Here are 10 things about it.

1. It’s called The Book Game and the “author” is Frances Wise.

2. It’s about a group of old friends and colleagues – writers, university lecturers, book people – in peak mid-life: 40s and 50s. Think Miranda July meets Joanna Trollope with a soupçon of John Milton and a dash of White Lotus. It’s that rarest of birds, a Miranda-Trollope-Milton-Lotus. The Spectator summarised it like this:

3. Some people who read it thought there were in it. It was interesting that they thought this. But the only presence from real life that is faithfully maintained (although transplanted to another city) is the setting – the house and the garden, which are the same, inch-for-inch.

4. Literary talks, book signings (but which name should we sign — Frances, Chloë, Adam?), visiting reading groups, people saying they know someone exactly like Lawrence, people saying they cried at the end – total fun. If you can, do it.

5. Why are there not more co-authored novels? Why do we still expect a link between sole author and literary fiction? Chloë and I would meet on Zoom, allocate scenes (‘You do the dinner party; I’ll do the fight in the garden’, etc.), and then we’d write. When we ran out of the steam, we’d swap. Our one rule was no similes or metaphors.

6. Here is our shared Dropbox:

   

7. I wrote my bits mostly early in the morning: 6-7am was my favourite, sitting on the sofa, before the rest of the house awoke. It was important for it not to become folded into academic work – in terms of the time of the working day, the location of writing.

8. Here is a pile of them, freshly arrived last week, on my garden table.

   

9. You can see it, and buy it, at this definitely-not-Amazon site, here. It’s cheap!

10. “Frances Wise” will be interviewed at Waterstones in Cambridge on Wednesday 17 June by the novelist Kate Sawyer. Details here.

Over the last couple of months, I re-read two books I originally read a long time ago but had – in all meaningful senses of the word – forgotten.

The first was EM Forster’s Howards End (1910). Just before Christmas I had dinner at my friend Laurence’s and he said it was his favourite book – he said it was ‘the perfect book’ – so I went back to it. Here is my copy.

I read it first in November 1993 in Kishinev (now Chișinău), Moldova. I was 21 and was teaching English to children and adults at a physically crumbling school; Moldova had only separated from the Soviet Union two years before. The people I met were divided fairly evenly between pro Russia and pro Europe. You could only change a dollar at a time because the currency was collapsing so fast. I was living with a Moldovan family in a tower block in the middle of the capital. At midday, the father would come back from his lawyer’s office to have lunch with me: we’d eat borscht and bread and butter, and talk in elementary French, and the expectation was that we’d finish between us the bottle of vodka he brought. My afternoon teaching was chaotic. But I was also reading EM Forster.

When I reread Howards End 29 years later – this was December 2025, just after Laurence’s dinner – there was only one bit I remembered: the part where younger brother Tibby, at a performance of Beethoven’s 5th symphony (in chapter 5), ‘implored the company to look out for the transitional passage on the drum.’ I remembered this word for word – ‘the transitional passage on the drum’ – and also as a mood: a sense of wanting others to be alert to an imminent significance, and those others not taking notice.

After Howard’s End I re-read Jane Austen’s Emma. My copy of Emma takes me further back: it’s my school copy and so we’re in A-level English with Mr Batten at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School in Amersham, and it’s 1988:

I was good at English, even if I never said a word (my teenage mode was to strive for invisibility above all things). The only trace I left on the book was a series of underlinings and a few summarising words. Things like this:

I like the way I’ve added ‘closeness’ to the description of Miss Taylor. It makes me think how distant these markings are, and how distant I am. I’ve no idea what I was thinking; why underline ‘Emma doing just what she liked’, and not any number of other clauses? I find the neatness of the underlinings sad, and I feel a long way away – as far away as this unknown reader, adding a pointing fist (or ‘manicule’) to a copy of Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene (1615) now in the Folger Library (to be exact: STC 23084 Copy 1).

And here is Ben Jonson – friend-rival of Shakespeare (‘I loved the man,’ Jonson wrote, ‘this side [of] idolatry’) – annotating the great how-to poetry manual of sixteenth-century verse, George Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) (this one is British Library G.11548):

What does it mean to underline a clause? To add as asterix? Is it endorsement? Interest? Disagreement? Here is the awkward 16-year-old me, diligently using a ruler to underline some of Austen’s clauses (and adding at the bottom of the page: ‘PHYSICAL APPEARANCE IMP[ORTANT]’):

‘Reading itself is such an inscrutable activity’ — Jeff Dolven and Sean Keilen wrote in 2010 – ‘and to watch someone read is to be forcefully reminded of everything we cannot know about another mind.’

But that’s not what I’m writing about today. In the London Library, there’s a shelf of new books in the entrance hall and I was looking at the new literature titles when this one caught my eye:

It caught my eye in part because I’m interested in Shakespeare and the sea. But mainly it caught my eye because I didn’t understand the first word. ‘Fathoming.’ For about 5 seconds I had no idea what it meant, and I could only read it as ‘Fat Homing.’ Fat Homing the Deep in English Renaissance Tragedy. What did that mean?

Jamais vu – French for ‘never seen’ – is the psychological condition where a familiar situation, word or person suddenly seems new or unknown. It’s the opposite of déjà vu (‘already seen’). What was familiar is suddenly strange – and not just a bit strange, but entirely weird. You probably have your own instances. My wife had a conversation with someone who described how they lived ‘with a flat-mate.’ Eliane was baffled: what on earth was a ‘flat mate’? My friend Gill was reading lots of 18^th-century newspapers and only belatedly realised that ‘domestick’ was ‘domestic’, and not ‘dome stick.’

‘Fat Homing’ and ‘flat mate’ and ‘dome stick’ are about words being disaggregated so that the distinct parts make no sense – or rather, have a meaning, but a meaning which seems baffling in terms of the context.

Medical opinion says these flashes happen in moments of tiredness or stress – and I did just have a long flight from Austin to London. Medical opinion also says they are characterised by a ‘false sense of unfamiliarity’, but I’m not sure about that ‘false.’ Amid the discomfort of not knowing, moments of jamais vu also feel like true insights – a sudden uncovering of something strange that was lurking in the word all along; a sense of, for a few seconds, seeing thing as they really are. It doesn’t have to be this way!

It feels as if there is a connection here with the phenomenon of words containing their opposites. Sometimes a word transforms from one meaning to its opposite over time, but for a while the two meanings co-exist. (I’ve often thought about this because a key moment of transition was in the 16^th and 17^th centuries.) So: the word character comes from a notion of marking, writing, engraving (in ancient Greek, χαρακτήρ means die, stamp, impress, engraving tool). In time, the word shifts into a contrasting sense of, not marked surface, but rather something distinctive within – something like inwardness. Shakespeare, characteristically, uses the word in a way that keeps both meanings (roughly: outer and inner) alive – as when, in Hamlet, Claudius worries over Hamlet’s letter telling of his ‘sudden and more strange return’. ‘Know you the hand?’ says Laertes. ‘Tis Hamlet’s character,’ Claudius replies: both his written letters, and his personality.

‘Specious’ is another one: meaning, today, superficially plausible but actually wrong, it comes from the Latin for fair, and in later Middle English meant beautiful. Ditto ‘sophistry’: clever but false arguments, but originating with the Latin sophists, from the Greek sophistēs, meaning, ‘master of one’s craft; a wise or prudent man.’ My favourite appears in Milton’s Areopagitica (1644): ‘It was from out the rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World.’ ‘Cleave’ vibrates with its opposite: clinging to one another in unity, but separating from God in division.

In ‘The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words’ (1910), Freud suggests that ancient languages, particularly ancient Egyptian, used the same word to designate opposites (strong / weak; command / obey). For Freud, this history is mirrored in dreams, where an individual is less worried about maintaining rational binaries, and where ‘the category of contraries and contradictories is … simply disregarded.’ As Freud puts it nicely: ‘the dream-work’s singular tendency to disregard negation.’

‘Fat Homing’ isn’t quite an example of these kinds of opposite. I think its significance is less about collapsing a binary of meaning / opposite (as with cleave), and more about shifting suddenly between order and absurdity. Once I realised my misreading (if we still want to call it that), my reaction was to find it funny, and also joyful – things are only precariously what they are, and a slight interpretative tilt to the left or right, a moment of productive error, and we enter a different, and absurd, order.1

In the mid-1990s I wrote some short stories, and, not knowing quite what to do next, I looked up the names of authors I knew and liked in Who’s Who, found some addresses, and sent copies, asking for feedback. I suppose now I might have signed up for a Creative Writing MFA, but those didn’t really exist outside of a few places I excluded for being impossibly distant (like Iowa) or impossibly competitive (like the University of East Anglia). In any case, I couldn’t afford a course, so I posted out the stories for the price of a stamp.

I think I expected to hear nothing, and soon forgot about my letters. My fiction wasn’t particularly good, and wasn’t going anywhere. But almost everyone replied – some with quite detailed critiques; some with short notes saying they looked forward to reading it in the future; some with lengthy notes reporting that they didn’t have time to look over random manuscripts.

So here are some of the replies, ringing out from 1996 and 1998 – before email was the default mode, and when letters were things that landed on a mat. I’m struck by the generosity of these replies — and the very ordinariness of my fiction makes that even clearer.

(All of the writers are dead now, but I’ve cut off any home addresses.)

One of my stories was about chess. (I played a lot of chess in my youth, and was reading lots of Nabokov at the time.) Here is David Lodge, unable to read a stranger’s submission on ‘the principle of survival & self-preservation’:

And here is Malcolm Bradbury, shifting focus after a quarter of a century:

Beryl Bainbridge did read my story, and sent this back:

A couple of years later, in 1998, I’d finished another story – this one about a bloke called Henry wandering around an airport. Again: not good; nothing really happened; I think I had a sense that nothing really happening was a literary virtue, despite Beryl Bainbridge’s sage advice that ‘plot is everything’. But I’d just read and loved Seamus Deane’s novel Reading in the Dark, so I sent a copy off to him. He replied with amazing fullness.

Even writing to say you haven’t read it is a generosity. Here is Martin Amis doing just that:

And finally, A.S. Byatt — I was obsessed by Possession at the time — writing through her secretary, with a gracious ‘can’t read’, dispatched from France:

The memorial was carved by Sir Francis Chantry in 1834: the extravagant folds of Mary’s dress make it clear this is both a memorial to a young woman (Mary died young after the birth of her 7th child), and a chance for Francis to show off his skills. Death here is like sleep: we die as we nod off with a book in our hands. The hands are the focal point, the left holding the right in place as if to still its progress across the page, and to cover the text. Apart from the four words in black capitals from the Pater Noster, ‘Thy will be done’, the text is signalled by indentations that denote letters but, on closer examination, are illegible.

They are writing-like marks, not writing, and their unreadability keeps us from coming too close, both in terms of the sculpture as a work (so we stand back and observe the whole), and in terms of Mary’s subjectivity (we can no longer share what she has been reading: she is locked out to us).

Some different hands. These belong to biographer Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) in a portrait by Dora Carrington. In fact they are hardly hands at all, more collections of gathered fingers, held in a pose so striking that you feel it must be documentary: the left thumb and forefinger forming a ‘c’, the right fingers resting on the book more than holding it, like sticks or lined up pencils.

Here’s a photograph of him.

We don’t know who took it, but Strachey here is being paradigmaticly Lyttonic: not one but two deckchairs, with a third on standby, and objects (large floppy hat, umbrella) gathered but not used. He’s in the garden of Asheham House, Leonard and Virginia Woolf’s weekend house near Lewes, Sussex, around 1915 – the fingers once again grasping and also framing, holding the magazine as if the pages vibrate and need pinning down.

One consequence of Strachey looking so particular is, ironically, that lots of people look like him. Here is his near double in 1541.

Giovanni della Casa (1503-56) was a Florentine poet and author of the enormously influential conduct book, Il Galateo overo de’ costume (1558). Don’t clip your nails in public; don’t talk about dreams ‘since most dreams are by and large idiotic.’ He’s painted by the Italian Mannerist Jacopo da Pontormo. There are no deckchairs but there is a Strachey-like stretching to everything: the head, the nose, the beard, the body, the hands, even the windows. The book is held close, away from us – we threaten intrusion – and the job of the fingers is to mark where the reading paused, and where it should resume. In fact the fingers register two places in the book, and della Casa – humanist scholar that he was – may have been in the process of comparing different passages. The book is unidentifiable. It’s not Il Galateo, which wasn’t published for another 17 years, but its small format suggests portability and ease of use. Perhaps it’s one of the elegant publications of the Aldine Press in Venice: Aldus Manutius’s publishing house, founded in 1494, became famous for the small ‘handbook’, or enchiridion, from the Greek within (‘en-‘) and hand (‘kheir’), something held and contained within the hand.

What does thought look like? For his 128-screen video work, Solo Scenes (1998), the Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930-98) set up cameras in his house and several studios which recorded hundreds of hours of footage, from 3rd March 1997 to 28th April 1998. The footage captures the artist’s everyday life, while he attempts to recover from alcoholism, in his final year: it is a work of deliberate self-surveillance. Roth sits, sometimes drawing, often reading, or making notes, but also often simply sitting still and staring ahead. He gets up and walks slowly about. He sleeps. He hangs a shirt on a drying rack. He polishes his shoes. He plays the piano and then waters his plants. He sits on the toilet. He calmly turns the pages of the lamp-lit book he is reading.

Is this what late style looks like? Roth’s son and collaborator Björn said Roth ‘was filming himself dying’, and several critics have drawn a connection between Roth’s video diary and Rembrandt’s self-portraits. Roth himself said he was trying to capture an ‘intense Zero-ness’, and as we watch we feel both that nothing is happening, and everything. If this is interiority – if this is an artist’s creativity turning and coiling within – then its power is precisely that it is unreachable. Played out across 128 screens, Roth’s inner life is everywhere, but also beyond us.

I always thought the Roth of this sequence looked uncannily like some representations of St Matthew. Caravaggio (1571-1610) was commissioned to paint canvases depicting Matthew writing his gospel for the Contarelli Chapel in the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome, and produced four paintings which, in the words of one art historian, ‘open his mature period as a religious painter.’1 For the altarpiece, Caravaggio was asked to paint Matthew composing his gospel. His first version, Saint Matthew and the Angel (1602), above, was destroyed by the burning of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin in 1945, but is known today through reproductions. The painting shows a thick-set Matthew, with crossed lumbering legs and eyes staring over the book in apparent bafflement as an angel physically guides his hand across the page – a movement which is, as Irving Lavin has noted, both pedagogical and inspirational2 – to produce a Hebrew script Matthew hardly seems to understand.3 This is a Matthew who seems ‘coarse, low brow’, even if the ‘bowling-ball head’ and ‘stocky gnarled body’ in fact – and ironically – recall the image of Socrates.4 It is an image of the author as cipher, a bulky bodily mass guided by divine powers, of thought passing through, of a writer seemingly unused not only to deep thought, but also to the very weight of a book in his hands. Art historians have long loved what they call Caravaggio’s ‘revolutionary naturalism and proletarian’ sympathies,5 but the canons of San Luigi hated the painting. ‘The figure had neither decorum nor the aspect of a saint ... his feet crudely exposed to the public’6 – and the painting was rejected. Caravaggio produced a second, more refined depiction, The Inspiration of St Matthew (1602), more consistent with his other canvases of Matthew, and this painting resides in the chapel today.

Sunday 5 January Setting up google spreadsheet for recording what I’m doing at 5.35pm.

Monday 6 January On northern line to dinner and art opening.

Tuesday 7 January In Cork and Bottle, Leicester Square, paying bill for red wine and pitta.

Wednesday 8 January Reading Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë and drinking tea at home.

Thursday 9 January Reading Lucy Lippard’s The Dematerialisation of the Art Object, at home.

Friday 10 January On train pulling into Marylebone.

Saturday 11 January Arriving at You Me Bum Bum Train venue.

Sunday 12 January Watching Arsenal vs Man united on tv.

Monday 13 January Helping Anna with her maths homework.

Tuesday 14 January Having wine in bar of Oxford and Cambridge Club.

Wednesday 15 January Reading Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings with cup of tea.

Thursday 16 January Walking through Marston on the way to Elsfield.

Friday 17 January On packed train from Oxford to Marylebone.

Saturday 18 January Reading Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy on northern line.

Sunday 19 January Warming up gumbo.

Monday 20 January Making leeks vinaigrette.

Tuesday 21 January Listening to Dr. Harry McCarthy give lecture on early modern boy actors and race.

Wednesday 22 January On train from Oxford to Marylebone assessing research applications to Balliol College.

Thursday 23 January Cooking burgers for dinner.

Friday 24 January In Cork and Bottle wine bar eating pitta bread with red wine.

Saturday 25 January Watching Traitors with Anna and Ezra.

Sunday 26 January Reading PhD on 17th-century anti-semitism for a viva next week.

Monday 27 January Laying the table for dinner.

Tuesday 28 January On northern line to Tottenham Court Road.

Wednesday 29 January Reading student’s PhD chapter on train approaching Marylebone.

Thursday 30 January Doing emails with cup of tea.

Friday 31 January In a PhD supervision with student.

Saturday 1 February Talking with Ben, Eliane and Jacob about hypnosis.

Sunday 2 February Collecting car battery and jump leads from Rob.

Monday 3 February Making mashed potato.

Tuesday 4 February Listening to talk by Professor Kevin Killeen on poetry and uncertainty.

Wednesday 5 February On Bakerloo line between Paddington and Edgware Road.

Thursday 6 February Listening to lecture by Professor Leah Price on domestic reading.

Friday 7 February Cycling home in rain.

Saturday 8 February Proof reading Inscription volume 5.

Sunday 9 February Returning from birthdat party bowling with Anna and 9 friends.

Monday 10 February Writing quiz for Anna’s birthday.

Tuesday 11 February Drinking coke in kitchen.

Wednesday 12 February Reading Miranda July’s On All Fours on train approaching Marylebone.

Thursday 13 February Talking to Anna’s drama teacher at parents evening.

Friday 14 February Drinking wine and reading menu at pub in Marylebone.

Saturday 15 February Having cup of tea in room in Imperial Hotel, Blackpool.

Sunday 16 February Walking past North pier on Blackpool seafront.

Monday 17 February Eating wraps at home.

Tuesday 18 February Talking to Siobhan about teaching.

Wednesday 19 February Doing emails in office.

Thursday 20 February Making tea.

Friday 21 February Reading PhD thesis on train.

Saturday 22 February On beach at Whitstable.

Sunday 23 February Driving Anna to Edie’s.

Monday 24 February Editing friend’s research proposal.

Tuesday 25 February Cooking pork noodles.

Wednesday 26 February Reading PhD for viva in train.

Thursday 27 February Waiting at Oxford station.

Friday 28 February Walking along northern line platform at Kings Cross Station.

Saturday 1 March Entering Tufnell Park underground station.

Sunday 2 March Working out karaoke settings on Spotify.

Monday 3 March Writing notes on index cards.

Tuesday 4 March Listening to lecture by Professor Gill Woods on theatrical dumb-shows.

Wednesday 5 March Marking essays on tragedy in train pulling in to Marylebone.

Thursday 6 March Listening to lecture by Dr Melanie Bigold on 18th-century women book collectors.

Friday 7 March On train from Oxford to Marylebone.

Saturday 8 March Putting out cheeseboard.

Sunday 9 March Listening to Arsenal play Manchester United on radio.

Monday 10 March On underground at St John’s Wood.

Tuesday 11 March Backstage before performance of You Me Bum Bum Train.

Wednesday 12 March In meeting at school about Anna’s football trip to Holland.

Thursday 13 March Walking to Tufnell Park tube.

Friday 14 March On train pulling into Marylebone station.

Saturday 15 March Having a drink in Cork and Bottle wine bar.

Sunday 16 March Reading about art history.

Monday 17 March On train pulling into Marylebone.

Tuesday 18 March On tube at Mornington Crescent.

Wednesday 19 March Watching Anna play football in the school team.

Thursday 20 March Visiting exhibition on Lewis Caroll at Christ Church Oxford.

Friday 21 March On tube at Euston.

Saturday 22 March Making beef wellington with Ezra and Anna.

Sunday 23 March Reading Akenfield by Ronald Blythe.

Monday 24 March Reading The Hole by NF Simpson.

Tuesday 25 March Texting Eliane.

Wednesday 26 March Having dinner with Anna.

Thursday 27 March Walking to Ezra’s school parents evening.

Friday 28 March Having glass of wine in Nell Gwynn pub, Covent Garden.

Saturday 29 March Playing cricket with Eliane, Anna and Ezra.

Sunday 30 March Walking back from seeing off Kathy at Kentish Town tube.

Monday 31 March Listening to Anna saying ‘your alarm is going off!’

Tuesday 1 April On Northern Line with Eliane.

Wednesday 2 April Making chorizo and beans for dinner.

Thursday 3 April Making a salad.

Friday 4 April Having pavement drinks with neighbours.

Saturday 5 April Scraping peanuts into a pan for noodle sauce.

Sunday 6 April Drinking tea and talking to mum.

Monday 7 April Making wraps for Ezra and me.

Tuesday 8 April Eating chicken pie with Ezra.

Wednesday 9 April Eating chicken pie with Ezra and Eliane.

Thursday 10 April Buying coffee beans on Monmouth Street.

Friday 11 April Asleep.

Saturday 12 April Writing a story on laptop.

Sunday 13 April Making dinner of meat balls and rice.

Monday 14 April Booking a haircut.

Tuesday 15 April Making hot dogs for Anna and Ezra.

Wednesday 16 April Talking at kitchen table with Katherine and Nick.

Thursday 17 April Editing The Hole by NF Simpson for amateur village production in the summer.

Friday 18 April Walking up stairs to bedroom to have nap.

Saturday 19 April Walking through Elsfield listening to Daft Punk.

Sunday 20 April Cooking sausages.

Monday 21 April Reading Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume.

Tuesday 22 April Taking Ezra to Camden Youth Theatre.

Wednesday 23 April On northern line to Tottenham Court Road.

Thursday 24 April Getting off tube at Tottenham Court Road.

Friday 25 April Getting on Elizabeth Line at Tottenham Court Road.

Saturday 26 April Walking over bridge with Eliane.

Sunday 27 April Reading Solvej Balle’s On The Calculation Of Volume.

Monday 28 April Marking student essay on John Lyly on the train.

Tuesday 29 April Turning off phone alarm in lecture by Professor Leah Price.

Wednesday 30 April Waiting at lights with Ezra at Tufnell Park.

Thursday 1 May Listening to Professor Leah Price lecture on servants and books.

Friday 2 May On bus to meet Molly at the Edinboro Castle, Camden.

Saturday 3 May Reading On the Calculatoon of Volume, volume 2, by Salvoj Balle.

Sunday 4 May Making mushroom sauce.

Monday 5 May Having a bath.

Tuesday 6 May On train pulling into Marylebone.

Wednesday 7 May Reading Joanna Trollope’s A Village Affair.

Thursday 8 May Chairing panel discussion on the antiquarian book trade.

Friday 9 May Sleeping.

Saturday 10 May On underground to Tottenham Court Road.

Sunday 11 May Sorting out recycling.

Monday 12 May Writing a text message to Emma.

Tuesday 13 May Watching Anna at football trials.

Wednesday 14 May Setting up launch party for Inscription 5 at Senate House.

Thursday 15 May Taking to Eliane in secret garden behind Phoenix Theatre.

Friday 16 May Boarding Kings Cross train to Cambridge with Eliane.

Saturday 17 May Buying coffee at Monmouth in Covent Garden.

Sunday 18 May Walking with Ezra eating an ice cream.

Monday 19 May Cycling past Gospel Oak station.

Tuesday 20 May Walking on Hampstead Heath.

Wednesday 21 May Listening to lecture by Michael Robb on book selling.

Thursday 22 May Talking about Romeo and Juliet Globe performance with students in pub.

Friday 23 May On Northern Line with Eliane.

Saturday 24 May Eating boiled beef and schnitzel in Cafe Korb, Vienna.

Sunday 25 May Listening to overture to Tannhauser with Eliane at Vienna State Opera.

Monday 26 May In rooftop pool in Hoxton Hotel, Vienna.

Tuesday 27 May Walking along Weiburg-Gasse, Vienna, with Eliane.

Wednesday 28 May Talking to Eliane.

Thursday 29 May Listening to Dr. Paul Nash lecture on 15th-century printing.

Friday 30 May Watching Anna and Ezra swimming.

Saturday 31 May Drinking Prosecco with Tom and Siobhan.

Sunday 1 June Walking home with shopping (tin of tomatoes, pasta, lettuce).

Monday 2 June Cycling along Parkhill Road.

Tuesday 3 June Crossing road at Tufnell Park.

Wednesday 4 June Ordering curry.

Thursday 5 June Eating curry with Ezra.

Friday 6 June Having drinks in garden with Eva and Eliane.

Saturday 7 June Reading about the artist Richard Wright.

Sunday 8 June Helping Anna find wrapping paper.

Monday 9 June Cycling past Regents Park.

Tuesday 10 June Talking to Eliane.

Wednesday 11 June Cycling home.

Thursday 12 June On train to Finchley Road.

Friday 13 June Eating noodles with Tom in Soho

Saturday 14 June Having drink in Southampton Arms with Dennis.

Sunday 15 June Having wine and crisps in garden.

Monday 16 June Having drink with Abigail in Kings Arms.

Tuesday 17 June In online meeting with neighbours.

Wednesday 18 June Talking to Ezra about woodwork.

Thursday 19 June In exam board meeting at Cambridge University.

Friday 20 June Pavement drinks with neighbours.

Saturday 21 June Driving to Phoenix cinema in Oxford.

Sunday 22 June Reading PhD chapter on Catholic poetry.

Monday 23 June Unpacking food shopping.

Tuesday 24 June Talking to Ezra.

Wednesday 25 June Talking to Eliane in the Dartmouth Arms.

Thursday 26 June Warming up macaroni cheese.

Friday 27 June On train to Winchmore Hill.

Saturday 28 June Dancing at the Scala.

Sunday 29 June Talking to Nathalie outside The Chesterfield Arms.

Monday 30 June Eating hoisin duck wrap at Paddington station.

Tuesday 1 July On train to Paddington.

Wednesday 2 July Talking to Anna in the kitchen.

Thursday 3 July Talking to Ezra about his brass band performance.

Friday 4 July Listening to Eliane talk on phone about this evening’s plans.

Saturday 5 July Trying to do salsa dancing at street fair.

Sunday 6 July Looking up used second-hand diaries from the 1920s on eBay.

Monday 7 July Reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Tuesday 8 July Having drink with Eleanor at The Turf.

Wednesday 9 July On train passing High Wycombe.

Thursday 10 July Walking to Dartmouth Arms with James.

Friday 11 July Watching end of year prize presentations at Acland Burghley School.

Saturday 12 July Sitting talking on Hampstead Heath with Molly and Eliane.

Sunday 13 July Reading Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas on Hampstead Heath.

Monday 14 July Checking route to the O2 arena.

Tuesday 15 July Talking to Gill in kitchen about next issue of Inscription.

Wednesday 16 July Making haloumi burgers.

Thursday 17 July On number 4 bus approaching Holloway Road listening to Fleetwood Mac’s ‘The Chain’.

Friday 18 July Making noodles.

Saturday 19 July Saying hello to Naomi.

Sunday 20 July In passport control queue at Olbia airport, Sardinia.

Monday 21 July Packing up travel scrabble.

Tuesday 22 July Reading Iris Murdoch’s The Sandcastle on the beach.

Wednesday 23 July Watching Anna doing handstands in the sea.

Thursday 24 July Playing table tennis with Anna.

Friday 25 July Walking with Ezra, Eliane and Anna towards Spiaggia Cala Brandinchi bus stop.

Saturday 26 July Eating watermelon with Eliane, Ezra and Anna.

Sunday 27 July Watching Anna pretend to cook chicken wings on the beach.

Monday 28 July Sitting by the pool reading DH Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia.

Tuesday 29 July Sitting by pool trying to settle argument between Ezra and Anna over headphones.

Wednesday 30 July Reading DH Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia by the pool.

Thursday 31 July Unpacking suitcase.

Friday 1 August Emptying towels from the washing machine.

Saturday 2 August Making tomato sauce for pizzas.

Sunday 3 August Reading Frances Wilson’s biography of Thomas De Quincey.

Monday 4 August Driving on M40 towards London.

Tuesday 5 August Lying in hospital bed, talking with Eliane.

Wednesday 6 August Listening to audiobook of Williams Wordsworth’s The Prelude.

Thursday 7 August Asleep.

Friday 8 August Reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library.

Saturday 9 August Helping Ezra write out pool cleaning instructions.

Sunday 10 August Sitting in garden drinking tea listening to audiobook of the Diaries of Chips Channon.

Monday 11 August Watching Adam Curtis’s ‘Shifty’.

Tuesday 12 August Listening to Chappell Roan’s “Good luck, babe!’

Wednesday 13 August Reversing in car with Eliane.

Thursday 14 August Reading Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming Pool Library.

Friday 15 August Talking to Dan and Zoe and Eliane about naps.

Saturday 16 August Making dinner with Anna.

Sunday 17 August Talking to Ezra.

Monday 18 August Reading Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner in bed.

Tuesday 19 August Asleep.

Wednesday 20 August Asleep.

Thursday 21 August Trying and failing to log on to Gmail.

Friday 22 August Pouring wine in the garden for Eliane.

Saturday 23 August Reading Yellow Face by Rebecca F. Kuang.

Sunday 24 August Asleep.

Monday 25 August Reading final page of Yellow Face by Rebecca F. Kuang.

Tuesday 26 August Driving with Eliane towards Elsfield.

Wednesday 27 August Watching The White Lotus series 3 on laptop in bed.

Thursday 28 August Asleep.

Friday 29 August Walking in Woodeaton Woods listening to Billie Eilish.

Saturday 30 August Asleep.

Sunday 31 August Watching Arsenal versus Liverpool.

Monday 1 September Helping Ezra and Anna buy school stationery in WHSmiths.

Tuesday 2 September Drinking cup of tea.

Wednesday 3 September Lying on the bed.

Thursday 4 September Writing a Substack post about learning about art with Simon Morris.

Friday 5 September Reading the Guardian.

Saturday 6 September Trying to work out how to get the TV working with Ezra.

Sunday 7 September Listening to radio in bed.

Monday 8 September On Northern Line pulling into Kentish Town.

Tuesday 9 September Unpacking dishwasher.

Wednesday 10 September Walking towards Covent Garden in rain.

Thursday 11 September Talking to Eliane about our days.

Friday 12 September Reading James Hogg’s Private Confessions of a Justified Sinner.

Saturday 13 September Drinking beer in kitchen.

Sunday 14 September Walking on Hampstead Heath.

Monday 15 September Listening to talk about Ezra’s Athens trip at school.

Tuesday 16 September Making lasagna.

Wednesday 17 September Talking to Anna about woodwork.

Thursday 18 September Eating Sri Lanka food with Eliane and Naomi.

Friday 19 September Dancing with Ezra and Anna in the Dartmouth Arms.

Saturday 20 September Reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s A Man In Love on the sofa.

Sunday 21 September Watching Arsenal vs Manchester City on tv.

Monday 22 September Spreading dozens of bagels with cream cheese.

Tuesday 23 September Helping Anna with her maths homework.

Wednesday 24 September Frying mushrooms.

Thursday 25 September Reading the Guardian in bed.

Friday 26 September Playing book game on WhatsApp with Dennis, Chloe, Sophie, Minnie, Larushka, Ollivia, Sarah.

Saturday 27 September Eating smoked salmon and cheese at Mum’s house, Whitstable.

Sunday 28 September Editing video of Abigail reading Rousseau.

Monday 29 September Listening to Anna’s Year 9 information evening at school.

Tuesday 30 September Walking on Hampstead Heath listening to Three Bean Salad podcast.

Wednesday 1 October Walking on Hampstead Heath listening to Three Bean Salad podcast.

Thursday 2 October Trying to work out how to use Google Calendar.

Friday 3 October Ordering Chinese food in Islington with Ezra.

Saturday 4 October Looking at Renato Guytuso’s ‘Death of a Hero’ at the Estorick Colection.

Sunday 5 October Editing chapter of novel in bed.

Monday 6 October Reading Emma Smith’s ‘Who wrote Pericles?’ in Victoria Embankment Gardens.

Tuesday 7 October Walking upstairs to turn the bath off.

Wednesday 8 October Making chilli.

Thursday 9 October Looking at London Bridge.

Friday 10 October Talking to Sajid in Whitehall pub.

Saturday 11 October Talking to Dan and Zoe about quinces.

Sunday 12 October Walking on Hampstead Heath with Eliane.

Monday 13 October Checking messages on phone.

Tuesday 14 October Reading emails on phone.

Wednesday 15 October Talking to Laurence and Matthew about Barbara Cartland.

Thursday 16 October In queue with Anna in pharmacy at Royal Free Hospital.

Friday 17 October Watching Inside No. 9 on tv with Ezra.

Saturday 18 October Looking at contents page of London Review of Books.

Sunday 19 October Eating apple pecan cake with Delilah and Eliane.

Monday 20 October Arriving at Charing Cross on Northern Line.

Tuesday 21 October Reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in bed.

Wednesday 22 October Reversing car.

Thursday 23 October Drinking tea with Tom.

Friday 24 October Making potato curry.

Saturday 25 October Helping Anna work out how to sell something on Vinted.

Sunday 26 October Having bath while watching World at War episode 2 (1939-40) on laptop.

Monday 27 October Talking to Siobhan about sciatica.

Tuesday 28 October Reading Chris Krauss’ I Love Dick in bed.

Wednesday 29 October Reading Chris Krauss’ I Love Dick in bed.

Thursday 30 October Arriving on bike at Mansfield College, Oxford.

Friday 31 October Talking to Eliane about my conversation with Oliver.

Saturday 1 November Asleep.

Sunday 2 November Reading Karl Ove Knaussgard’s A Death in the Family.

Monday 3 November Talking with Ezra and Minnie about diaries.

Tuesday 4 November Roasting a chicken.

Wednesday 5 November Talking to Ezra and Eliane about making a stand for the television.

Thursday 6 November Talking to Eliane about prostate cancer.

Friday 7 November Trying to find the green beans.

Saturday 8 November On a zoom meeting talking about gardening.

Sunday 9 November On the Northern line with Eliane, Ezra and Anna.

Monday 10 November Making cup of tea.

Tuesday 11 November Listening to online lecture about literary archives by Joan Winterkorn.

Wednesday 12 November Frying halloumi.

Thursday 13 November Reading the Guardian on the sofa.

Friday 14 November Doing leg stretches on the bed.

Saturday 15 November Coming down the stairs.

Sunday 16 November Watching The World at War (episode 6 - Pearl Harbour).

Monday 17 November Watching The World at War (episode 8 - The Desert)

Tuesday 18 November Drafting a letter to former subscribers to the journal Inscription, asking them to buy edition six.

Wednesday 19 November Watching The World at War (episode 13 - Italy)

Thursday 20 November Driving through central London.

Friday 21 November Working out which film to watch with Ezra and Anna.

Saturday 22 November Reading Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Funeral Rites’.

Sunday 23 November Talking to Danya and Thomas, in Danya’s kitchen, about Caravaggio.

Monday 24 November Talking to Jerome, in Manchester wine bar, about Andy’s death.

Tuesday 25 November Getting out of the shower.

Wednesday 26 November Exporting short film about Rousseau from CapCut.

Thursday 27 November Testing projector in Keynes Library, Birkbeck, with Sue and Joe.

Friday 28 November Playing the book game on WhatsApp with Sarah, Dennis, Piers, Gill, Chloe, and Sophie.

Saturday 29 November Looking at coats for Ezra and Anna in UNIQLO.

Sunday 30 November Running the bath.

Monday 1 December In Waitrose buying wine.

Tuesday 2 December Frying chicken.

Wednesday 3 December Putting coat on.

Thursday 4 December Watching Ashes cricket highlights on TV.

Friday 5 December In bed listening to accidental ASMR.

Saturday 6 December Reading EM Forster’s Howards End.

Sunday 7 December In Porchester spa steam room.

Monday 8 December In Oxford admissions meeting.

Tuesday 9 December In Oxford admissions meeting.

Wednesday 10 December Grating cheese.

Thursday 11 December Listening to lecture about Samuel Pepys’s 19th-century editors by Professor Kate Loveman.

Friday 12 December Reading about conceptual art while listening to Aretha Franklin.

Saturday 13 December Reading EM Forster’s Howards End while listening to Burnley vs Fulham.

Sunday 14 December Eating bagels.

Monday 15 December Writing peer review report on article about Pericles and coasts.

Tuesday 16 December Reading The Book Collector in the London Library.

Wednesday 17 December Drinking Martini at the Langham Hotel bar with Eliane and Naomi.

Thursday 18 December Putting jeans on.

Friday 19 December Making cous cous listening to ‘Taxes’ by Geese.

Saturday 20 December Trying to work out how Anna can be picked up later from Juno’s house.

Sunday 21 December Walking through Woolwich.

Monday 22 December Eating mince pies in kitchen with Eliane, Larushka, Tom, Lottie and Horatio.

Tuesday 23 December Pulling suitcase through Whitstable.

Wednesday 24 December Driving into Whitstable with Eliane.

Thursday 25 December Reading the Adelphi Magazine from 1923.

Friday 26 December Reading EM Forster’s Howards End.

Saturday 27 December Reading EM Forster’s Howards End.

Sunday 28 December Making tea.

Monday 29 December Cleaning ink off printing press.

Tuesday 30 December Stroking Crab.

Wednesday 31 December Collecting fire wood.

Thursday 1 January In bed reading messages on phone.

Friday 2 January Playing book game on WhatsApp with Dennis, Sarah, Gill, Chloe and Piers.

Saturday 3 January In meeting with neighbours talking about fixing the gate.

Sunday 4 January Reading LP Hartley’s The Go-Between in bed.

Monday 5 January Talking to Eva about Crab.

Photocopiers and home printers produce these little aleatory alignments all the time. Is there a relationship here between each side? Not meaningfully in terms of content, however tempting it is to draw a thread between Krauss’ ‘The State of Criticism’ and punchy declarations like ‘wheel trim is missing’. But there must be a link in terms of time and place: one of these texts was lying around and unwanted when the other needed copying, or printing out.

My grandfather had an aversion to any kind of waste and for him paper was always two-sided. In the plastic bags he left behind on his death are many instances of this kind of recycling-as-doubleness. He had a particular habit of drafting poetry on the reverse of dust jackets (to which he had a curious and never fully explained aversion), and also on the pieces of everyday print that fluttered through Kent in the 1930s and 1940s. Here are some twins:

One of the effects of these doubles is to draw out our intellectual or aesthetic or ethical priorities: do you see a cover to Austen’s novel which, incidentally, carries the draft of some unpublished lines; or is this a document of amateur mid-century poetic taste, by chance written on an unwanted scrap of print? Can we read both sides without imposing a sense of hierarchy? Where would these pages go in an archive?

Verses drafted on the back of – for example – a ticket to a Social Evening at St Mary’s Hall, Westerham, are similar to Emily Dickinson’s much-discussed poems written on the reverse of used envelopes. Not only is there is a recycling of already-used paper, but also, and more fundamentally, a sense of poems as in the first instance shapes – the (often unusual) form of the reused page informing the poetic choices of the writer, including line and verse length.

The starkly simple fact that paper has two sides (rather than surface and depth) has consequences for writing and reading that I don’t think have been fully explored. We probably become most aware of these two sides in instances of bleedthrough – when the ink from one side is visible on the other. Here’s an example from 425 years ago, a collection of dialogues called The wil of wit, wits will, or wils wit, compiled by the prolific but now rarely-discussed author Nicholas Breton. It was printed in 1606 under the command of publisher Thomas Creede, but whoever Creede had inking the type and pulling the press grew repeatedly over-exuberant and there are a number of instances in the copy at the Huntington Library, California, where we can see what we shouldn’t.

These are two sides of a single leaf. The page on the left – the penultimate page of an exchange between ‘The Scholar and the Solider’ – becomes in places illegible because the ink-heavy setting on the other side of the leaf (right) seeps through. We can see this best with the word ‘FINIS’, trimly definitive and appropriately located on the right, but hovering, reversed and clustered but just about legible, on the left. The effect is of an imminent ending: of an ending approaching around the corner, noisily. It’s a product of the two temporal orders of the leaf: the two sides are simultaneous (they are both there at the same time), but also sequential (we read one and then the other), and the collision between these two orders creates the sense of an untimely intrusion. In moments of bleedthrough we can nearly but not quite achieve the impossible feat of reading two sides of paper at once.

One is a copy of John Carey’s memoir, The Unexpected Professor, published in 2014 by Faber.

Carey was the Merton Professor in Literature at Oxford University – a super distinguished post – and wrote a book about John Donne that still shapes my undergraduates’ essays to this day. But I liked him best as the punchy, black-turtle-neck bedecked pundit on BBC2’s The Late Review in the 1990s. I loved watching Carey lock horns with Mark Lawson, Allison Pearson, Ekow Eshun, Germaine Greer, Tom Paulin, and Tony Parsons – discussing everything from (recalling the conversations I remember most vividly) Samual Beckett’s Endgame, Edie Izzard’s stand-up, REM’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi.

In April 2016, I interviewed Carey about his memoir at Hollywell Manor in Oxford, as part of a literary festival. He inscribed the copy of his book I’d brought along, before saying – with apologies – he had to hurry home to look after his beehives.

The second is a copy of London: A Pilgrimage, a teeming evocation of the capital written by the journalist Willaim Blanchard Jerrold, with illustrations by Gustave Doré – a very hot, and very well renumerated artist in 1872, when it was originally published in 13 parts.

My copy is a paperback published by Anthem Press in 2005. It was given to me by Andy Gordon in what must have been about January 2007. I’d just left New York for good after 3 years, and was back in London, trying to work out what next. I didn’t have anywhere to live, and everything seemed to have come apart. I met Andy for a drink, probably at Bradley’s on Hanway Street, just off Oxford Street – we went there a lot around this time – and he gave me this book with an inscription welcoming me back and, with his signature light touch, telling me things would be okay.

Andy died on 28 October 2025, at the age of 56. He was Professor of Renaissance Literature and Culture at Aberdeen University. He wrote books and articles about 16^th and 17^th century letters, memory, autobiography, maps, space, walking, and London. Of all my friends, he knew London best: I can see him now in my mind’s eye, fast-walking his way along the Thames Path, passing London Bridge, early evening and the lights coming on, Andy talking and laughing and looking east as the river bends towards Wapping.

What do we see in Albert Bartholomé’s pastel and charcoal ‘The Artist’s Wife Reading’ (1883)? Here is Périe Bartholomé, reclining in a scene of comfortable and affluent domesticity: chaise longue, book, flowers, jewelled rings, gilt-framed mirror, the shelf of other volumes suggesting a process of reading that could go on and on. This is part portrait, part still-life. Périe – youthful and beautiful, here – died four years later, aged 38. Bartholomé renounced painting and dedicated the next two years to sculpting Périe’s tomb at Bouillant cemetery, near Crépy-en-Valois – the first mournful step in an ultimately highly successful late sculptural career, encouraged by his friend Degas. With this hindsight – with death just around the corner – we probably pause over Périe’s black dress and gloves, and her recumbent, proleptically tomb-like pose; the mirror and flowers quietly suggest a vanitas tradition that warns us that all earthly things will pass.

What absorbs Périe in the living present is reading – the white square of a book is the gravitational centre of the composition – and the picture conveys, in its mixture of stasis and carrying away, the sense of Périe’s mind transported: the place of reading, here, is less a comfortable domestic interior but some other site entirely, unreachable to us. What does her mind’s eye see? Where is she? What is both central and also curiously easy to miss is precisely the illegibility of the page, striking (once we clock it) in a scene of carefully rendered realism. What enthrals Périe appears to us as something like redacted text, or a mocked-up book, or a series of pastel brown lines that refuse to signify, or that signify something other than words on a page.

Why can’t we read what Périe can read? Why, in so many paintings of readers, is reading conveyed by an unreadable page? Think Renoir’s portrait of Monet (1872), pipe in hand and absorbed in a book with text suggested only by a darker central square.

Or Egon Schiele’s portrait of industrialist and book collector Hugo Koller, the pages bearing something that may be text or image or a hybrid of the two (1918):

Or Fragonard’s ‘Young Girl Reading’ (ca. 1769); or Tamara de Lempicka’s ‘Kizette in Pink’ (1927).

In The Look of Reading: Book, Painting, Text (2006), Garrett Stewart suggests that illegible pages testify to the book’s ‘unpicturable receipt by the reader’s visible figure’: the block of darkened space standing in for, and, crucially, standing in the way of our comprehending the experience of someone else taking in words. By the time Albert Bartholomé was painting, immersive reading was the sign of deep human subjectivity: it marked us out, in an age of industrialisation, as thinking, feeling subjects. Périe’s inner life is guaranteed by the illegibility of her text, and what Stewart calls the ‘recessional structure’ of paintings of readers (we look at someone looking at a book) locks us out to preserve this depth. Of course to observe someone else reading – in real life, or in a painting – is often a pleasing and comforting sight. But to watch the reclining Périe Bartholomé read is also – to borrow the words of Jeff Dolven and Sean Keilen in a 2010 essay on Shakespeare’s reading – ‘to be forcefully reminded of everything we cannot know about another mind.’

In September 2025, I invited friends and family members to record themselves reading a 20-second passage from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). I collected these clips, and edited them into two short films.

This was the passage from Rousseau:

I have studied mankind and know my heart; I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence; if not better, I at least claim originality, and whether Nature has acted rightly or wrongly in destroying the mould in which she cast me, can only be decided after I have been read.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) is an account of the first fifty-three years of his life, up to 1765, describing his experiences from humble childhood in Geneva to international fame. It is full of factual errors: Rousseau breezily admitted that his memory often failed him, and that the dates are often muddled, and that he transposed lots of the events. But none of this really bothered him. His aim was not to write a correct history of what he’d done. His aim, Rousseau wrote, ‘is to communicate an exact knowledge of what I interiorly am … to enter into my own heart.’ The epigraph to Rousseau’s Confessions is the Latin ‘Intus et in cute’ – ‘inside and under the skin.’ The reader, Rousseau writes, ‘must follow me …into every recess of my life’. ‘I must be continually present to his gaze … he must not lose sight of me for a moment.’

The sentence I asked people to read captures Rousseau’s sense that he is unique: that no one else is like him. But a sense of singularity, of being apart, is an experience that everyone feels. Rousseau is both an individual set apart from what he calls the ‘numberless legion’; but he also speaks for everyone. ‘I at least claim originality’, Rousseau writes; but one of the early meanings of ‘original’ was something which serves as a model, or, something from which copies can be made: at the heart of originality is the potential for duplication, for the production of copies, of lots of things which all look original. Rousseau ends the passage by saying he was cast from a mould, which is fascinating: he is ‘made’, pressed out of ‘mould’, like a pot on a shelf, cast in a production line. But the mould is broken in the process, meaning we can’t make any more.

I asked people to read the text into an iPhone, or similar, and to send it to me. I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do with it, but the idea of lots of people repeating the same claim to singularity seemed interesting. I asked each reader – in a gesture at the 18^th century – to wear a white cravat or fichu: this usually meant a white napkin, pillowcase, dish cloth, or even paper towel.

At first, I asked people close to me – the project was in part about documenting my community in the autumn of 2025 – but soon the invitation spread, people sent it on to other people (tutors to students, friends to relatives), and I began to receive 20-second film clips from individuals I’d never met, from the UK, and abroad: Ottowa, New York, Cardiff, Winnipeg, Washington State, rural Virginia, Madrid, Montreal, Paris, Los Angles.

It was so enjoyable, each day having 3 or 4 film clips pinging into my inbox, sometimes in different languages. I still wasn’t sure what would emerge, but the process of putting each clip into a series made me think about other art works I enjoyed that had a similar mix of repetition and difference. Like Christian Marclay’s 2010 work The Clock, a 24-hour collage of moments in films when the time is spoken or told, organised so that the time in the clip on screen matches the time of our watching. Or the 24-hour video to Pharrell Williams’s ‘Happy’, which loops one infectious 3-minute pop song across a whole day, each repetition showing a different person in a different place dancing to the same tune. Or Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself, made for the Venice Biennale in 2007, in which French artist Calle, after receiving a break-up email ending with the words ‘take care of yourself’, asked 107 women to respond to it: ‘To analyze it,’ in Calle’s words, ‘comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Exhaust it.’

When happens, when a claim to singularity is repeated over and over? Is it undermined? Is it magically refreshed each time? Or is what we experience a shared sense of being unique?

One effect of the repetition is that as we watch the series of readings, we become hyper alert to differences between clips – we become close readers, attentive to shifts in accent, emphasis, a word missed out, the repressed laughter on a speaker’s face – and in that sense, individuality emerges in the gaps between each performance. As we watch, our attention starts to drift away from the spoken words and on to the person’s face, their clothes, their glasses, the dog in their lap, the book-shelves behind them, the glimpse of a city out the window, the tattoos on their arm, the buffeting wind, the cat stalking unseen beneath the speaker’s chair. If there’s a sense of individuality, here, maybe it’s less in Rousseau’s bold words about singularity, and more in the messy surround – the contingent stuff of a particular time and a place – that gets scooped up and recorded along the way.

The film exists in two states. At the top of this message is the shorter version, in 3 parts: part one, about 9 minutes, featuring a small sample of those clips, back-to-back; part two (about a minute), which re-edits elements of those speeches; and then part three (about three minutes), which is my favourite.

The full film of everyone who submitted a clip – that’s about 120 people – is on YouTube. You can view it here. It’s for the completionists.

The name H ____ is written neatly on the fly leaf of each volume, along with an address on Piedmont Avenue, then (in 1953) on Telegraph Avenue, then (in 1957) on San Luis Road, and then, from 1959, Telegraph Avenue once again.

Almost all of the pages contain some kind of handwritten record. The handwriting is often illegible, or scarcely legible, and the impression is of notes made at speed with no concession to a future reader beyond the author himself. The overwhelming majority of these notes are surnames of clients, written against times of the day: Bradbury, Cann, Unwin, Davies, Mival, Lam. These names form the core of the 1950 diary. Progressing from volume to volume, particular names grow familiar, and then stop, and new ones appear: Ward, Ayres, Mayberry, Jones. Appointments tend to take place Tuesday to Saturday, although in later years Monday is used, too. In 1955 H tends to keep Wednesdays free. Appointments fall between 8am and 7.30pm. A busy day has 5; many days have 1 or 2; occasionally there are none. Sunday is always free. Client names are generally written in pencil, often supplemented with a neat cross (before) or tick (after) or (from July 1952) an inked asterisk, indicating, perhaps, attendance or payment. First and final appointments are noted (8 May 1953, 8am: Lloyd ‘last time’). The final page of each diary contains full names, addresses and telephone numbers of clients.

H is punctilious in recording non-attendance:

‘missed, no notification’; ‘cancelled on 30 min notice’; ‘on vacation’; ‘no phone call’; ‘didn’t phone’; ‘didn’t come’; ‘no show’; ‘missed appointment, but no notice’; ‘late cancellation’; ‘late call’; ‘overslept’; ‘cancelled at 4:20 because couldn’t get car from garage’; ‘just didn’t come’; ‘missed !!!’.

There are few records of costs although on 25 February, Unwin’s 10am appointment has the note: ‘cancelled because car trouble $5.00’, and some pages contain arithmetic which looks like money worries. A number of notes refer to the process of diary-keeping, particularly when noting has become problematic: ‘Book not [here] noted later from memory’; ‘No contemporary notation’; ‘o = retrospectively noted’.

The diary is in general characterised by haste, regularity, and reticence. It’s easy to describe it as unyielding, but that’s to import inappropriate expectations of candour: these volumes constitute the bureaucratic scaffolding around a series of professional interactions. But within this scaffolding there are moments, particularly in later volumes, when H writes short, delphic notes about his clients. A vignette opens before us, and we can briefly draw closer to something like a person. Here is one note, from 1 August 1953, relating to client French:

‘French – flunked like sch test. Gen. resistance – silly, nthg to say’.

What we read here is I think not H’s judgement, but a brief excerpt from French’s account of herself: H here is like an audience member at a theatre, scribbling a line spoken by an actor in his notebook. There was a moment – a few seconds in 1953 – when French described herself in these self-trivializing words. I’m silly. I’ve nothing to say.

There are other notes, for clients O’Brien, Cook, David, Parker, McCoy and Simon (1953-8):

‘O’Brien – General parasite – No MA thesis. Catholic bro younger, Explotive [sic] living– a girl, her ear. Draft — guilt. Takes sick leave from work’

‘Cook – has broken from g.f. New girl – really clear that sister enters into sex

inhibitions’

‘David – passive aggressive, F’s voyeurism, F’s death’

‘Parker – appearance, clothes, spank – couch, laughing at her, cheating her’

‘McCoy – late, anal, withholding’

‘Simon – Puts me on spot. “If anyone calls you – Let him sweat”.’

What can we know about these people? What do we want to know? H’s difficult-to-read handwriting records a blend of his own judgements (‘really clear that …’) with the briefly vivid voices of his clients. The self-lacerations of O’Brien (‘Draft — guilt’), and the controlled aggression of Simon (‘Let him sweat’), are audible, or nearly so, and if these diaries have a power, it lies not in a trespass into the private sphere, but rather in the spectral sense of voices from the past returning back to life. Sometimes the notes are short: ‘Webb – SILENCE’. Sometimes a client’s voice is embedded in H’s: ‘Bicknell’s “peculiar” qualities.’ Other annotations, unmoored from referents, are harder to understand, but have an urgent intensity as a result: ‘This is it’, written diagonally and then struck through; ‘and to feel justified’, underlined twice; ‘no no’ on an otherwise empty page; ‘Portia!!’ When H is sick, he notes it, usually in a loose blue pencil, expanded to cover the page.

The volumes also hold scattered scraps, letters, and items of ephemera, including a university parking permit, inserted loose at the start or end of volumes, or interleaved, or held to pages with paper-clips.

These loose letters contain messages from patients expressing gratitude at the moment of departure, writing of the need to end the course of treatment, usually for reasons of cost (‘the way I had to earn the money for therapy was too unpleasant’), or because they are moving, or because they have no time, often due to university studies.

Events from the outside world do not intrude: the Korean War, which began the year of the first diary, is felt only in the passing reference to O’Brien’s anxiety about the draft, and the presence of Joseph McCarthy, or Brown vs Board of Education, or I Love Lucy, or John Wayne, or the Russian space race, or Rosa Parks, or Elvis Presley, is impossible to discern. The only intervention from beyond is the word ‘SNOW’, written in large letters across 7 February 1959.

How did these diaries come to be for sale? Why were they not destroyed, or kept safely by someone close to H? I purchased them from an eBay seller specialising in ‘good quality new and vintage collectibles’: ‘champagne tastes for a beer budget.’ A lot of people want to read these kinds of thing: there’s a sizeable market online. With less of the spirit of rifling through old bins, the Great Diary Project collects, catalogues, and archives diaries, gathered through donation or purchase: it has thousands of unpublished texts, ranging in date from 1785 to 2018, and although some are closed for a period of time (5 years, 40 years, 50 years, indefinitely), readers can consult many of the originals in Bishopsgate Institute’s reading room.

I wonder about the ethical position of what I’m writing. H’s diaries were written between 60 and 70 years ago; the author (certainly) and all of the mentioned clients (very probably) are dead – although some may have had children who are alive. I wrote a first draft with full names but then redacted H’s, and then removed the first-names of clients, and then changed the names of the clients entirely (I swapped in the surnames of people in my school class when I was 12). There might still be sufficient information here for a determined reader to identify H, so my redactions may only serve to devolve the moral dilemma on to you, as readers. In making these omissions, I’m conscious that my article repeats not only one central dynamic of therapy – a promise of revelation that is deferred – but also the experience of the diary as a form: a hope for depth, intimacy, contact, presence, that is never fully reached.

There are at least a couple of things one could do with the contents of the plastic bags. The first would be to make something new out of the old papers: like a collage, as below, patched from small selections of the many hundreds of letters and other pieces of paper. The nice thing about preserving in collage, as opposed to in an archival box, is the sense of pieces of text in motion, moving around in an atmosphere they have created. Another nice thing is that the collage becomes something to look it (it hangs on my bedroom wall), and also, at the same time, a way of archiving: the collage is a means of gathering together papers for a time, until some point in the future when those papers acquire a purpose and can be released.

Here is the inked blotting paper, and the business notes from ‘late 1943’, and the drafts of poems written (Emily Dickinson-style) on recycled envelopes, and the dust jacket to Virginia Woolf’s The Years. (For reasons I don’t quite understand, my grandfather hated dust jackets, seeing them I think as crassly excessive; he removed them from books on purchase and used their reverse for shopping lists, writing with a sense of both utility and punishment).

That was response number one to the plastic bags of papers. Response number two would be to place individual letters, papers, doodles, and drafts between the pages of lots of books, one item per book. When I did this, I didn’t chose the book titles with any deliberation, but inevitably certain effects-through-juxtaposition occurred. The dog licence tucked among the pages of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The letter of 18 January 1943 from New York introducing American officer 1st Lt. William (Bill) Adler, ‘a pretty nice fellow’, in a copy of D.A. Miller’s Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style. Here are four examples of many.

The most interesting effect of doing this is the impression of touching time: both when putting a letter in a book and then placing the book on the shelf, and not knowing how many years will pass before it’s seen again; and in the moments of chance retrieval – opening a copy of the catalogue of The Library of Thomas Cranmer, for example, unread for years, and finding part of a poem from March 1945, long forgotten. Two bookish affordances are at work here: the book as a container for something else, and the book as an object likely to endure through time.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), Sigmund Freud argues that slips of the tongue and the pen constitute moments when repressed thoughts break through. The taxing psychic labour of keeping buried thoughts at bay is momentarily relaxed, which is why, if we agree with Freud, that one of the effects of parapraxis is often a kind of joyous relief. Freud’s brief discussion of printing errors maintains the same central idea: that errors are meaningful as moments when ‘the real thinking … broke through’.1 Rather counterintuitively, Freud suggests that revelatory errors are particularly likely when printing, because the slower, mechanical production of texts means — he says — it is harder to inhibit those buried meanings. Amid the sustained physical strain of printing, Freud suggests, meaningful errors are more prone to spring forth — to ‘escape’, in the language of 16th and 17th-century errata lists.

It’s a fascinating question, the degree to which this Freudian model of error, based as it is around individual subjectivities, can help explain the generally collaborative, multi-agent world of printing. If a book has a printing error, whose repressed unconscious is bursting through? The author’s? The printer’s? The print shop’s? The book’s?

‘PEEFACE’, above, comes from the opening of Revd Robert Forby’s The Vocabulary of East Anglia: an Attempt to Record the Vulgar Tongue of the Twin Sister Counties, Norfolk and Suffolk, as it existed in the last 20 Years of the 18th Century, and Still Exists, with Proof of its Antiquity from Etymology & Authority (1830). The error was found by the novelist Melissa Harrison in a copy in Gladstone’s Library in Flintshire, Wales – the national memorial to the Victorian statesman, and four times Victorian Prime Minister, William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), and Britain's only Prime Ministerial Library – although the slip seems to be common to all copies of this edition: the whole book, complete with Peeface at page v, is available on Googlebooks. Reverend Robert Forby (1759–1825), was an English philologist and rector of Fincham, Norfolk; The Vocabulary of East Anglia was his life’s work, although he died before completing it. His friend the Reverend George Turner, of Kettleburgh, Suffolk, edited and published the book in 1830, and penned the peeface.

Printings errors are paradoxically most visible in moments of correction, which serve to mark out slips even as they purport to remove them. The errata list is one such bookish technology. One of print’s innovations, the errata list flourished from the early sixteenth century until the end of the seventeenth, although the form continued on after this date, too. It was one of the last parts of a book to be printed, catching errors which proof-reading and stop-press corrections had missed. Sometimes it took the form of a note of a necessary global change (‘Towards the midst, till the end of this Booke, for Getulia, alwaies reade Natolia’),2 but more common was the litany of substitutions – for this, read that – pegged to page and sometimes line or column number.

This one comes from Edward Lhuyd’s Archaeologia Britannica (1707), a study of ancient British languages – or, to give it its full title-page unfurling, ‘Some Account Additional to what has been hitherto Publish’d, of the Languages, Histories and Customs Of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain: From Collections and Observations in Travels through Wales, Cornwal [sic], Bas-Bretagne, Ireland and Scotland’. Lhuyd was a Welsh botanist and linguist, and Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford from 1690, but that didn’t stop him (or his printer, or his scribe, or his proof-reader, or his book, or his historical moment), getting confused over ‘Guespeden’ which, in Cornish and Breton – as if I need to tell you! – means ‘wasp’ (or hornet), not ‘bisket’.

Paste-in correction slips were also quite common in seventeenth-century books. They’re inconspicuous to a quick scan of the page, and it takes some care, and some attention to the surface of the page, to notice the slightly embossed, often imperfectly aligned glued-on slip: passages of text which, in Jeffery Masten’s phrase, ‘rise up from the texture of the page.’3 In the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible, printed by Robert Barker, Matthew 26: 36 described not Jesus coming to ‘a place called Gethsemane’ but Judas: the error meant that Jesus had to be pasted over Judas. Reading closely, as Protestants should, the disruption is clear: an off-kilter son of God, the ‘J’ of Judas peaking out beneath.

Errors also sometimes produce what we might call errata list justifications from the printer – explanations of what went wrong that are often miniature masterpieces of passive aggression and blame shifting. For the book historian, these micro-narratives can provide little glimpses of the book production process that we’d otherwise never know: in going wrong, the book reveals its own history. Here is Richard Stanyhurst’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, printed at Leiden, Holland, by John Pates in 1582. Before reeling off a list of faults and corrections (including ‘vvoonman’ for ‘vvooman’), Pates asks ‘thee curteous reader’ patiently to endure and correct the numerous errors, before, less temperately, blaming the mistakes on a blend of ‘thee noouelttye of imprinting English in these partes’, and the absence of the author from the print shop.

I’ll end with what may be the greatest printing error of all, but with no real explanation because I can’t understand how it happened. An article in the Peterborough Standard in 1979 begins as a piece about a silver jubilee committee but then starts to cannibalise itself, mixing in strange neologisms and word-fragments, before evolving quite suddenly into a clipped and tidy football report (the transitional moment is ‘he latched onto a through ball’). It’s best read as a kind of absurdist poem set in 1970s Peterborough.

For two excellent recent books on error, I recommend Erica McAlpine’s The Poet’s Mistake (Princeton, 2020), and Alice Leonard’s Error in Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Error (Palgrave, 2020).

Thanks to Adam Zucker and Sarah Pyke for sending vvoonman and tremony, respectively, my way — and to Kate Bennett for the wasp / bisket situation.

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A particular form of (auto)biography could be written by listing unrealised projects: the ideas that sparked, glowed, but never received public articulation. The paths considered but not taken. Sean Ashton’s beguiling and addictive Living in a Land (MA BIBLIOTHEQUE, 2017) is a kind of autobiography told entirely through negative statements: a life implied, like an intaglio print, by the things not there. (‘I have never taken a phone call from an uncle I hardly know. I have never been handed a broken toy. I have never dieted or bulked up.’)

Failed or abandoned projects are related to, but different from, things not done: they are a few inches closer to realization. And although none of the projects listed below were ever realised (although I probably need to think more about what that term means), each calls to mind intensely a particular time and place (number 2: the tea room of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC, the day before September 11^th, 2001). Things never done exist everywhere in time; but things abandoned are hooked to a particular moment.

Here are some, but by no means all, of the instances I would chose if I was beginning to write an autobiography through projects abandoned or failed.

1. Founding of literary-cultural review magazine, Print. Submissions recruited; failed to raise money; abandoned. Neglected (shamefully) to communicate with contributors. [1998]

2. An edited collection of essays on early modern secrets. Stalled after 2 meetings. [2001]

3. An article on the circulation of Ben Jonson’s poetry. Written; rejected by Review of English Studies (‘fails to adequately consider musical contexts’); put in a drawer somewhere and unseen since 2001. [2001]

4. Novel: murder story involving audio recording technology. Draft completed, agent interested, then dribbled away. [2005]

5. A collection of biographies of figures on the edge of Renaissance culture (Virginia Ferrar, John Taylor, Hugh Plat, William Jaggard, others). Outline sketched, then abandoned. [2007]

6. A non-fiction book about fatherhood. Pages of notes, quotes, then ran aground, partly because everyone seemed to be thinking of writing the same book (but also never did). [2009]

7. A monograph about all the services offered by early modern authors beyond writing (arithmetic, astrology, dancing lessons). Examples gathered. [2009]

8. Database of all books printed in English, in England, in 1609. Completed after 2-3 weeks; large spreadsheet; on completion, all sense of purpose evaporated. What is the point of this? Dormant file on desktop. [2010]

9. An article on the early modern sense of the future. Enthused for 2 pages. [2010]

10. A co-written article on archival failures. Initial email exchange. [2011]

11. A trade book about the Anglican community at Little Gidding in the 17 century. 20-page proposal rejected after lengthy back-and-forth of redrafts. [2011]

12. A radio programme about the religious community at Little Gidding in the 17 century. See previous. [2011]

13. A TV programme about the religious community at Little Gidding in the 17 century. See previous. [2011]

14. An article about individuals who refuse to offer up what they know, who keep what they know to themselves, especially (but not only) in contexts when others want to know it. Socrates, up until the very last day, refusing to write anything down. Aaron in Titus Andronicus. Iago in Othello. Demand me nothing; what you know, you know. / From this time forth I never will speak word. 3 pages of notes. [2014]

15. A co-written article on authorial intention. Notes. [2016]

16. A novel about fatherhood. Abandoned – upon opening the Word document now, in 2025, I see I only wrote the following rather baffling 2 sentences: ‘Will, the host, pushed past Jack. “I’m going to be opening the oven door so there’ll be a waft of hot air around your thighs.”’ [2016]

17. Collection of lots of Freecycle adverts with idea that they might produce, when somehow rewrittten or collated, something interesting about a community, the objects jettisoned or reclaimed, possibly some strange version of life-writing – but can’t see way forward. Things like: OFFER: Table, small, white (Headington), or TAKEN: Single bed frame and trundle bed, one mattress (Jericho.) [2016]

18. A co-written article on early modern proof sheets. Examples gathered and bibliography compiled; then ground to a halt. [2017]

19. Introduction to the History of the Book: trade book proposal invited, written, then publisher declined. ‘Insufficiently global.’ [2017]

20. Processional theatrical event in Oxfordshire village, with audience (not actors) processing through series of houses – in front door, out back door – as families within continue normal evenings, affecting not to notice the entering onlookers. Initial emails sent out, then nothing. [2017]

21. Podcast about murder of a taxi driver in Oxford, with friend Tom. Interviewed police officers, witnesses and colleagues; recorded draft pilot; stalled. [2018]

22. Review of 2 books about paintings of readers for London Review of Books: major revisions requested by editors; enthusiasm leaked away; moved on. [2019]

23. Committed to memorizing poems, aiming for one per week. Start with W. H. Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, and do learn it, but don’t find time to do any more poems and after one month can’t recall much of the Auden poem. [2020]

24. A survey of all extant copies of the black page in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. Emails sent to all libraries holding copies but then discovered someone else had already done this. [2020]

25. An article about bad printing. Collect some examples but nothing further happens. [2021]

26. A novel about going to university in the 1990s, at the time when the internet was beginning and older forms of writing were starting to shift. Never really got started beyond conversations with friends. [2022]

27. A novel with lightly fictionalised versions of people I was aware of as contemporaries at university who went on the run the country (Dominic Cummings, George Osborne). Abandoned after I realized I couldn’t face the prospect of thinking about these people. [2023]

28. A series of short films, the camera positioned above, with my hands turning the pages of interesting books. Filmed one (a copy of Ian Hamilton’s Finaly journal Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.) but never did any more. [2024]

29. A book of essays about lost or ‘ghost’ villages. Started research then drift off. [2024]

30. A book about the unsolved murder of Dr Helen Davidson in Hodgemoor Wood, Buckinghamshire, 1966, next to the village where my family moved when I was 5, in 1977. Did some initial research but found that a book had recently been written about the crime, purporting to solve it. [2024]

31. A village theatrical staging of NF Simpson’s absurdist play, The Hole. Abandoned when it became clear that the anti-religious sentiments would not go down well in the church setting. [2025]

32. A series of short paragraphs, each presenting a vivid fictional scene, with each scene turning out to be not real but the imagining of a character in the next paragraph – i.e. a scene in paragraph 1, which seems at first real, is in fact only in the head of a character in the scene in paragraph 2, which is itself only imagined by a character in the scene in paragraph 3, etc. Wrote 5 scenes then lost momentum: the problem was that the series could only move forward in time. [2025]

I saw a version of this exhibition last year at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and was prompted to write the following short piece.

The image above is the South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s haptic memory of the bathroom of the apartment he lived in for 18 years (but no longer lives in) on West 22^nd Street, New York, NY. Suh covered every surface and every object in that apartment with white paper; rubbed the paper repeatedly with coloured pencils; peeled off the papers; removed them; and then pinned them to boards, organising their placement by type. ‘Rubbing is like writing a diary’, Suh says. 1-to-1 scale representations of bathroom fixtures, smoke alarms, floor tiles. Not the original objects, but the shape of the original objects, displayed on the wall like a giant butterfly, or a taxonomy of the material culture of one particular domestic space. The objects are very nearly present, but their pencil-rubbing medium – a medium that recalls (for me, at least) a child bent over a brass memorial to someone in the historic past – declares that these objects are resolutely not here. The rubbings are attentive testimonies to a series of absences.

In about the year 2003 I lived for six months or so in the south of America, in a city with a large university. I was floating: looking for a job in America although not quite sure I wanted to be in America (this was still soon after 9/11, and America was an alienating place; it was also a short time after my dad had died in England). A senior member of the university’s English faculty introduced me to a recently appointed younger literature professor, about my age. I liked her immediately. We had coffee and then lunch with the senior faculty member, and then just the two of us. She had been, or perhaps was, a poet, although she now taught literary criticism, and had a way of describing things that produced a mild jolt: a little shock of defamiliarization, even if she was only noticing the plates and cutlery on the table in the restaurant. Understanding my floating state, she asked if she could help to see if there was some teaching I might do. I was pleased we were becoming friends, or might be soon becoming friends. Then I heard from a mutual contact that she was ill, and had been ill since her teenage years: a form of cancer that never went away. She didn’t mention it, and looked and seemed healthy – indeed, beautiful – although she would disappear for chunks of time, not answering emails. Then I heard things were bad, and then, probably only 4 months after I first met her, I was told by a near-stranger that she had died. There were testimonials in the online student newspaper about her teaching and her dedication to her students right up until her final days. But because this was 2003, that online presence was slight and it soon faded in a way that seems impossible from the vantage of 2025. Back in England a year or so later (I had abandoned the idea of living in America) I would occasionally Google her, but the searches felt intrusive: not sanctioned by the brevity of my knowing her, and the nameless nature of our relationship which had existed, if it existed at all, as a promise for the future. For a while there were a few online articles, and then for a time no articles but a single photo of her from some point in the past (a contextless black-and-white image, she was sitting on a porch, with no signs of where or when it was taken), and then there seemed to be no trace of her at all.

I’m making a short film composed of lots of 20-second clips of different people reading the same sentence from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782). It’s a sentence about being an individual: it expresses Rousseau’s conviction that he is singular. By having many people speak the line out loud, and by splicing these brief clips together into a longer sequence, I am hoping something interesting will happen – perhaps a mix of the idea being affirmed (everyone is indeed different), and undermined (the claim for singularity is being repeated).

Initially, my idea was to ask 20 or so family and friends, but the idea has spread and I’m now getting volunteers who I don’t know directly, which is exciting, and which is a better way of testing and stretching Rousseau’s line.

So — and keeping this momentum going — if you would like to be involved, please email me with a couple of lines describing who / where you are, at adam.smyth@ell.ox.ac.uk, and I’ll send you the simple information you need. It will be fun, and interesting, and easy: you film on a phone for 20 seconds and send me the clip, rough edges and all, and I’ll do the rest.

Thank you!

For much of its life, Clarissa was published in pieces. Richardson first circulated bits of the novel among his friends around 1744 (as a printer, Richardson would have thought of texts primarily not in terms of whole books, but rather sheets and gatherings). When it became a book, it was a plural thing, with 7 volumes appearing in the first edition of 1747-8.

The modern Penguin edition of 1985 is one volume, which means it’s huge. Too huge, in fact, to read on the move, or to carry in a bag. Which is an interesting problem.

And the physical bulk is a problem in another way. Richardson’s book is an epistolary novel, made of letters zipping between characters, each dated to the day. In fact, Clarissa is in part about what the letter as a form (short, mobile, quick, responsive to the moment, intimate yet circulating dangerously) can do. But this sense of the epistolary gets obscured, or at least compromised, when the book itself is so physically anti-flighty, and so unitary as a pile of words.

One solution is to cut the single volume in two – which looks like violence, or disrespect, but is in fact the opposite: a registering of a desire to read.

My father, Alan Smyth, was a viola player. When I was young, in the 1980s, he mentioned a couple of times that he’d played with the Beatles. He wasn’t very interested in them; growing up, I wasn’t either. Years later, now that I’ve become very interested in them, I think often about his casual aside.

My dad died in 2002. In early 2020 I made contact with his musician friends to ask if they had any memories of his playing with the Beatles. John Underwood, the viola player in the Delmé String Quartet, played on ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in April 1966, on ‘A Day in the Life’ in February 1967, and on ‘She’s Leaving Home’ in March 1967. John said my father didn’t play on these songs, and he couldn’t remember if he played on others.

The fixer who arranged string players for lots of Beatles sessions was Sid Sax. He died in 2005. In the 1980s, when my dad was freelance and eternally worried about money, hanging on every phone call, Sax’s was a familiar name in our house, a kind of incantation. He was half-patron, half-demon. Peter Willison, a cellist my dad shared a flat with in St John’s Wood in the mid-to-late 1960s, remembers returning home at about 10 p.m. on 6 October 1967 after a concert at the Albert Hall and getting a call from Sax, telling him to drive to Studio Two at Abbey Road, immediately, for an all-night recording of what turned out to be ‘Blue Jay Way’. Peter arrived at the studio still wearing tails. At 27, he was about the same age as the Beatles. ‘They didn’t really have a clue what they were doing,’ Peter told me. ‘There were no other musicians. There was no music stand and no music. George Martin asked me to listen to the track and just play along. We experimented a bit. Finally at 4 a.m. we were finished.’ Could he remember my dad playing on any Beatles tracks? He couldn’t.

I trawled through footage of Beatles’ recordings online, looking for moments when the string section was visible. For a while I felt certain I could see my father among the black-tie-wearing string players on ‘A Day in the Life’, despite what John Underwood had said; I could certainly recognise some of his friends among the players. But after a few minutes even the wobbly tracking camera couldn’t conceal the fact it was a violinist, not a viola player. When I sent Peter a photo for confirmation, he said the hand position wasn’t quite right for my dad’s bow arm.

I wrote to Mark Lewisohn, the author of The Complete Beatles Chronicle (1992) and the monumental Tune In (2013), a product of such meticulous care that after 946 pages the Beatles story has progressed only as far as December 1962, two months after the release of their first single, ‘Love Me Do’. (Two more volumes will follow.) Lewisohn replied:

The names of the outside musicians brought in to augment Beatles recordings come solely from documents kept by EMI in its archive. It is an incomplete set of papers. It’s a frustration to history that holes remain in the collection. In those documents we do have, your father’s name does not show. In those we don’t have ... well, there’s simply no knowledge.

I asked him specifically about ‘A Day in the Life’, hoping I’d been wrong. Lewisohn has documents for that session listing all the musicians, with addresses and signatures. ‘Your father can’t be among them.’

I tried other routes. I spoke to someone at Abbey Road, who told me to try Universal Music Archives, which includes the Abbey Road archive; they directed me to the EMI Archive Trust. I talked to the former chief accountant of Warner Brothers who runs Crescendo Music Services, which collects unpaid historic fees for session musicians. The trail ran cold. This all happened while Covid was turning from a story about elsewhere to the only news in town.

Was my father mistaken? Did he imagine himself into a famous period of music history? Did he blur one of the hundreds of recording sessions he did with the recordings he’d heard his colleagues discuss? Did he make it up to impress me? Had I misheard him, or misremembered him, or reimagined something slightly different? I can’t see a way to resolve these questions. I feel a moment in the past dwindling, receding towards a dot.

The bottom and top edge of the text block and cover had been cut at an angle, producing not the tidy rectangle we expect, but something slanting and irregular. None of the inside text was obscured, but the text at the bottom only just gets squeezed in. The whole things feels perilous.

Was it meant to look like this? I didn’t think so, and comparing Lottie’ gift with another copy brought into focus the nicely hacked-about nature of my birthday present.

Interesting things happen to objects when they go wrong.

The first is that the object’s materiality comes into focus – the fact of it as a bundle of stuff (rather than bodiless, transcendent ideas) is felt. The TV remote that stops working is suddenly more vividly a plastic and rubber thing we hold in our hands and stab with frustration, rather than the object made invisible from its sleek efficacy.1 So with the book: the book is a thing of paper and glue and stitching and ink – and also of edges and lines – and of roughness and texture – when it goes awry.

The second thing is that in these moments of wrongness we imagine the book’s process of production: a book mistakenly trimmed (if that’s what my present is) probably makes us think about what went awry, makes us speculate on process, and so our head is suddenly in the printer’s, at Clay’s, in Bungay, Suffolk, pondering presses and conveyer belts. Our imagination isn’t transported in this way with a tidy finished volume. So we might imagine the book clamped to a conveyer built, and two parallel guillotine knives descending to trim the top and bottom of the book, and then a third knife perpendicular to the first two trimming the fore-edge. (You can see something like this happening here – jump to about 50 seconds. It’s hypnotic: I could loop this and watch it for hours.) My copy must have been not positioned squarely as it hit the trimmers. Normally, a copy like this would be binned, but thankfully this one made it through.

Thanks to Dennis Duncan, Paul Nash and Richard Lawrence for talking to me about trimming; to Clay’s, in Bungay, Suffolk, for answering my questions; and to Lottie for the present.