still not only of immense importance to her, but the work had formed her.Henry: You see the Wasteland all over her own work and the shared Dante obsession.Frances: Yes.Henry: It's remarkably strong. She got to the point of thinking that T.S. Eliot was breaking into her house.Frances: Yes. As I said, she had this paranoid imagination, but also what fired her imagination and what repeated itself again and again in the imaginative scenarios that recur in her fiction and nonfiction is the idea of the intruder. It was the image of someone rifling around in cupboards, drawers, looking at manuscripts. This image, you first find it in a piece she wrote about finding herself completely coincidentally, staying the night during the war in the poet Louis MacNeice's house. She didn't know it was Louis MacNeice's house, but he was a poet who was very, very important to her.Spark's coming back from visiting her parents in Edinburgh in 1944. She gets talking to an au pair on the train. By the time they pull into Houston, there's an air raid, and the au pair says, "Come and spend the night at mine. My employers are away and they live nearby in St. John's Wood." Spark goes to this house and sees it's packed with books and papers, and she's fascinated by the quality of the material she finds there.She looks in all the books. She goes into the attic, and she looks at all the papers, and she asks the au pair whose house it is, and the au pair said, "Oh, he's a professor called Professor Louis MacNeice." Spark had just been reading Whitney. He's one of her favourite poets. She retells this story four times in four different forms, as non-fiction, as fiction, as a broadcast, as reflections, but the image that keeps coming back, what she can't get rid of, is the idea of herself as snooping around in this poet's study.She describes herself, in one of the versions, as trying to draw from his papers his power as a writer. She says she sniffs his pens, she puts her hands over his papers, telling herself, "I must become a writer. I must become a writer." Then she makes this weird anonymous phone call. She loved the phone because it was the most strange form of electrical device. She makes a weird anonymous phone call to an agent, saying, "I'm ringing from Louis MacNeice's house, would you like to see my manuscript?" She doesn't give her name, and the agent says yes.Now I don't believe this phone call took place. I think it's part of Sparks' imagination. This idea of someone snooping around in someone else's room was very, very powerful to her. Then she transposed it in her paranoid attack about T.S. Eliot. She transposed the image that Eliot was now in her house, but not going through her papers, but going through her food cupboards. [laughs] In her food cupboards, all she actually had was baked beans because she was a terrible cook. Part of her unwellness at that point was malnutrition. No, she thought that T.S. Eliot was spying on her. She was obsessed with spies. Spies, snoopers, blackmailers.Henry: T.S. Eliot is Stealing My Baked Beans would have been a very good title for a memoir.Frances: It actually would, wouldn't it?Henry: Yes, it'd be great.[laughter]Henry: People listening will be able to tell that Spark is a very spooky person in several different ways. She had what I suppose we would call spiritual beliefs to do with ghosts and other sorts of things. You had a sort of conversion of your own while writing this book, didn't you?Frances: Yes, I did. [laughs] Every time I write a biography, I become very, very, very immersed in who I'm writing about. I learned this from Richard Holmes, who I see as a method biographer. He Footsteps his subjects. He becomes his subjects. I think I recognized when I first read Holmes's Coleridge, when I was a student, that this was how I also wanted to live. I wanted to live inside the minds of the people that I wrote about, because it was very preferable to live inside my own mind. Why not live inside the mind of someone really, really exciting, one with genius?What I felt with Spark wasn't so much that I was immersed by-- I wasn't immersed by her. I felt actually possessed by her. I think this is the Spark effect. I think a lot of her friends felt like this. I think that her lovers possibly felt like this. There is an extraordinary force to her character, which absolutely lives on, even though she's dead, but only recently dead. The conversion I felt, I think, was that I have always been a very enlightenment thinker, very rational, very scientific, very Freudian in my approach to-- I will acknowledge the unconscious but no more.By the time I finished with Spark, I'm pure woo-woo now. Anything can happen. This is one of the reasons Spark was attracted to Catholicism because anything can happen, because it legitimizes the supernatural. I felt so strongly that the supernatural experiences that Spark had were real, that what Spark was describing as the spookiness of our own life were things that actually happened.One of the things I found very, very unsettling about her was that everything that happened to her, she had written about first. She didn't describe her experiences in retrospect. She described them as in foresight. For example, her first single authored published book, because she wrote for a while in collaboration with her lover, Derek Stanford, but her first single authored book was a biography of Mary Shelley.Henry: Great book.Frances: An absolutely wonderful book, which really should be better than any of the other Mary Shelley biographies. She completely got to Mary Shelley. Everything she described in Mary Shelley's life would then happen to Spark. For example, she described Mary Shelley as having her love letters sold. Her lover sold Mary Shelley's love letters, and Mary Shelley was then blackmailed by the person who bought them. This happened to Spark. She described Mary Shelley's closest friends all becoming incredibly jealous of her literary talent. This happened to Spark. She described trusting people who betrayed her. This happened to Spark.Spark was the first person to write about Frankenstein seriously, to treat Frankenstein as a masterpiece rather than as a one-off weird novel that is actually just the screenplay for a Hammer Horror film. This was 1951, remember. Everything she described in Frankenstein as its power is a hybrid text, described the powerful hybrid text that she would later write about. What fascinated her in Frankenstein was the relationship between the creator and the monster, and which one was the monster. This is exactly the story of her own life. I think where she is. She was really interested in art monsters and in the fact that the only powerful writers out there, the only writers who make a dent, are monsters.If you're not a monster, you're just not competing. I think Spark has always spoken about as having a monster-like quality. She says at the end of one of her short stories, Bang-bang You're Dead, "Am I an intellectual woman, or am I a monster?" It's the question that is frequently asked of Spark. I think she worked so hard to monsterize herself. Again, she learnt this from Elliot. She learnt her coldness from Elliot. She learnt indifference from Elliot. There's a very good letter where she's writing to a friend, Shirley Hazzard, in New York.It's after she discovers that her lover, Derek Stanford, has sold her love letters, 70 love letters, which describe two very, very painfully raw, very tender love letters. She describes to Shirley Hazzard this terrible betrayal. She says, "But, I'm over it. I'm over it now. Now I'm just going to be indifferent." She's telling herself to just be indifferent about this. You watch her tutoring herself into the indifference that she needed in order to become the artist that she knew she was.Henry: Is this why she's attracted to mediocrities, because she can possess them and monsterize them, and they're good feeding for her artistic programme?Frances: Her attraction to mediocrities is completely baffling, and it makes writing her biography, a comedy, because the men she was surrounded by were so speck-like. Saw themselves as so important, but were, in fact, so speck-like that you have to laugh, and it was one after another after another. I'd never come across, in my life, so many men I'd never heard of. This was the literary world that she was surrounded by. It's odd, I don't know whether, at the time, she knew how mediocre these mediocrities were.She certainly recognised it in her novels where they're all put together into one corporate personality called the pisseur de copie in A Far Cry from Kensington, where every single literary mediocrity is in that critic who she describes as pissing and vomiting out copy. With Derek Stanford, who was obviously no one's ever heard of now, because he wrote nothing that was memorable, he was her partner from the end of the 40s until-- They ceased their sexual relationship when she started to be interested in becoming a Catholic in 1953, but she was devoted to him up until 1958. She seemed to be completely incapable of recognising that she had the genius and he had none.Her letters to him deferred to him, all the time, as having literary powers that she hadn't got, as having insights that she hadn't got, he's better read than she was. She was such an amazingly good critic. Why could she not see when she looked at his baggy, bad prose that it wasn't good enough? She rated him so highly. When she was co-authoring books with him, which was how she started her literary career, they would occasionally write alternative sentences. Some of her sentences are always absolutely-- they're sharp, lean, sparkling, and witty, and his are way too long and really baggy and they don't say anything. Obviously, you can see that she's irritated by it.She still doesn't say, "Look, I'm going now." It was only when she became a novelist that she said, "I want my mind to myself." She puts, "I want my mind to myself." She didn't want to be in a double act with him. Doubles were important to her. She didn't want to be in a double act with him anymore. He obviously had bought into her adulation of him and hadn't recognised that she had this terrifying power as a writer. It was now his turn to have the breakdown. Spark had the mental breakdown in 1950, '45. When her first novel came out in 1957, it was Stanford who had the breakdown because he couldn't take on board who she was as a novelist.What he didn't know about her as a novelist was her comic sense, how that would fuel the fiction, but also, he didn't recognize because he reviewed her books badly. He didn't recognise that the woman who had been so tender, vulnerable, and loving with him could be this novelist who had nothing to say about tenderness or love. In his reviews, he says, "Why are her characters so cold?" because he thought that she should be writing from the core of her as a human being rather than the core of her as an intellect.Henry: What are her best novels?Frances: Every one I read, I think this has to be the best.[laughter]This is particularly the case in the early novels, where I'm dazzled by The Comforters and think there cannot have been a better first novel of the 20th century or even the 21st century so far. The Comforters. Then read Robinson, her second novel, and think, "Oh God, no, that is her best novel. Then Memento Mori, I think, "Actually, that must be the best novel of the 20th century." [laughs] Then you move on to The Ballad of Peckham Rye, I think, "No, that's even better."The novels landed. It's one of the strange things about her; it took her so long to become a novelist. When she had become one, the novels just landed. Once in one year, two novels landed. In 1959, she had, it was The Bachelors and The Ballad of Peckham Rye, both just completely extraordinary. The novels had been the storing up, and then they just fell on the page. They're different, but samey. They're samey in as much as they're very, very, very clever. They're clever about Catholicism, and they have the same narrative wit. My God, do the plots work in different ways. She was wonderful at plots. She was a great plotter. She liked plots in both senses of the world.She liked the idea of plotting against someone, also laying a plot. She was, at the same time, absolutely horrified by being caught inside someone's plot. That's what The Comforters is about, a young writer called Caroline Rose, who has a breakdown, it's a dramatisation of Sparks' own breakdown, who has a breakdown, and believes that she is caught inside someone else's story. She is a typewriter repeating all of her thoughts. Typewriter and a chorus repeating all of her thoughts.What people say about The Comforters is that Caroline Rose thought she is a heroine of a novel who finds herself trapped in a novel. Actually, if you read what Caroline Rose says in the novel, she doesn't think she's trapped in a novel; she thinks she's trapped in a biography. "There is a typewriter typing the story of our lives," she says to her boyfriend. "Of our lives." Muriel Sparks' first book was about being trapped in a biography, which is, of course, what she brought on herself when she decided to trap herself in a biography. [laughs]Henry: I think I would vote for Loitering with Intent, The Girls of Slender Means as my favourites. I can see that Memento Mori is a good book, but I don't love it, actually.Frances: Really? Interesting. Okay. I completely agree with you about-- I think Loitering with Intent is my overall favourite. Don't you find every time you read it, it's a different book? There are about 12 books I've discovered so far in that book. She loved books inside books, but every time I read it, I think, "Oh my God, it's changed shape again. It's a shape-shifting novel."Henry: We all now need the Frances Wilson essay about the 12 books inside Loitering with Intent.Frances: I know.[laughter]Henry: A few more general questions to close. Did Thomas De Quincey waste his talents?Frances: I wouldn't have said so. I think that's because every single day of his life, he was on opium.Henry: I think the argument is a combination of too much opium and also too much magazine work and not enough "real serious" philosophy, big poems, whatever.Frances: I think the best of his work went into Blackwood's, so the magazine work. When he was taken on by Blackwood's, the razor-sharp Edinburgh magazine, then the best of his work took place. I think that had he only written the murder essays, that would have been enough for me, On Murder as a Fine Art.That was enough. I don't need any more of De Quincey. I think Confessions of an English Opium-Eater is also enough in as much as it's the great memoir of addiction. We don't need any more memoirs of addiction, just read that. It's not just a memoir of being addicted to opium. It's about being addicted to what's what. It's about being a super fan and addicted to writing. He was addicted to everything. If he was in AA now, they'd say, apparently, there are 12 addictions, he had all of them. [laughs]Henry: Yes. People talk a lot about parasocial relationships online, where you read someone online or you follow them, and you have this strange idea in your head that you know them in some way, even though they're just this disembodied online person. You sometimes see people say, "Oh, we should understand this more." I think, "Well, read the history of literature, parasocial relationships everywhere."Frances: That's completely true. I hadn't heard that term before. The history of literature, a parasocial relationship. That's your next book.Henry: There we go. I think what I want from De Quincey is more about Shakespeare, because I think the Macbeth essay is superb.Frances: Absolutely brilliant. On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.Henry: Yes, and then you think, "Wait, where's the rest of this book? There should be an essay about every play."Frances: That's an absolutely brilliant example of microhistory, isn't it? Just taking a moment in a play, just the knocking at the gate, the morning after the murders, and blowing that moment up, so it becomes the whole play. Oh, my God, it's good. You're right.Henry: It's so good. What is, I think, "important about it", is that in the 20th century, critics started saying or scholars started saying a lot, "We can't just look at the words on the page. We've got to think about the dramaturgy. We've got to really, really think about how it plays out." De Quincey was an absolute master of that. It's really brilliant.Frances: Yes.Henry: What's your favourite modern novel or novelist?Frances: Oh, Hilary Mantel, without doubt, I think. I think we were lucky enough to live alongside a great, great, great novelist. I think the Wolf Hall trilogy is absolutely the greatest piece of narrative fiction that's come out of the 21st century. I also love her. I love her work as an essayist. I love her. She's spooky like Spark. She was inspired.Henry: Yes, she is. Yes.Frances: She learnt a lot of her cunning from Spark, I think. She's written a very spooky memoir. In fact, the only women novelists who acknowledge Spark as their influencer are Ali Smith and Hilary Mantel, although you can see Spark in William Boyd all the time. I think we're pretty lucky to live alongside William Boyd as well. Looking for real, real greatness, I think there's no one to compare with Mantel. Do you agree?Henry: I don't like the third volume of the trilogy.Frances: Okay. Right.Henry: Yes, in general, I do agree. Yes. I think some people don't like historical fiction for a variety of reasons. It may take some time for her to get it. I think she's acknowledged as being really good. I don't know that she's yet acknowledged at the level that you're saying.Frances: Yes.Henry: I think that will take a little bit longer. Maybe as and when there's a biography that will help with that, which I'm sure there will be a biography.Frances: I think they need to wait. I do think it's important to wait for a reputation to settle before starting the biography. Her biography will be very interesting because she married the same man twice. Her growth as a novelist was so extraordinary. Spark, she spent time in Africa. She had this terrible, terrible illness. She knew something. I think what I love about Mantel is, as with Spark, she knew something. She knew something, and she didn't quite know what it was that she knew. She had to write because of this knowledge. When you read her, you know that she's on a different level of understanding.Henry: You specialise in slightly neglected figures of English literature. Who else among the canonical writers deserves a bit more attention?Frances: Oh, that's interesting. I love minor characters. I think Spark was very witty about describing herself as a minor novelist or a writer of minor novels when she was evidently major. She always saw the comedy in being a minor. All the minor writers interest me. Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. No, they have heard Elizabeth Bowen has been treated well by Hermione Lee and Henry Green has been treated well by Jeremy Treglown.Why are they not up there yet? They're so much better than most of their contemporaries. I am mystified and fascinated by why it is that the most powerful writers tend to be kicked into the long grass. It's dazzling. When you read a Henry Green novel, you think, "But this is what it's all about. He's understood everything about what the novel can do. Why has no one heard of him?"Henry: I think Elizabeth Bowen's problem is that she's so concise, dense, and well-structured, and everything really plays its part in the pattern of the whole that it's not breezy reading.Frances: No, it's absolutely not.Henry: I think that probably holds her back in some way, even though when I have pushed it on people, most of the time they've said, "Gosh, she's a genius."Frances: Yes.Henry: It's not an easy genius. Whereas Dickens, the pages sort of fly along, something like that.Frances: Yes. One of the really interesting things about Spark is that she really, really is easy reading. At the same time, there's so much freight in those books. There's so much intellectual weight and so many games being played. There's so many books inside the books. Yet you can just read them for the pleasure. You can just read them for the plot. You can read one in an afternoon and think that you've been lost inside a book for 10 years. You don't get that from Elizabeth Bowen. That's true. The novels, you feel the weight, don't you?Henry: Yes.Frances: She's Jamesian. She's more Jamesian, I think, than Spark is.Henry: Something like A World of Love, it requires quite a lot of you.Frances: Yes, it does. Yes, it's not bedtime reading.Henry: No, exactly.Frances: Sitting up in a library.Henry: Yes. Now, you mentioned James. You're a Henry James expert.Frances: I did my PhD on Henry James.Henry: Yes. Will you ever write about him?Frances: I have, actually. Just a little plug. I've just done a selection of James's short stories, three volumes, which are coming out, I think, later this year for Riverrun with a separate introduction for each volume. I think that's all the writing I'm going to do on James. When I was an academic, I did some academic essays on him for collections and things. No, I've never felt, ever, ready to write on James because he's too complicated. I can only take tiny, tiny bits of James and home in on them.Henry: He's a great one for trying to crack the code.Frances: He really is. In fact, I was struck all the way through writing Electric Spark by James's understanding of the comedy of biography, which is described in the figure in the carpet. Remember that wonderful story where there's a writer called Verica who explains to a young critic that none of the critics have understood what his work's about. Everything that's written about him, it's fine, but it's absolutely missed his main point, his beautiful point. He said that in order to understand what the work's about, you have to look for The Figure in the Carpet. It's The Figure in the CarpetIt's the string on which my pearls are strung. A couple of critics become completely obsessed with looking for this Figure in the Carpet. Of course, Spark loved James's short stories. You feel James's short stories playing inside her own short stories. I think that one of the games she left for her biographers was the idea of The Figure in the Carpet. Go on, find it then. Find it. [laughs] The string on which my pearls are strung.Henry: Why did you leave academia? We should say that you did this before it became the thing that everyone's doing.Frances: Is everyone leaving now?Henry: A lot of people are leaving now.Frances: Oh, I didn't know. I was ahead of the curve. I left 20 years ago because I wasn't able to write the books I wanted to write. I left when I'd written two books as an academic. My first was Literary Seductions, and my second was a biography of a blackmailing courtesan called Harriet Wilson, and the book was called The Courtesan's Revenge. My department was sniffy about the books because they were published by Faber and not by OUP, and suggested that somehow I was lowering the tone of the department.This is what things were like 20 years ago. Then I got a contract to write The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, my third book, again with Faber. I didn't want to write the book with my head of department in the back of my mind saying, "Make this into an academic tome and put footnotes in." I decided then that I would leave, and I left very suddenly. Now, I said I'm leaving sort of now, and I've got books to write, and felt completely liberated. Then for The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, I decided not to have footnotes. It's the only book I've ever written without footnotes, simply as a celebration of no longer being in academia.Then the things I loved about being in academia, I loved teaching, and I loved being immersed in literature, but I really couldn't be around colleagues and couldn't be around the ridiculous rules of what was seen as okay. In fact, the university I left, then asked me to come back on a 0.5 basis when they realised that it was now fashionable to have someone who was a trade author. They asked me to come back, which I did not want to do. I wanted to spend days where I didn't see people rather than days where I had to talk to colleagues all the time. I think that academia is very unhappy. The department I was in was incredibly unhappy.Since then, I took up a job very briefly in another English department where I taught creative writing part-time. That was also incredibly unhappy. I don't know whether other French departments or engineering departments are happier places than English departments, but English departments are the most unhappy places I think I've ever seen.[laughter]Henry: What do you admire about the work of George Meredith?Frances: Oh, I love George Meredith. [laughs] Yes. I think Modern Love, his first novel, Modern Love, in a strange sonnet form, where it's not 14 lines, but 16 lines. By the time you get to the bottom two lines, the novel, the sonnet has become hysterical. Modern Love hasn't been properly recognised. It's an account of the breakdown of his marriage. His wife, who was the daughter of the romantic, minor novelist, Thomas Love Peacock. His wife had an affair with the artist who painted the famous Death of Chatterton. Meredith was the model for Chatterton, the dead poet in his purple silks, with his hand falling on the ground. There's a lot of mythology around Meredith.I think, as with Elizabeth Bowen and Henry Green, he's difficult. He's difficult. The other week, I tried to reread Diana of the Crossways, which was a really important novel, and I still love it. I really recognise that it's not an easy read. He doesn't try, in any way, to seduce his readers. They absolutely have to crawl inside each book to sit inside his mind and see the world as he's seeing it.Henry: Can you tell us what you will do next?Frances: At the moment, I'm testing some ideas out. I feel, at the end of every biography, you need a writer. You need to cleanse your palate. Otherwise, there's a danger of writing the same book again. I need this time, I think, to write about, to move century and move genders. I want to go back, I think, to the 19th century. I want to write about a male writer for a moment, and possibly not a novelist as well, because after being immersed in Muriel Sparks' novels, no other novel is going to seem good enough. I'm testing 19th-century men who didn't write novels, and it will probably be a minor character.Henry: Whatever it is, I look forward to reading it. Frances Wilson, thank you very much.Frances: Thank you so much, Henry. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk/subscribe

Paul Hartnoll of electronic music duo Orbital talks about the reissue of the band's Brown album which was originally released in 1993, with the addition of 23 extra tracks of rarities and previously unreleased material and about the intersection between dance music and politics. Frances Wilson, who has previously published acclaimed biographies of D H Lawrence and Thomas De Quincy tells us about her latest book Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, about the great Scottish writer, poet and essayist. And the creator of Netflix's new detective series Dept. Q, Scott Frank, who previously wrote and directed The Queen's Gambit and has written the scripts for Hollywood movies from Minority Report to Marley & Me, talks to us about adapting bestselling Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen's books for the screen and why he's transposed the setting for the series from Copenhagen to Edinburgh. Presenter: Kate Molleson Producer: Mark Crossan

Sean is joined by author of 'Understanding J. Bruce Ismay: The True Story of the Man They Called The Coward of Titanic', Clifford Ismay, to look into J. Bruce Ismay.Bruce Ismay was the Chairman of The White Star Line, who became infamous for getting into a lifeboat and surviving the sinking of the Titanic. But are things as one-sided as people think?Listen in to this riveting discussion as Cliff and Sean bring their own insights into the debate.They discuss:-Thomas Henry Ismay and his relationship with his son, Bruce.-Parental expectations.-Bruce Ismay's introverted personality and how it ended up working against the public's perception of him, both before and after the Titanic tragedy.-Myths around Bruce and Captain Smith.-The impact of TV and film depictions of real-life people on public memory.-The cultural impact of Titanic (1997).-The "ram-shackle" evacuation of Titanic.-How surprisingly quickly the attacks on Ismay's character began.-The bravery of Titanic's Engineers and Postmen.Raised Questions:-Who did Cliff really want to write a book about?-Did you know that Bruce's Dad was a world-renowned businessman and self-made man?-Are we all a product of our parents?-Did Bruce's façade alienate people around him?-Has Bruce Ismay been portrayed factually and fairly?-What was the last song played by Titanic's band?-Can we ever corroborate Ismay's version of events?-Do the Public and the Press love a villain when a disaster occurs?-Does the sacrifice of wider Titanic's crew get forgotten?Correction:-It was Lifeboat number 13, which almost had Lifeboat number 15 dropped on it.-Enclosed A Deck Promenade* not "Enclosed Boat Deck" as Sean put it.Further Reading:-Understanding J. Bruce Ismay: The True Story of the Man They Called 'The Coward of Titanic' (The History Press, 2022) by Clifford Ismay.-How To Survive the Titanic; or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury, 2011) by Frances Wilson.-The Triumvirate: Captain Edward J. Smith, Bruce Ismay, Thomas Andrews and the Sinking of Titanic (The History Press, 2024) by George Behe.Chapters:0:32 Introduction1:17 The Power of Film3:24 J. Bruce Ismay's Perception4:48 Thomas Ismay: A Legacy6:45 Father and Son Dynamics10:33 The Politics of Perception12:49 Portrayals of Bruce Ismay15:48 The Myths of Titanic17:51 The Last Moments21:42 Lifeboat Decisions23:53 The Reality of Survival26:29 The Impact of Inquiry29:02 The Press and Public Perception34:45 The Legacy of Bruce Ismay38:09 Life After Titanic44:35 New Perspectives on History48:17 The Real Heroes of Titanic51:45 Unfinished Stories of Titanic56:59 Future Works and CollaborationsThanks for Listening!Find us here: X: @YourselfReviewInstagram: reviewityourselfpodcast2021YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ReviewItYourself⁠ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, writer, academic and critic Frances Wilson is joined by Artistic Director of Dior Homme and Vice President of Charleston, Kim Jones, Dr Darren Clarke, Head of Collections, Research and Exhibitions at Charleston and Sotheby's, and Jen Hardie, Director and Senior Specialist in Modern British & Irish Art at Sotheby's in London, for a conversation about the indefatigable spirit of the Bloomsbury group and the renewed interest in their work and lives today, across paintings, drawings, furniture, ceramics and literature. This podcast was originally recorded at Sotheby's in London to celebrate Radical Modernity: From Bloomsbury to Charleston, a private selling and loan exhibition in collaboration with Charleston. And, to step further into the world of Sotheby's, you can visit any of our galleries around the world; they're open to the public. For more information, visit sothebys.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: Christopher Caldwell asks what a Trump victory could mean for Ukraine (1:07); Gus Carter argues that leaving the ECHR won't fix Britain's immigration system (8:29); Ruaridh Nicoll reads his letter from Havana (18:04); Tanya Gold provides her notes on toffee apples (23:51); and a selection of our books of the year from Jonathan Sumption, Hadley Freeman, Mark Mason, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith and Frances Wilson (27:08).    Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

On this week's Spectator Out Loud: Christopher Caldwell asks what a Trump victory could mean for Ukraine (1:07); Gus Carter argues that leaving the ECHR won't fix Britain's immigration system (8:29); Ruaridh Nicoll reads his letter from Havana (18:04); Tanya Gold provides her notes on toffee apples (23:51); and a selection of our books of the year from Jonathan Sumption, Hadley Freeman, Mark Mason, Christopher Howse, Sam Leith and Frances Wilson (27:08).    Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Make sure you tune into the latest episode of The Read Smart Podcast, which explores what life is like in dictatorships across the world and throughout history. Our host Razia Iqbal will be joined by three former winners of the prize; Historian Michael Burleigh, journalist Barbara Demick and historian Frank Dikötter. They delve into the fascinatingly complex definitions and qualities behind the term ‘dictator', as well as the role that secrecy and terror plays in countries living under authoritarian rule. As we continue to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Baillie Gifford Prize, keep an eye out for more special episodes of The Read Smart podcast, where faces from the prize's past will be returning to give their insight on more fascinating topics. We will also be sharing special episodes dedicated to the authors shortlisted for our Winner of Winners competition, which is being judged by Chair Jason Cowley, Shahidha Bari, Sarah Churchwell and Frances Wilson. Listen now to hear all about it. The podcast is generously supported by the Blavatnik Family Foundation. For more podcasts from The Baillie Gifford Prize, click here. Follow @BGPrize on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and YouTube.

This week we feature a special episode with BIO's 2022 Plutarch Award-winner Frances Wilson. Her latest book, Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, published by Farrar, Straus and […]

*This episode contains very strong language and adult content*A semi autobiographical account from a conflicted man? An ode to a wife's sexual desire? A criminally obscene novel?Lady Chatterley's Lover is one of the most famous texts from the past century, but why?In this episode, we hear from the director of the new Netflix movie Laure De Clermont-Tonnerre about why this story is important to the 21st century. Then, Kate speaks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence, his final novel, and the trial that made them the sexual mascots of the 1960s.Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Anisha Deva.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I've been circling this episode all season and am excited, finally, to bring you the story of Ted Smith (as he was known to those closest to him), the quiet but genial captain of the RMS Titanic. We live with his ghost(s) in so many ways.Thank you to GJ Cooper for his intense Captain Smith research; you can buy his book here and support the pod: https://bookshop.org/books/titanic-captain-the-life-of-edward-john-smith/9780752460727?aid=80949&listref=episodes-miscellanyI also recommend, for more on Ismay and the White Star Line, Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-survive-the-titanic-the-sinking-of-j-bruce-ismay/9780062094551?aid=80949&listref=episodes-miscellanyFor the alleged haunting of Smith's home, see: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/titanic-captain-ghost-haunt-house-neil-louise-bonner-england_n_1406928For the allegedly haunted mirror, see: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/haunted-mirror-possessed-ghost-titanic-13608741For the pub selfie, see: https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/7523740/couple-photobombed-captain-titanic-belfast/SUPPORT THE POD ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/unsinkablepodSupport the show

Frances Wilson, publicist and writer/blogger extraordinaire talks to Hattie and Rebecca about her blog and other work, her love of live music, lack of creative motivation in lockdown, and what it's like to get to know the artists behind the music. She is most famed for her wonderful blog, The Cross-Eyed Pianist, and her popular series of written interviews, Meet the Artist, that is about to turn 10 years old! We are incredibly grateful to Frances for her time and her wisdom. p.s apologies for the questionable audio quality - Hattie and I forgot to wear headphones and it caused all manner of problems in the 'editing studio'...Frances' bio:Frances Wilson is a publicist and writer/blogger on classical music and the piano under the pen name The Cross-Eyed Pianist. Frances has established a strong presence in the UK classical music world through her blog The Cross-Eyed Pianist (founded in 2010) and her many contacts with musicians through the popular Meet the Artist interview series (launched in 2012). In addition to her blog, Frances is co-founder/editor of ArtMuseLondon, an independent website focusing on reviews of art, music and culture. She has appeared on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters to discuss the role of music criticism today and the effect of the internet on music journalism and writing. She is a writer for Hong Kong-based classical music site Interlude HK, and has contributed articles to Pianist magazine and The Schubertian, the journal of the Schubert Institute UK. She is concerts manager for Weymouth Lunchtime Chamber Concerts, a monthly recital series founded in 2002 by pianist Duncan Honeybourne. Frances returned to the piano seriously after an absence of nearly 25 years and achieved Licentiate and Associate performance diplomas, both with Distinction, in her late 40s. She has studied privately with leading pianist-teachers Penelope Roskell and Graham Fitch, and participated in masterclasses and coaching sessions with Murray McLachlan, Stephen Savage, James Lisney, Charlotte Tomlinson and Sarah Beth Briggs.TMDTA!Follow us on instagram!And TwitterOur websiteBuy our stickers (What Would Yuja Wear)Or buy us a coffee!Support the show

Welcome back to Unsinkable: The Titanic Podcast! Episode two is an in-depth examination of the life of J. Bruce Ismay, managing director of the White Star Line (and, essentially, the owner of Titanic). History has not been kind to him, this man accused of abandoning his own ship and all those aboard her as she plunged into the sea. Here I outline his entire life, his own tragedies before and after the disaster, and attempt to answer the nagging question: did he deserve his reputation as Titanic's notorious scapegoat?For sources, please check the blog on my website: unsinkablepod.comIf you enjoy this episode, I highly recommend:Frances Wilson's How to Survive the Titanic, or, The Sinking of J. Bruce IsmayGareth Russell's The Ship of Dreams: The Sinking of the Titanic and the End of the Edwardian EraPlease rate/review if you enjoyed the ep. Email me: unsinkablepod@gmail.comProduction assistance by: John BeadlesMusic by: John BeadlesPod Artwork by: Judith Castillo

Perhaps the greatest boxing novel ever written, Leonard Gardner's Fat City was first published in 1969; it was shortlisted for the National Book Award; Joan Didion and Denis Johnson are amongst those who have sung its praises. The book was made into a film in 1972 starring Stacy Keach and Jeff Bridges, directed by John Huston from a screenplay by Gardner himself. In this episode Andy, John and Nicky explore both the novel and the film and the ways in which Gardner shows the reader the whole of a society through the prism of sport. We also hear from the author as to why he has never published another novel. Plus in this episode John reignites his love of D.H. Lawrence with Frances Wilson's acclaimed new biography Burning Man, while Andy shares an extract from Leonora Carrington's magical novel The Hearing Trumpet, read by actress Siân Phillips.

Lawrence's dad was a butty - a contractor who put together a team to mine coal for an agreed price. His 1913 novel Sons and Lovers drew on this heritage. Frances Wilson's new biography focuses on the decade following, when The Rainbow had been subject to an obscenity trial, he travelled to Cornwall and Mexico and then the discovery that he had tuberculosis. In a non-Covid year, this weekend would have seen the Durham Miners' Gala take place. Poet Jake Morris-Campbell writes a postcard about the traditions of this annual gathering of banners and brass bands. Prabhakar Pachpute's family worked in the coal mines of central India for three generations. For his contribution as one of the artists taking part in Artes Mundi 9, he's drawn on this shared cultural heritage with the Welsh mining community to create an installation of paintings, banners and objects that comment on protest and collective action. Matthew Sweet presents. Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson is out now. Artes Mundi is on show at the National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39 Dr Jake Morris-Campbell teaches at the University of Newcastle and is a visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. He is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of programmes from the past ten years of the scheme on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35 Producer: Luke Mulhall

Lawrence's dad was a butty - a contractor who put together a team to mine coal for an agreed price. His 1913 novel Sons and Lovers drew on this heritage. Frances Wilson's new biography focuses on the decade following, when The Rainbow had been subject to an obscenity trial, he travelled to Cornwall and Mexico and then the discovery that he had tuberculosis. In a non-Covid year, this weekend would have seen the Durham Miners' Gala take place. Poet Jake Morris-Campbell writes a postcard about the traditions of this annual gathering of banners and brass bands. Prabhakar Pachpute's family worked in the coal mines of central India for three generations. For his contribution as one of the artists taking part in Artes Mundi 9, he's drawn on this shared cultural heritage with the Welsh mining community to create an installation of paintings, banners and objects that comment on protest and collective action. Matthew Sweet presents. Burning Man: The Ascent of DH Lawrence by Frances Wilson is out now. Artes Mundi is on show at the National Museum Cardiff, Chapter and g39 Dr Jake Morris-Campbell teaches at the University of Newcastle and is a visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. He is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to select ten academics each year to turn their research into radio. You can find a collection of programmes from the past ten years of the scheme on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08zhs35 Producer: Luke Mulhall

D.H. Lawrence is best known for his work Lady Chatterley's Lover and the obscenity trial relating to the book's publication in the early 1960s. But Lawrence is in fact one of the most important British writers of the 20th century and there is much more to his work and story than Lady Chatterley. He was one of the first successful novelists from a working-class background, he wrote a number of other successful novels including The Rainbow and Women in Love as well as short stories, travelogues, poetry, history and even a school textbook. He was also a complicated and sometimes difficult character and a thorn in the side of the British writing establishment. To tell us about his all too short life Dan is joined by Frances Wilson who has recently written the first biography of Lawrence by a female author in thirty years. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

D.H. Lawrence is best known for his work Lady Chatterley's Lover and the obscenity trial relating to the book's publication in the early 1960s. But Lawrence is in fact one of the most important British writers of the 20th century and there is much more to his work and story than Lady Chatterley. He was one of the first successful novelists from a working-class background, he wrote a number of other successful novels including The Rainbow and Women in Love as well as short stories, travelogues, poetry, history and even a school textbook. He was also a complicated and sometimes difficult character and a thorn in the side of the British writing establishment. To tell us about his all too short life Dan is joined by Frances Wilson who has recently written the first biography of Lawrence by a female author in thirty years. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Gemma Creagh and Michael Pope review new films incl. A Quiet Place 2, playwright Marina Carr has adapted Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse' corkmidsummer.com/whats-on/to-the-lighthouse ,‘Burning Man' a new biography by Frances Wilson on DH Lawrence

In 1915, D.H. Lawrence published his ‘big and beautiful book’, The Rainbow. Despite being considered one of his finest novels today, within a year of its publication it was censured by the state for obscenity and the remaining 1,011 copies of it were burnt by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. So begins the biographer Frances Wilson’s tour of 1915, which would turn out to be dark and turbulent year in the life of one of Britain’s most controversial writers. Frances Wilson is an award-winning biographer and critic. Her latest book, Burning Man: The Ascent of D. H. Lawrence (Bloomsbury) focuses on the middle period of the writer’s life between 1915 and 1925. As ever, much, much more about this episode is to be found at our website tttpodcast.com. Show Notes Scene One: November - Bow Street Magistrates Court, where D H Lawrence’s novel, The Rainbow, is tried for obscenity and the remaining 1.011 copies burnt by a hangman outside the Royal Exchange. Lawrence is not present at either event, but the destruction of his ‘big and beautiful book’  will impact dramatically on the direction of his writing. Scene Two: November - The Vale of Health at the top of Hampstead Heath, where Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, are living in house in a row called Byron Villas. Lawrence now decides that he will become, like Byron himself, a literary outlaw: ‘I will retire out of the herd and throw bombs into it.’ Scene Three: March - Trinity College, Cambridge, where Lawrence, the son of a coal miner, is invited to High Table by Bertrand Russell. This is his first visit to the ancient university. After being paraded around like a pet, he gets a taste of Bloomsbury homosexuality and is horrified. A ‘little madness’ passes into him and for the next few weeks he loses his mind. People/Social Presenter: Artemis Irvine Guest: Frances Wilson Production: Maria Nolan Podcast partner: Colorgraph Follow us on Twitter: @tttpodcast_ Or on Facebook See where 1915 fits on our Timeline  

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells me why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation wasn’t really interested in sex at all - and reveals that after his death Lawrence may have been eaten by his admirers.

Sam Leith's guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is Frances Wilson, whose new book Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence sets out to take a fresh look at a now unfashionable figure. Frances tells him why we’re looking in the wrong places for Lawrence’s greatness, explains why the supposed prophet of sexual liberation wasn’t really interested in sex at all - and reveals that after his death Lawrence may have been eaten by his admirers.

This week, host Razia Iqbal is joined by biographer and previous Baillie Gifford Prize judge Frances Wilson and writer Jasper Rees. Jasper and Frances give us insight into their own experiences, their thoughts on what it takes to write a great biography and what biographers should leave on ‘the cutting room floor'. This episode was recorded and produced remotely. Find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @BGPrize and keep up to date at thebailliegiffordprize.co.uk

In our event from 16 July 2019, Geoff Dyer talks to Frances Wilson about D.H. Lawrence. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, published in 1997, is a brilliant account of attempting to write, and most often failing, a book about his great hero D.H. Lawrence. Now, more than two decades later, he has edited a selection of Lawrence's essays for Penguin. Subjects covered in this freewheeling volume include art, morality, obscenity, songbirds, Italy, Thomas Hardy, the death of a porcupine in the Rocky Mountains and, presciently, the narcissism of photographing ourselves. Historian and biographer Frances Wilson's most recent book is Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas de Quincey. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We can't go to the movies for a fix of action now. We can, though, witness spectacle that even the biggest budget blockbusters can't match - by simply going outside into the weather. 'Use should be made of it,' wrote Virginia Woolf. 'One should not let this gigantic cinema play perpetually to an empty house.' The poet Alice Oswald discusses Gigantic Cinema: A Weather Anthology that she's compiled with editor Paul Keegan, capturing writing about the weather, from the deluge in Gilgamesh, the earliest known poem, to 'Billie's Rain' one written a few years ago, about sitting in a van listening as rain hammers on the roof. Missing the stage? Don’t despair - three regional theatres just got together to stage a lockdown-proof digital production of Jonathan Coe’s classic 1994 satirical novel What A Carve Up! They’ve re-imagined it for 2020, and added an all-star cast from Tamzin Outhwaite to Sharon D Clark, with cameos from Stephen Fry and Derek Jacobi. Katie Popperwell reviews. In recent years, the growing popularity of Life Writing - creative writing based on autobiography or memoir - can be seen across book awards shortlists as well as the sheer number of creative writing courses dedicated to the subject. As the annual Spread the Word Life Writing Prize opens for entries, we talk to judge Frances Wilson about the kind of work the prize is seeking as well as the latest developments in this type of writing. She’ll be joined by Poet and teacher Anthony Anaxagorou, whose book How to Write It - published this month by Stormzy’s publishing imprint, Merky Books - aims to encourage budding writers to tell their story. Presenter Ben Bailey Smith Producer Jerome Weatherald

One of the things wiped off my 2020 travel calendar was a highly anticipated trip to South Africa. And although I had to hit pause on those travel plans, my Traveltude remains unbothered and the reason is- In a 2-part episode Nick Buckland and Frances Wilson of “Into Africa,” a destination management company based in […]

One of the things wiped off my 2020 travel calendar was a highly anticipated trip to South Africa. And although I had to hit pause on those travel plans, my Traveltude remains unbothered and the reason is- In a 2-part episode Nick Buckland and Frances Wilson of “Into Africa,” a destination management company based in […]

The much-loved story of the Chinese warrior Mulan is the latest Disney animation to get a live-action remake. Its less a direct remake of the 1998 original and more a retelling of the Chinese folk legend of Hua Mulan with an all-Asian cast. There have been changes - no cute animated dragon or songs - are we going to love it as much? Find out with critic Gavia Baker Whitelaw. Lorna Sage was a much admired literary critic but it was her memoir Bad Blood that made her a household name. Bad Blood examines Lorna’s childhood and adolescence in a small Welsh border town and is an exploration of thwarted desires, marital disappointment and the search for freedom from the limits and smallness of family life. The critic Frances Wilson has written an introduction to the twentieth anniversary edition and discusses the legacy of what is one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs ever written - vividly bringing to life Lorna’s dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather, her embittered grandmother and her domestically inept mother. Hull’s annual Freedom Festival begins this weekend. Its an event rooted in the legacy of the Hull-born anti-slavery activist William Wilberforce and usually brings thousands onto the streets to celebrate. This year due to Covid 19, its moving online, but its keeping its strong commitment to “art that helps build a stronger and fairer society”, fuelled by current affairs from Black Lives Matter to the virus itself. But if artists have a political aim, does that affect the quality of the art? Should Art be valued for its political engagement even if we don’t rate the artwork itself? We'll be debating these questions with the director of the Design Museum Tim Marlow, Jazz saxophonist Soweto Kinch and artist Davina Drummond, part of the duo Yara and Davina. Across the country independent music venues are in serious crisis. They’re having to keep their doors closed - in spite of a cash injection of £3.36m from the government’s Cultural Recovery Fund - because they simply don’t have the room to operate within social distancing guidelines. Passport: Back to Our Roots is a campaign that aims to raise money for these stricken venues by asking some of the UK’s biggest bands to commit to playing small local gigs. All fans have to do is make a minimum £5 donation to be entered into a prize draw to see these artists, should the gigs go ahead. We find out more from Ash drummer Rick McMurray and campaign co-founder Sally Cook. Presenter Katie Popperwell Producer Olive Clancy

What style of life did an ancient Roman emperor lead? How did he actually spend his time? Mary Beard fills us in; Frances Wilson on literary couples (and their pet names) and what they can, and can’t, tell us about marriage; Mika Ross-Southall on how gentrification works and who it works for The Emperor in the Roman World by Fergus MillarLiterary Couples and 20th-Century Life Writing: Narrative and intimacy by Janine UtellParallel Lives: Five Victorian marriages by Phyllis RoseNewcomers: Gentrification and its discontents by Matthew L. SchuermanUs Versus Them: Race, crime, and gentrification in Chicago neighborhoods by Jan DoeringThe Aesthetics of Neighborhood Change, edited by Lisa Berglund and Siobhan GregoryAlpha City: How London was captured by the super-rich, by Rowland Atkinson See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Poet John Keats was 25 years old when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1820. After his death he became an icon of the supposed relation of tuberculosis to art, beauty and genius. In this episode we investigate how a disease can become fetishized. Written and produced by Lucinda Smyth; composed and sound designed by Tom Chapman; logo by Alice Konstam. DONATE to TB Alert: https://www.tbalert.org/support-us/donate/ or text TBAL14 £10 to 70070 (Refs: Keats by Andrew Motion; Thomas M Daniel, The History of Tuberculosis, Respiratory Medicine (2006); The Lancet: Tuberculosis http://www.tbonline.info/posts/2017/7/24/lancet-tuberculosis/; 'How London Became the Tuberculosis Capital of Europe', Frances Wilson, Guardian; Tuberculosis and Fashion, Horror Everyday Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nz4_f6d93o; Tuberculosis: The Era of Consumption https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-73rQw3lX_g ; Pioneers of Medicine and their impact on Tuberculosis, Thomas M Daniel.)

The Oldie's Ferdie Rous talks to author and journalist, Frances Wilson, about Wordsworth's idyllic home in the Lake District, his remarkably intense relationship with his sister, Dorothy Wordsworth, and why he was known as the pedestrian poet

Frances Wilson gets implausibly angry about the hypocrisy of Patrick O’Brian; Michèle Roberts makes the case for the forgotten author of the nineteenth century, George Sand; Miranda Seymour turns literary detective to identify a new work by Ada Lovelace. And Roz Dineen fails to be enticed by cakes.Romans 1 & 2 George Sand; Edited by José-Luis Diaz and Brigitte DiazPatrick O’Brian – A very private life Nikolai Tolstoy See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Like what you see? Please give generously. http://www.thinktechhawaii.com Pageants that were created to uplift black women and not set that standard of beauty where you have to be skinny, have long hair, etc.. Some people choose to take their own path, disregarding what others think and pursue their dream with all their might. The host for this episode is Sharon Thomas Yarbrough. The guest for this episode is Frances Wilson.

Author Frances Wilson discovers the hidden world of TB in London. Produced for BBC Radio 3

In this episode, our podcast host, Razia Iqbal, is joined by judges Stig Abell and Frances Wilson to talk about the twelve books that have made it onto the longlist. The twelve titles span history, biography, current affairs and natural science, with several addressing grand themes including race, courtroom drama, ideology, and economics.

It’s the centenary of the birth of Iris Murdoch, the novelist-philosopher who dominated the literary pages for much of the twentieth century. Where do we stand on her now? Michael Caines and Frances Wilson discuss; This was the week that the US women’s football team won the World Cup. Devoney Looser, the roller derby queen of academia, enjoys “a brief opportunity to revel in America’s better strengths”. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Phil Baker guides us through the morbid, wistful and yet immensely charming world of the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey; Frances Wilson weighs the pleasures and pains of letter and email writing; Ian Sansom on the struggle to be funnyBooksBorn To Be Posthumous: The eccentric life and mysterious genius of Edward Gorey, by Mark DeryWhat a Hazard a Letter Is: The strange destiny of the unsent letter, by Caroline AtkinsWritten In History: Letters that changed the world, by Simon Sebag MontefioreIn Their Own Words: Volume 2: More letters from historyWit's End: What wit is, how it works, and why we need it, by James GearyMessing About In Quotes: A little Oxford dictionary of humorous quotations, compiled by Gyles Brandreth See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Frances Wilson, President and CEO of the Purple Door, discusses the importance of prevention of domestic and sexual abuse, the many programs and services offered by the organization, and why ALL victims of abuse are welcome in Episode 37.

Philip Horne and Frances Wilson join us to discuss Henry James, the not-always masterly Master who gave us novels as apparently divergent as Washington Square, with its clear, tight prose, The Ambassadors (prone to accidents of publication) and The Golden Bowl, which spills pleasures of an altogether more sinuous nature; plus, details of a little-known trip James took to California, which – unexpectedly, perhaps –“completely bowled” him over BooksGenerous Mistakes: Incidents of error in Henry James by Michael Anesko The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James: The Ambassadors; Edited by Nicola Bradbury. The Portrait of a Lady; Edited by Michael Anesko. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910; Edited by N. H. Reeve (Michael Anesko, Tamara L. Follini, Philip Horne and Adrian Poole, general editors) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What makes someone a Jew? Some might say: I’m a Jew because I believe in Judaism, and I feel Jewish. But to many, including most Orthodox and conservative rabbis, that’s not enough. Some might say: I’m Jewish because I’ve been converted. But the State of Israel, for example, doesn't recognize Jews who were converted by reform and conservative Rabbis. And to many, even those who converted by the most stringent of laws, are not REALLY Jews, and referred to as “Meguyar” or "Converted" But some people choose to take their own path, disregarding what others think, and pursue their dream with all their might. Frances Wilson, is undoubtedly one such person. Wilson is an African-American from Hawaii, who converted to Judaism and now came for one year of teaching and volunteering in Israel. Winner of several beauty contests, Frances’s path to recognition in Israel is not without struggle, and she’s joining us today to talk about why she came here, and the bewildering choice to join one of the most exclusive and often loathed religions in the world.

The Rt Hon Lord David Willetts talks to Philip Dodd about universities. The UK Minister for Universities and Science from 2010 to 2014, his new book considers both the history and the global role they now play. Plus a discussion about scandal old and new - is it a driving force for social change or once the outrage has passed does everything revert to the status quo. Historian and New Generation Thinker Tom Charlton, journalist Michael White and biographer Frances Wilson, author of lives of Thomas De Quincey and royal courtesan Harriette Wilson look at scandals past and present.

With Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi – Novelist Neel Mukherjee discusses the vexed state of Modern India and the legacy of Partition 70 years on; Frances Wilson considers a problematic clutch of books that look to describe a "sisterhood" of female writers from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf and beyond See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Adam Tendler shared an ambitious program of works that provoke, challenge, thrill, and ultimately move the listener. The program included works by Nico Muhly, Earle Brown, Marina Poleukhina, Charlie Sdraulig, Morton Feldman, and Philip Glass. About Adam Tendler: Adam Tendler has been called "an exuberantly expressive pianist" who "vividly displayed his enthusiasm for every phrase" by The Los Angeles Times, a “quietly charismatic...intrepid...outstanding...maverick pianist” by The New Yorker, a "modern-music evangelist" by Time Out New York, and a pianist who "has managed to get behind and underneath the notes, living inside the music and making poetic sense of it all," by The Baltimore Sun, which continued, "if they gave medals for musical bravery, dexterity and perseverance, Adam Tendler would earn them all." London critic Frances Wilson described Tendler's memorized performance of Morton Feldman's Palais de Mari as "a concentrated listening experience...meditative, intense and beautifully poised." And New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote that Tendler played an outdoor performance of John Cage's music "captivatingly," and that "the wondrously subdued sounds silenced many, who listened closely even as street bustle and chirping birds blended in." Tendler lives in New York City and serves on the faculty of Third Street Music School Settlement, the country’s first community music school.

A recording from the TLS’s 2016 London Lit Weekend at King’s Place, London: 2016 was the 200th anniversary of a dark and stormy night with an extraordinary literary legacy: Frankenstein. Frances Wilson and Benjamin Markovits recount the three days in June, 1816, at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, when a group of young writers – among them Mary Godwin – sheltered from the gloom. Find out more at www.the-tls.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this week's episode of the Futility Closet podcast we'll explore some more curiosities and unanswered questions from Greg's research, including a pilot who saved Buckingham Palace, a ghost who confronted Arthur Conan Doyle, what Mark Twain learned from a palm reader, and a bedeviling superfluity of Norwegians. We'll also discover a language used only by women and puzzle over a gift that's best given sparingly. Intro: Horatio Nelson's coffin was fashioned from the mast of a French flagship that he had defeated. In 1994 the city council of Green River, Wyoming, designated an airstrip south of town as an "intergalactic spaceport." Sources for our feature on notes and queries: The story of the Singapore tiger shooting appears in this history of the Raffles hotel. Neil Kagan's 2013 book The Untold Civil War alleges that the 15th Wisconsin Volunteer Regiment was so thick with Norwegians that it contained dozens of men named Ole Olson. The Norwegian American Genealogical Center says that the Roster of Wisconsin Volunteers shows that the 15th had 128 men whose first name was Ole, 75 men whose last name was Olson, Olsen, or Oleson, but just 15 whose names were Ole Olson, Ole Olsen, or Ole Oleson. The anecdote about the Gettysburg ordinance is mentioned in Michael Sanders' 2006 More Strange Tales of the Civil War, which cites Gregory A. Coco's A Strange and Blighted Land, Gettysburg: The Aftermath of a Battle, 1995. I found it in Allen C. Guelzo's Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, 2013. Frances Wilson describes Titanic survivor Lawrence Beesley's visit to the set of A Night to Remember in her 2011 book How to Survive the Titanic, Or The Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay. The observation about John Ford's eye for camerawork appears in Robert L. Carringer's 1996 book The Making of Citizen Kane. Dan Murphy's Puritan name is spelled out in Willard R. Espy's An Almanac of Words at Play, 1975. (I first wrote about unusual Puritan names in 2009.) The two long names cited by H.L. Mencken appear in his 1921 study The American Language. Douglas Hofstadter describes Stanford art professor Matt Kahn's confetti illusion in his foreword to Al Seckel's 2004 book Masters of Deception. Mark Twain wrote about Cheiro's prophecy in his notebook in 1903. His affidavit regarding the palmist's insight into his character is described in Sarah E. Chinn's 2000 book Technology and the Logic of American Racism. Three sources regarding Georges Simenon's prolificity: Stanley G. Eskin, Simenon, A Critical Biography, 1987. Henry Anatole Grunwald, "World's Most Prolific Novelist," Life 45:18 (Nov. 3, 1958). Aubrey Dillon-Malone, Stranger Than Fiction: A Book of Literary Lists, 1999. Also in Stranger Than Fiction, Dillon-Malone says that Anthony Trollope's quota of seven pages a day would sometimes carry him out of one book and into the next. Dillon-Malone says he's quoting Malcolm Cowley, who indeed says as much in this Paris Review interview, but I'd like to confirm the anecdote. British fighter pilot Ray Holmes' severing of a Dornier bomber's tail is depicted in this painting. In his 2010 book Royal Prayer: A Surprising History, David Baldwin says "the whole engagement was captured on film," but I've never been able to find it. The best I've found is the opening moments of this National Geographic documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lACDhxSLbYQ The anecdote about Arthur Conan Doyle in Africa is from Russell Miller's 2008 book The Adventures of Arthur Conan Doyle: A Biography. Among other places, the story about Kant's soul appears in Arthur Stone Dewing's 1903 Introduction to the History of Modern Philosophy. And Cornelia Parker's comment about her conversation with Noam Chomsky appears in "Apocalypse Later," Guardian, Feb. 11, 2008. Listener mail: Noah Shachtman, "They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside," Wired, Nov. 16, 2012. Wikipedia, "Copiale cipher" (accessed Dec. 8, 2016). "Scientists Crack Mysterious 'Copiale Cipher,'" Guardian, Oct. 26, 2011. Jon Watts, "The Forbidden Tongue," Guardian, Sept. 23, 2005. Wikipedia, "Nüshu script" (accessed Dec. 8, 2016). David Kahn, The Codebreakers, 1967. This week's lateral thinking puzzle is from Paul Sloane and Des MacHale's 2014 book Remarkable Lateral Thinking Puzzles. You can listen using the player above, download this episode directly, or subscribe on iTunes or Google Play Music or via the RSS feed at http://feedpress.me/futilitycloset. Please consider becoming a patron of Futility Closet -- on our Patreon page you can pledge any amount per episode, and we've set up some rewards to help thank you for your support. You can also make a one-time donation on the Support Us page of the Futility Closet website. Many thanks to Doug Ross for the music in this episode. If you have any questions or comments you can reach us at podcast@futilitycloset.com. Thanks for listening!

With Richard Holmes and Frances Wilson. Presented by Sam Leith.

On Start the Week Andrew Marr talks to the psychologist Charles Fernyhough about the inner speech in our heads. But what if it's a lone voice? The writer Olivia Laing explores what it's like to be lonely in a bustling city, while the playwright Alistair McDowall explores what happens when you're abandoned on a distant planet with no sense of time. The biographer Frances Wilson writes a tale of hero-worship, betrayal and revenge through the life of Thomas De Quincey, a man who modelled his opium-habit on Coleridge and his voice and writing on Wordsworth. Producer: Katy Hickman.

The Times Literary Supplement - an occasional series of readings. Frances Wilson tells us why she's looking forward to What You Want by Constantine Phipps and reads an extract from the book. Find out more: www.the-tls.co.uk See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.