Table Of ContentSaturday 3 October 2020 – Issue № 142
Review
How nature is helping us through the pandemic
Wild times
Saturday 3 October 2020 The Guardian 3
COVER ILLUSTRATION Kerry Hyndman
‘We, the readers or listeners,
are crucial to the text, story
or song becoming powerful.
We are not impartial
observers; we are a
fundamental part of the
circuitry; if we are not
connected, the charge will
not be able to fl ow.”
— Kae Tempest, page 24
Saturday 3 October 2020 – Issue № 142
Review
The week in books ......................................................................................04
The books that made me by Petina Gappah ................................................05
COVER STORY Nature in the time of coronavirus by Mike McCarthy .....06
Book of the week: Tom Stoppard: A Life by Hermione Lee ........................10
Nonfi ction reviews
Agent Sonya: Lover, Mother, Soldier, Spy by Ben Macintyre ........................12
The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom
and the Spanish Civil War by Giles Tremlett .................................................13
Happiness, a Mystery & 66 Attempts to Solve It by Sophie Hannah...............14
The Haunting of Alma Fielding: A True Ghost Story
by Kate Summerscale .......................................................................................15
Fiction reviews
Red Pill by Hari Kunzru ...............................................................................16
Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah ...................................................................17
The Devil and the Dark Water by Stuart Turton .........................................18
The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman ...........................................19
D (A Tale of Two Worlds) by Michel Faber ......................................................19
INSIDE STORY Heard the one about the Essex girl? by Sarah Perry .........20
BOOKS ESSAY What is creativity Kae Tempest asks .................................24
How I wrote The Sea by John Banville, plus Tom Gauld ..........................26
Contents
– Issue № 142
4 The Guardian Saturday 3 October 2020
Exponential
A lending hand
As is the case for all public
spaces, the reintro duc-
tion of stricter Covid-19
rules will aff ect the way
libraries operate. But it
should be remembered
that even during the
height of lockdown, they
never really closed. When
buildings shut in March,
libraries went online to
support their commu ni-
ties. E-lending surged,
with a 600% rise in digi tal
memberships in the fi rst
month, and library staff
broadcasting from their
kitchens proved a sur-
prise hit: Kingston
Libraries had 10,000
views for their YouTube
story times. Library staff
also made thousands of
calls to check up on vul-
ner able people , clubbed
together with charities to
¶ Forewords
The week in books
3 October
get books out to families,
and used 3D printers to
make PPE for care homes.
Since libraries were
allowed to reopen in July
staff have worked to
restore services and keep
everyone safe. These
secur ity measures have
ensured that libraries
have not had to close or
reduce their services,
even in coronavirus hot-
spots. Currently about
75% of branches are open,
with most off ering access
to PCs and browsing.
Foot fall is, of course,
much lower than usual –
about 25% compared
with last year – but this is
only part of the picture
along side increased use
of order-and-collect and
home delivery services,
as well as the growing
number of mobile librar-
ies back on the road in
more remote areas.
Staff are positive about
the new ways of work ing.
Getting books ready for
order-and-collect ser-
vices is giving them new
insights into users’ tastes,
and “lucky dip” bags
have been a hit with
child ren. One parent
said it felt like Christmas
when their children
unpacked their bags .
The escalation of the
pandemic may well slow
down the next phase of
recovery at a time when,
as head of Lancashire
libraries Julie Bell said,
“so many diff erent
people are desperately
in need of being able to
connect again”. But with
hard work and ingenuity
I am certain our libraries
will continue to fulfi l one
of their most vital func-
tions, and once again
become the commu nity’s
living room.
Isobel Hunter,
chief executive of
Libraries Connected
WORD OF THE WEEK
Steven Poole
—
The prime minister has warned that Covid-19 infections are increasing
“exponentially” . That sounds technical, but should we be frightened?
The Latin exponere means “to place out”; so an “exponent”, from the
16th century in English, is a proposition (or later a person) that sets forth
some idea. It was adopted in algebra for expressions such as “ bn”: here
the “exponent”, n, sets forth the number of times b (the “base”) should
be multiplied by itself. As n increases, b increases exponentially.
“Exponential growth” is often loosely used to mean “large” or “fast”,
but it needn’t be either: it simply means that the increase is proportional
to the total quantity. Thus, the “complicated exponential-horned
gramophone” owed by Professor Welch in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim
is one in which the horn gets wider the further it is from the base, not
one that keeps growing indefi nitely until it swallows the Earth.
In computer science, problems requiring “exponential time” take
exponentially longer to solve the bigger they are, until some will need
longer than the lifetime of the universe. No doubt Boris Johnson hopes,
if only for his own sake, that Covid-19 is not such a problem.
New writing prizes are
mas sively important for
aspiring writers – vastly
more so than literary
awards. So many emerg-
ing writers don’t have
access to publishing intel,
or connections to agents
or editors. Instead, they
have manuscripts con-
taining worlds and
characters we haven’t
yet seen, stored away
on computers or in desk
drawers . Being able to
bypass the machi nations
of the publishing indus-
try by submitting your
story to be read by
someone who knows
talent when they see it
is important for many
reasons. Even if you don’t
win, there’s something
to be said for fi nishing a
piece of writing and just
sending it off .
I say all this because
last week, Merky Books ,
the imprint launched by
rapper Stormzy , opened
applications for its new
writers’ prize . The winner
will be published by
Merky and all the long-
listed authors invited to
a writers’ camp, which is
eff ectively the place to
learn about writing and
publishing. Trust me,
I was on a panel at the
camp last year and stayed
to learn about an industry
I’d been in for just under a
decade. And the greatest
thing about entering
these competitions is
that even if you don’t
win, your words are still
seen. You are still seen.
PAGE TURNER
Candice Carty-Williams
—
Saturday 3 October 2020 The Guardian 5
The last book that made me cry
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell . It didn’t help that I read it
in my own year of grief, which reverberated endlessly
in this year of universal grief, so it was both a solace and
what in Shona we call kudzimbirwa, or a rewounding.
The last book that made me laugh
I recently came across Jerome K Jerome’s Three Men in
a Boat in a charity shop in Harare. I fl ipped through to
the cheese chapter and it made me laugh loudly enough
to have people ask me what on earth I was reading.
The book I couldn’t fi nish
I love to read books where they are set, so it was only
natural to take Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick on a
voyage aboard a container ship across the Atlantic last
year. I got through the endless whaling glossary fi ne
enough, but when I got to Queequeg, I lost the will to
go on. I will try it again , but life may just be too short .
My earliest reading memory
I had no books until I went to school. So my earliest
memory is of a Tsuro naGudo (Hare and Baboon)
Shona folktale book that I won for coming second
in my class at my school in Rhodesia at the age of
seven. I read it once before it was snatched from me,
and I was beaten up by other children for having
won it.
My comfort read
Poetry, most recently Collective Amnesia, the searing
collection by South African poet Koleka Putuma. I
have a friend to whom I am introducing poetry, so
every day or so, I send him a new poem.
Out of Darkness, Shining Light by Petina Gappah is
published by Faber .
The book I am currently reading
Belonging, the second part of Simon Schama’s
magisterial series The Story of the Jews .
The books that changed my life
Peter Sha ff er’s plays Equus and Amadeus. Reading
them as scripts inspired me to become a playwright.
The books I wish I’d written
A better version of every book I’ve written. I also wish
I had written the magnifi cent battle scene in Maaza
Mengiste’s The Shadow King , some of Teju Cole and
Zadie Smith’s essays and the Dunkirk scenes in Ian
McEwan’s Atonement.
The book that infl uenced my writing
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s Decolonising the Mind helped me
reconcile my relationship with my mother tongue and
understand my condition as a product of a colonial
education . I read it at least once a year.
The books that are most underrated
I worry that the circumstances of the last few months
mean some wonderful books will get lost . Trapped, by
the Zimbabwean novelist Valerie Tagwira, who is also a
doctor in Harare, is a powerful, illuminating portrayal
of lives unravelling against the collapse of Zimbabwe’s
healthcare system. Charlotte by Helen Moff ett is a
lyrical meditation on grief, and has the added pleasure
of being set in the Pride and Prejudice universe .
MURDO MACLEOD/GUARDIAN
The books that made me ¶
‘Jerome K Jerome made me
laugh out loud in a bookshop’
Petina Gappah
¶ Cover story
The natural world thrived in this year of chaos, and its healing
before. Yet this Covid spring was diff erent. It seemed
unlike all others, not least because it was proving
exceptionally beautiful, yet by unfolding in parallel
with the disease it was producing a sort of bizarre and
tragic incongruity. Our beloved summer migrant birds
– the swallows and cuckoos, the swifts and the willow
warbler – were returning from their winter in Africa;
the spring butterfl ies – the brimstones, the orange-
tips and the holly blues – were emerging with their
fl ashes of brilliance; and the spring fl owers were each
day adding new colour to the landscape, which was
only intensifi ed by the sunshine that seemed to pour
down uninterrupted from morning till evening. Yet
even as all this was happening, people were dying
every day in their hundreds , often away from their
loved ones, alone and in distress, and the health
workers and care workers who were trying to save
them were also dying, while millions of others were
struggling to cope with the loss of jobs and the stress
of being confi ned to their homes . You almost felt that
nature should have switched off , out of sympathy. Yet
it went blithely forward, as nature has always done.
This paradox was what made this springtime unique,
and made me feel as though it required memorialising
from my home in Richmond, London. When I found
I
f there was one mitigating circumstance
about the coronavirus pandemic that fi rst
hit Britain in January 2020 it was that the
virus struck in the early part of the year ,
when the northern hemisphere was entering
into springtime. The coronavirus spring
that followed turned out, in fact, to be a
remarkable event, not only because it unfolded
against the background of the calamitous disease,
but also because it was in Britain the loveliest spring
in living memory. It had more hours of sunshine,
by a very substantial margin, than any previous
recorded spring; indeed, it was sunnier than
any previously recorded British summer, except
for three. It meant that life in the natural world
fl ourished as never before, just as life in the human
world was hitting the buff ers .
Now, as we head into the pandemic’s autumn,
and with it a second wave of infection and fresh
curbs on our lives, there are lessons to be learned
from looking back at our initial confi nement in
March, April and May, and in particular, at the
springtime in which it occurred.
I have loved wildlife and the natural world since
I was a small boy, but I had never recorded a spring
Bringing
the
t. It seemed
proving
Saturday 3 October 2020 The Guardian 7
Cover story ¶
that my naturalist friends, Jeremy Mynott and Peter
Marren, were writing it down as well, from their own
homes in Suff olk and Wiltshire respectively, I asked if
they would like to join me and compare our fi ndings. As
the spring evolved, so did the pandemic. Yet there was
something more: spring in the time of the corona-
virus felt not just unusual, not just paradoxical and
incongruous in its character, but important somehow.
What we could all see, initially, was solace: it was
clear that nature at its loveliest and most inspiring, in
springtime’s wondrous transformations, could off er
people comfort at a moment of tragedy and great
stress. “There is no salve quite like nature for an
anxious mind,” wrote Richard Deverell, the director
of Kew, as he reluctantly closed the botanical garden
as the pandemic took hold. A large number of others
who had ready access to the natural world agreed
with him , and wished to share their experiences of
the countryside on their doorsteps, often using social
media. Prominent among them were nature writers,
in that rich modern tradition that has sprung up in
Britain in the last 20 years or so. Mark Cocker tweeted
on 18 April: “I’m posting an uplifting image each day
till this thing is done. No coronas, no Covids, but
possibly corvids” (the last word a reference to one of
his best-known books, Crow Country ). Mark Avery ,
perhaps Britain’s most infl uential wildlife blogger,
organised a nature writing competition through his
website. Melissa Harrison , who writes moving novels
about the natural world, created a series of podcasts
about nature around her Suff olk village. Some of our
most brilliant wildlife photographers, such as Bob
Gibbons and Richard Steel, began sending out
inspiring daily images, and many others undertook
similar enterprises .
The idea of the consoling power of nature goes
back many centuries, but it is strange how recently
the benefi cial eff ects of the natural world on our
physical and mental health were prove d to be real.
They had long been supposed, in a sort of obvious,
generalised way , but it was not really until 1982 that
we began to open our eyes to the true dynamic
character of the link between nature and our psyches,
with the publication of Roger Ulrich’s celebrated
paper in the journal Science, with its title of
staggering banality and revolutionary implications:
“View Through a Window May Infl uence Recovery
From Surgery”.
Ulrich was an American architect who spec-
ialised in hospital design, and in a hospital in
outside
in
powers remain if we know where to look. By Michael McCarthy
�
ILLUSTRATION KERRY HYNDMAN
8 The Guardian Saturday 3 October 2020
¶ Cover story
Bringing the outside in
Pennsylvania he discovered something
uncanny: over a period of nine years, patients who
underwent gall bladder surgery made substantially
quicker and better recoveries if they had a natural
view from their beds. Some of the windows of the
hospital wing looked out on to a group of trees and
some on to a brick wall, and those lucky enough
to have the tree view, Ulrich found, recovered faster,
spent less time in hospital, required fewer pain-
killers, had better evaluations from nurses and
experienced fewer post-operative complications
than those who only had the wall to look at. Contact
with nature, even if only visual, clearly had a
measurable eff ect on people’s wellbeing.
Ulrich’s paper is still not widely known by the
public , but in highlighting the reality of our organic
bond with nature, it seems more seminal with every
year that passes . Research has mushroomed into
the eff ects of exposure to the natural world on our
physical and especially our mental health, and
there is now a vast amount of literature. Such
exposure is increasingly part of clinical practice,
and a stream of books have borne witness to its
eff ects, including Bird Therapy by Joe Harkness ,
The Natural Health Service by Isabel Hardman and
Losing Eden by Lucy Jones .
What all these accounts have in common is the
conviction that contact with the natural world
reduces stress; and with the whole population
confi ned to home, stress was one of the pandemic’s
principal consequences. The level of stress depended
on your circumstances : it was substantially harder to
self-isolate in a small high-rise fl at than in a mansion,
for example , or to self-isolat e with demanding child-
ren or abusive partners , or if you were on your own,
without support networks. But for most people ,
there was some level of strain and anxiety brought
about by the abrupt ending of normal social
intercourse, and the very real fear of infection.
In these circumstances, people sought diversion
in all sorts of ways, but many turned to nature. It
is clear their numbers were substantial. Let us take
just one, astonishing fi gure: the increase in page
views for the webcams run by the 47 wildlife trusts
across Britain. Many people enjoy watching wildlife
via webcams, which often show surprising and
intimate moments at the nest or in the burrow.
In the period 23 March to 31 May 2019, there were
20,407 page views of the trusts’ webcams combined;
but in the period from 23 March to 31 May 2020 there
were 433,632 views, an increase of 2,024 %. And it
was in contemplating numbers such as these that
it became clear what was important about the
coronavirus spring – the fact that it was there. The
natural world was available to us, even at such a
traumatic time. It had not been thrown off course,
it had not been knocked out by the pandemic, by this
great world-historical event that was making 2020
a lost year in human aff airs. At this time of chaos
in the world of people, nature was a constant . The
Covid-19 virus had wrecked, if only temporarily,
so many human artefacts; it had stopped business,
trade, travel, sport, education, entertain ment and
social gatherings of all kinds – but it hadn’t stopped
the spring. In nature, 2020 was not a lost year. Just
the opposite.
If you saw it like this, you suddenly saw once again
the unique worth of the natural world, which pro-
duced us and shaped us, which holds our origins and
which remains the true home of our psyches – as
Ulrich began to discover – and which even today,
when so many have turned their backs on it, gives
us everything, from the air we breathe to the water
we drink and the food we eat. You saw anew its
fantastic power and resilience. You saw its infi nite
value. You saw the wonder of it. But you also saw
its vulner ability, because the coronavirus spring
produced vivid instances of battered parts of the
natural world prospering once more, of natural
processes resuming when pressure from the
mammoth human enterprise was temporarily
lessened across the globe. Fish returned to the
canals of Venice, no longer churned up by tourist
boats. In parts of northern India, the Himalayas
Autumn wildlife in
Britain can be a
fascinating spectacle.
Big fl ocks of pink-footed
geese are arriving from
Iceland; they will be
followed by other wild
geese – greylags , white-
fronts, barnacles and
brents, and our two
species of wild swans,
whooper swans from
Iceland, then Bewick’s
swans from Russia. On
a smaller scale, the two
Scandinavian thrush
species, redwings and
fi eldfares, are starting to
arrive, and they will be
joined by other charming
northern songbirds, such
as bramblings and snow
buntings.
Although most
fl owers have dis-
appeared, ivy is in
splendid bloom from
now until November and
will attract many of the
remaining insects,
including the ivy bee ,
a recent arrival to the
UK. Ripening hedge
fruits include sloes, hips
and haws; it has been an
excellent year for acorns,
and among the myriad
autumn fungi, look out
for ceps, or penny-buns
as they are sometimes
known. Even mammals
provide a spectacle now:
red deer stags are just
beginning their autumn
rut (the competition for
females), roaring and
clashing antlers. You
don’t have to go to the
Scottish Highlands to
witness it: you can see
it in Richmond Park
in London.
Nature to
look out
for now
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and haws; it has been an
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it in R
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Saturday 3 October 2020 The Guardian 9
became visible for the fi rst time in 30 years as air
pollution fell. Baby turtles made it safely to the
water on Brazilian beaches empty of sunbathers,
joggers and dogs. Wild boar and deer came back
into car-free European cities; in Llandudno in
north Wales, wild goats roamed the streets. Most
notable of all, the world experienced a colossal
(though strictly temporary) fall in the carbon
dioxide emissions that are causing the most
menacing of all our environmental problems,
climate change.
So you can see the coronavirus spring, with
its spectacular pause in human activity and its
simultaneous fl ourishing of nature, as a great
global reminder that we have nearly reached the
point of no return in our destruction of the natural
world . It is a historic moment. We are at a parting of
the ways: one way, to continue as before; the other,
to rebuild economies shattered by the pandemic
diff erently, in a green way.
There are also lessons from the spring closer to
home. For in dealing with the consolation of nature,
it is only right that we should ask: for whom was it
available in Britain in 2020? For nearly everyone on
social media, but for fewer of us in real life . Offi cial
fi gures state that only 17% of us live in the countyside
and have access to nature, but this underestimates
the importance of gardens, for example . According to
a 2016 report on gardens and health from the King’s
Fund, 87 % of UK house holds have access to a garden,
and a lot of nature can be observed there. However,
that still leaves 13 % of UK households garden-free .
How many people in these households had access to
green space?
We can make some rough guesses. The Ordnance
Survey produces a Green Spaces Index, which
Cover story ¶
Goats’ town
The streets of
Llandudno in
Wales during the
coronavirus spring
suggests that there are 2.6 million people in the UK
who do not live within a 10-minute walk of a green
space or park, 10,579 of them in London (though some
of these people will probably have access to gardens).
Britain at present has no offi cial policy on how much
green space should be available for its citizens. So
perhaps one of the fi rst Covid-19 lessons to be learned
by the government – indeed, by all governments –
might be to adopt the idea put forward by the Green
party’s Caroline Lucas, who suggested in the 2019
general election manifesto that no new housing
development should be sanctioned more than one
kilometre from a public park.
What other lessons can we learn, as we head into
another season, with much of the country already
in lockdown? Spring may be the most hopeful time
of year, but it would be wrong to think that we
cannot still be inspired by nature as we move into
autumn and towards winter. Autumn has its arrivals
here of lovely migrant birds such as the “winter
thrushes”, the redwings and fi eldfares from
Scandinavia, as well as spectacular, less common
visitors such as waxwings and great grey shrikes;
the great pageant of autumn fungi is just beginning
on woodlands fl oors; and in the very depths of winter,
at the turn of the year, the snowdrops will start to
show. The natural world is there for us, even in
pandemics, even in lockdowns; it is there to console
and repair and recharge us, often unrecognised and
unacknowledged, but still giving life to every one
of us, regardless.
The Consolation of Nature: Spring in the Time of
Coronavirus by Michael McCarthy, Jeremy Mynott
and Peter Marren is published on 15 October by
Hodder Studio.
Cover sto
CHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY
10 The Guardian Saturday 3 October 2020
Book of
the week
{ Biography } An exceptional
and forgiving study of the
successful playwright and
his quantum dramatics
Stefan Collini
In The Invention of Love ,
Tom Stoppard has his Oscar
Wilde character describe
biography as “the mesh
through which our real life
escapes”. Quoting that line
in his biography (twice) is
a nice touch. Almost 1,000
pages is a lot of mesh, and
it’s best not to press too hard
on what might be meant by
“our real life”: in Stoppardia, such questions tend to
lead to long speeches about chaos theory.
How our experience in the theatre during one of
his plays relates to our lives outside is a question that
has nagged at discussions of Stoppard’s standing as a
writer. His kind of quantum dramatics messes with
our minds , and we love it, but when we get home we
still have to set the alarm for work the next day. Does
this mean that his plays are little more than a divert ing
display of verbal fi reworks, clever but of no signifi -
cance, or are deeper themes about our experience of
life being addressed? At the very least, his work reveals
a constant endeavour to decipher the puzzles of exis-
tence. As Hannah, a character in one of his best-loved
plays, Arcadia, says: “It’s wanting to know that makes
us matter. Other wise we’re going out the way we came
in .” She’s not just referring to the exit from the theatre.
T he life of the man behind the plays is familiar from
countless interviews and profi les, but Hermione Lee
has been allowed to go backstage, enabling her to tell
the story in unmatchable detail. Tomáš Sträussler was
born in Zlín in what was then Czechoslovakia in 1937.
When Hitler invaded in March 1939, the Sträusslers
and other professional-class Jewish families (his
father was a doctor) were advised to leave as soon as
possible. They left hurriedly that April, travelling to
Singapore, where Dr Sträussler had been off ered a
post in a hospital. When the Japanese army arrived in
February 1942, the family had to take fl ight once more.
The mother and two young children were rushed
on to a ship that was about to leave; they ended up in
Bombay. The father was to follow, but he never did:
the Japanese sank the ship he was on. After further
peregrin ations around India, Marta Sträussler and her
two young sons wound up in Darjeeling, where the
boys went to an English school. There their mother met
and later married an English offi cer, Major Kenneth
Stoppard, who brought the family to England in 1946.
The boys went to school in Derbyshire, and “Tom”,
identifying passionately with his new country, grew up
an Englishman, playing cricket and playing the part.
Marta told her sons very little about their family back-
ground and the circumstances of their fl ight from
Czechoslovakia; Stoppard was in his late 50s before he
fully understood that he was Jewish and that many of
his relatives had been murdered by the Nazis.
Although Stoppard’s plays can seem like the distilla-
tion of several course-loads of reading lists, he didn’t go
to university. Instead, at 17 he started work as a reporter
on a newspaper in Bristol. What he lacked in exper i ence
he seems to have made up for in chutzpah: he got him -
self made the paper’s motoring correspondent with-
out revealing that he couldn’t drive. Increasingly, he
wrote theatre reviews, and then followed his dream by
giving up his job, moving to London, and writing plays.
“Tom Stoppard: The Years of Struggle” would be
quite a short one-act piece: he was not yet 28 when
the RSC bought an option on his idea for a play about
Rosen crantz and Guildenstern, two of the minor char-
acters in Hamlet. Things soon went from good to better.
Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan at the National
Theatre decided to take a gamble on the unknown
young playwright, with the result that, as Lee puts it
with a proper sense of drama, on Tuesday 11 April
1967 at the Old Vic, “the lights went up on two men in
Elizabethan costume, betting on the toss of a coin”.
I t was a runaway success of extraordinary
proportions. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
ran for three years in that production; there have
been countless revivals, translations and adaptations.
Faber reprinted the text 23 times in the next 30 years,
going on to sell a further half a million copies between
2001 and 2008 alone. A woman coming out of the fi rst
New York production bumped into its author and
asked “What’s it about?” According to legend, he
replied: “It’s about to make me very rich.”
Along with its successors, it certainly did that:
Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), The Real Thing (1982),
Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast
of Utopia (2002), Rock’n’Roll (2006). The list goes on ,
right up to his latest play,
Leo poldstadt , whose suc-
cess ful opening run was cut
short by the lock down.
Writing the screen play for
Shakespeare in Love brought
in the odd penny, too (plus
an Oscar), as did a lot of other
fi lm work and adaptations. It
all helped to sustain a life
fi lled with country houses
and Con corde fl ights, marri-
ages and not-marriages,
parties and a lot of cigarettes.
Tom Stoppard: A Life
by Hermione Lee,
Faber, £30
The Shakespeare
in Love screenplay
brought in the
odd penny, and
helped sustain
a life fi lled with
Concorde fl ights,
marriages and
lots of parties
