The Literary Travel Blog

A blog on all aspects of literary travel and literary tours, with the latest news from thewordtravels.com

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Literary Festivals in the UK

A guide to literary festivals in the UK, with link details

thewordtravels: literary tours, literary travel and inspiring journeys

For inspiring journeys in the literary landscape. We specialise in literary travel, literary tours, creative writing and walking holidays, city breaks, and trekking adventures.

Yorkshire: The Bronte sisters and beyond

A literary guide to Yorkshire, including the Bronte sisters, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and many other writers

Literary Tours

Literary tours in Britain and Europe

The guardian Hay Festival in Segovia

The guardian Hay Festival in Segovia takes place 27-30 September 2007

The programme includes:

Edwin Williamson, Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford University and a Fellow of Exeter College, speaking on: how do you write a biography of Borges?

The Muslim Woman, Sufism and Literature
Elif Shafak in conversation with Maureen Freely

Literary Creation and the Politically Incorrect
Samih al-Qasim talks to Ignacio Gutiérrez de Terán

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree
Chris Stewart talks to Manuel Pimentel

A. C. Grayling speaking on The Concept of Liberty

Wole Soyinka in conversation with Landry-Wilfred Mampika

and 'In Conversations' with Hanif Kureishi and Arnold Wesker

For full details see http://www.hayfestival.com/segovia/

Gods, Heroes and Romantics

Gods, Heroes and Romantics is a unique adventure in the classical world. A journey into history, myth and legend

Ancient Greece and the Classical World

A literary travel guide to Ancient Greece and the Classical World

King's Sutton Literary Festival

This year's King's Sutton Festival takes place on Saturday and Sunday 10 and 11 March in this charming village just outside Banbury in Oxfordshire.

Writers appearing include Salley Vickers, who on Saturday 10th will be talking to Winifred Robinson about her latest novel The Other Side of You, and Margaret Drabble, who will be talking about her life and work on the Sunday. Full details and booking at www.kslitfest.co.uk

The Journey

‘A vast platform appeared before us, lit up by reflectors. A little beyond it, a row of lorries. Then everything was silent again. Someone translated: we had to climb down with our luggage and deposit it alongside the train. In a moment the platform was swarming with shadows. But we were afraid to break the silence: everyone busied himself with his luggage, searched for someone else, called to somebody, but timidly, in a whisper.’

From If This Is A Man by Primo Levi, trans. Stuart Woolf
27 January : Holocaust Memorial Day

Throw away other people’s maps

The second part of Zadie Smith’s beautiful and challenging article on writers and readers was published in The Guardian on Saturday. In the article she re-connects style with morality and life lived, and with it reclaims the actual experience, as felt, of reading - and why writing fiction, and reading it, matters. A truly thrilling read.

‘What unites great novels is the individual manner in which they articulate experience and force us to be attentive, waking us from the sleepwalk of our lives. And the great joy of fiction is the variety of this process …’

‘Both the writer and the reader must undergo an ethical expansion – allow me to call it an expansion of the heart – in order to comprehend the human otherness that fiction confronts them with; both fail in varied, fascinating ways to complete this action as ideally it might be completed. …’

Follow the permalink to read more about The Word Travels unique creative writing journey in Prague and Krakow.

T S Eliot and East Coker

T S Eliot died on 4th January 1965. We visited East Coker and the Eliot Corner of St. Michael's Church, East Coker, where his ashes are buried below the memorial plaque set in the wall.

‘Home is where one starts from’ he wrote in 'East Coker', one of the Four Quartets, and his burial here marks his return to the parish of his forefathers. The church is set on higher ground just above the village of East Coker, on the Dorset / Somerset border and provides magnificent views of the rolling countryside beyond.

There is something moving in the simplicity of the plaque, and the omission of his honours in favour of the simple description, ‘Poet’, that is wholly fitting of the kind of man, and poet, that he was. The stone includes the first and last lines from ‘East Coker’ - ‘In my beginning is my end ... In my end is my beginning’ and the one simple request that the beholder, of his or her charity, might pray for the repose of his soul.

As the wind blows through the trees skirting the graveyard, it is a perfect place to rediscover, as lines in ‘East Coker’ have it, ‘Love is most nearly itself / When here and now cease to matter.’

New Year’s Eve, Clavell Tower

New Year’s Eve, and a visit to the Dorset coast in bracing wind where the dogs rushed into the churning waves before we climbed up to The Clavell Tower, which stands high on the cliff above Kimmeridge Bay.

The Tower was built in 1820 as an observatory by the eccentric occupant of nearby Smedmore House, the Revd John Clavell. After many years standing empty and neglected, and in increasing danger of falling into the sea due to coastal erosion, it is now being painstakingly dismantled and re-erected 25 metres back from the cliff face.

The Black Tower
The Clavell Tower is the inspiration for The Black Tower, as it becomes (refaced with blocks of dark bituminous shale) in P D James’ crime thriller of the same name. The author’s detective, Adam Dalgliesh, is in Dorset to convalesce, but is soon plunged into a murder enquiry. Dalgliesh approaches the black tower with a sense of impending doom:

‘The view, spectacular and frightening, made him catch his breath … below, the cliff tumbled into a broad fissured causeway of boulders, slabs and amorphous chunks of blue-black rock which littered the foreshore as if hurled in wild disorder by a giant hand ... As he looked down on the chaotic and awe-inspiring waste of rock and sea and tried to picture what the fall must have done to Holroyd, the sun moved fitfully from behind the clouds and a band of sunlight moved across the headland lying warm as a hand on the back of his neck, gilding the bracken, marbling the strewn rocks at the cliff edge. But it left the foreshore in shadow, sinister and unfriendly. For a moment Dalgliesh believed that he was looking down on a cursed and dreadful shore on which the sun could never shine.’

Much later, the tower is the setting for the novel's chilling climax as Dalgliesh, engulfed in a dense sea mist and with his face against the tower, hears ‘the spine-chilling scrape, unmistakable, of bone ends clawing against the stone ... ’

Today the bright morning brought strong winds and waves crashing onto the shore, not ‘cursed and dreadful’ but still awe-inspiring in its raw, elemental power.

We wish all our readers and literary travellers (and travelers!) a very happy new year.

Creative Writing Breaks

Creative writing breaks that combine walks in some of the most spectacular landscapes in Britain with the time and space to respond creatively in poetry, prose, photography or drawing

More thoughts on Prague

It is perhaps only in a city so full of paradoxes that, within the space of several weeks, two vastly different but brilliant writers could have been born. One was a Jew who would write in German, a vegetarian, teetotal and self-absorbed ascetic, a man so obsessed with the knowledge of his own responsibility, his mission as a writer and his own shortcomings, that he dared not have most of his works published while he was alive. The other was a drunk, an anarchist, a bon vivant, and extrovert who ridiculed his profession and his responsibilities, who wrote in pubs and sold his work on the spot for a few beers. Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hašek, author of The Good Soldier Švejk, lived their brief lives (they both died prematurely, within a year of each other) separated by only a few streets. They each drew on the same period to create works of genius, but those works seem separated not just by ages, but by continents as well. Since then the people of Prague have used the word Kafkárna to describe the absurdities of their lives, and have called their own ability to make light of such absurdities, to confront violence with humour and utterly passive resistance, Švejkovina.

Ivan Klíma The Spirit of Prague

Ian Fleming and James Bond

A guide to Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, in London

Ivan Klima and The Spirit of Prague

I'm just re-reading Ivan Klíma’s wonderful collection of essays The Spririt of Prague, returning to one of my favourite writers partly in preparation for our creative writing trip to Prague in May 2007 (follow link for details). Klima writes very simply, with a wonderful carity and quiet authority.

In the first essay, entitiled with characteristic understated irony A Rather Unconventional Childhood, he writes of his childhood which coincided, in Eastern Europe, with the triumph of Nazism and his confinement (as a Jew) in the transit camp of Terezin. The wry, observational tone of the writing works to devastating effect:

‘I also experienced my first real friendships at this time which , as I later came to understand, were really only prefigurations of the adolescent infatuations that transform every encounter, every casual conversation into an experience of singular importance. All those friendships ended tragically; my friends, boys and girls, went to the gas chamber, all except one, the one I truly loved, Arieh, a son of the chairman of the camp prisoners’ self-management committee, who was shot at the age of twelve.’

His experiences in the camp, and later under the communist regimes of the post-war years, lead him to the conclusion that ‘fanaticism of any kind is a psychological precondition, a precursor, of violence and terror, and that there is no idea in the world good enough to justify a fanatical attempt to implement it.’

A thought that resonates today.

The Spirit of Prague and other essays, by Ivan Klima, translated from the czech by Paul Wilson (Granta Books, London, 1994)

Faik Bey Konitza in London

November 28 2006 is the 94th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence of Albania in 1912. In 1903-4 Faik Bey Konitza, one of Albania's greatest scholars and writers, was resident at 3 Oakley Crescent in Islington, London.

Here he continued to edit and publish, under the pseudonym Thrank Spirobeg, the dual language (French/Albanian) periodical Albania that he had founded in Brussels in 1897. He contributed bitingly sarcastic articles on what he saw as the cultural backwardness and naivety of his compatriots.

Albania helped to spread awareness of Albanian culture and the Albanian cause across Europe, and was highly influential in the development and refinement of Southern Albanian prose writing, which in turn would form the basis of modern Albanian literary language (gjuha letrare). In the words of the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Konitza ‘turned a rough idiom of sailors’ inns into a beautiful, rich and supple language.’

Whilst in Brussels Konitza had corresponded with Apollinaire regarding an article published by the poet in L’Européen. When Apollinaire came to London seeking to regain the affections of Annie Pleyden, an English governess he had met and fallen in love with in Germany, he stayed with Konitza at Oakley Crescent.

Apollinaire published a memoir of Konitza in the Mercure de France on 1 May 1912, which begins ‘Of the people I have met and whom I remember with the greatest pleasure, Faik Bey Konitza is one of the most unusual.’ He recalls that:

‘we would have lunch the Albanian way, which is to say, endlessly … The lunches were so long that I could not visit a single museum in London, as we would always arrive when the doors closed,’

and the attention and care with which Konitza edited his articles:

‘meant that the journal always came out very late. In 1904, only the issues for 1902 appeared; in 1907, the issues for 1904 came out at regular intervals. The French journal L’Occident is the only one that could compete with Albania in that respect.’

More on the literary history of London in London: City of Words. Follow the link for details.

B S Johnson

November 13. Today is the anniversary of the death of writer B.S. Johnson. On this day in 1973 he died by suicide at his home in Myddleston Square, Islington, North London.

Deeply influenced by writers such as Sterne, Joyce and Beckett, he was dedicated to technical innovation and experimentation in the novel form.

After the relatively conventional Travelling People (1963), his first novel, Johnson wrote Albert Angelo (1964), in which the fragmentary and episodic narrative concerning Albert, a frustrated architect who lives (as B.S. Johnson did at the time) in a rented room in an early Victorian square not far from the Angel, is interrupted by an authorial outburst, ‘an almighty aposiopesis’ in which Johnson revolts against the requirement of a novel to tell a story:

-I’m trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Clarement Square trying to say something about the writing and nothing being an answer to the loneliness to the lack of loving …

Bleak and exuberant by turns, in Albert Angelo Johnson also played with the physical form of the novel. The book was produced with a hole in page 149; this is later claimed to represent the knife-cut that killed Christopher Marlowe, and is also presented as a chance to read the future, through the past.

For more about writers in London, see London: City of Words

Blake, Jerusalem and Mayfair

203 years ago William Blake moved to 17 South Molton Street in Mayfair, central London, where he lived from from October 1803 until spring 1820.

Here he wrote and etched Milton (1804-8), Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804-20) and revised and extended Vala (1797-1804) into the more sexually explicit The Four Zoas, rediscovered in 1889.

Revised against a backdrop of war and bread riots, The Four Zoas offers a vision of renewal and restoration through a complex and private visionary system. Bad harvests, the Luddite protests of 1812 and 1813, and the intensification of the reform movement saw Blake more engrossed in Jerusalem. He saw the task of Jerusalem ‘To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes / Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity.’ An eternity he saw in the streets of London:

In Felpham I heard and saw Visions of Albion.
I write in South Molton Street what I both see and hear
In regions of Humanity, in London’s opening streets.

Blake saw London as ‘a Human awful wonder of God!’ and called for London and Albion to awake, evoking the wandering dead souls of Oxford Street from Hyde Park to Tyburn (the bones of Tyburn victims had been dug up in 1811 during the construction of Regent Street).

Jerusalem takes the form of journeys made by Los (Blake) through the darkness that is mythic London and Britain. Los essentially walks the boundaries of the city that Blake sees as ‘blind & age-bent begging thro the Streets / Of Babylon, led by a child’, coming to sit and listen to ‘Jerusalems voice’:

My Streets are my Ideas of Imagination.
Awake Albion, awake! And let us awake up together.

Read more in London: City of Words.
Follow the link for details.

Cock Tavern, Bow Street

Today's destination: The Cock Tavern in Bow Street,Covent Garden, London.

In June 1663 three court poets, Sir Charles Sedley, Sir Thomas Ogle and Sir Charles Sackville, later Lord Brockhurst, caused a riot by stripping naked and blaspheming from the balcony of the Cock Tavern.

Fined, imprisoned for a week and bound over to the keep the peace for three years, they nevertheless continued to get drunk at Oxford Kate’s (the proprietess of the Tavern).

In 1668 Pepys records them running naked through Covent Garden, fighting and getting locked up for the night. Sedley’s verse commemorated his all-night drinking and wenching:

Yet we will have store of good Wenches,
Though we venture fluxing for’t,
Upon Couches, Chairs, and Benches,
To out-do them at the Sport.

Read more in London: City of Words. Follow the link for details.

Iris Murdoch Hyde Park Walk

A walk in Hyde Park inspired by the novels of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Anax's Walk

Anax's walk - one of a series of walks in London inspired by the novels of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch

A series of walks in London relating to the novels of Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch Thames Walks

These Iris Murdoch Thames Walks trace the magnetic presence of the Thames in Iris Murdoch’s novels, from the Isle of Dogs to Cheyne Walk.

Walking the coast

At the weekend I was walking at Ringstead and White Nothe along the Dorset coast. The wind was billowing and the waves crashing against the cliffs far below.

Llewellyn Powys, who lived in one of the coastguard cottages at White Nothe in the 1920s, created a resonant body of essays inspired by his close knowledge and experience of the local landscape. In this extract he captures the excitement of winter at White Nothe:

On White Nose cliff after a November gale I have often picked up sea-weed, though the top of the headland stands 600 feet above the waves. The winds there would be so violent as to blow in the windows of the coast-guard cottages and to send slates from our roof flying over the ploughlands behind the houses as lightly as though they were sycamore leaves. And then, as soon as ever the wind went down, a sea mist would suddenly descend upon us enveloping us utterly …

The Distracted Preacher, a short story by Thomas Hardy, is also set nearby.

London: City of Words

A literary companion to London, exploring the lives, works and relationships of the writers who have lived in this city, from Chaucer to Zadie Smith

Tragedy and comedy

A final extract from Journey by Moonlight which so perfectly captures the 'mixed genre' that is life:

And he became quite serious. It all came home to him, and he saw the familiar ghastliness of the situation. In the middle of composing his suicide note they were pestering him to go to a christening. They burst in on him with their precious stupid business, the way people always burst in on him with their precious stupid business when life was sublime and terrible. And sublime and terrible things always happened to him when life was stupid and precious. Life was not an art-form, or rather, it was an extremely mixed genre.

Read this book!!

Keats and Journey by Moonlight

Another extract from Journey by Moonlight. Almost a meditation on literary travel. Mihaly is in Rome, walking in the little Protestant cemetery behind the pyramid of Cestius …

Mihaly was on the pointy of leaving when he noticed a small cluster of tombs standing apart in one corner of the cemetery. He went over and perused the inscriptions on the plain Empire-stones. One of them read simply, in English: Here lies one whose name is writ in water. On the second a longer text declared that there lay Severn, the painter, the best friend and faithful nurse on his death-bed of John Keats, the great English poet, who had insisted that his name should not be inscribed on the neighbouring stone under which he lay.

Mihaly’s eyes filled with tears. So here lay Keats, the greatest poet since the world began … though such emotion was somewhat irrational, given that the body had been lying there for a very long time, and the spirit was preserved by his verses more faithfully than by any grave-pit. But so wonderful, so truly English, was the manner of this gentle compromise, this innocent sophistry, that perfectly respected his last wishes but nonetheless announced without ambiguity that it was indeed Keats who lay beneath the stone.

For more on Keats see London: City of Words

Journey by Moonlight

A long train journey gave me the opportunity to really get stuck in to a remarkable book I found in the local ‘Help The Aged’: Journey by Moonlight by the Hungarian author Antal Szerb, published by the excellent Pushkin Press.

Written in the mid 1930s, it ranges across Europe, and is full of great lines such as: ‘In London November isn’t a month, it’s a state of mind.’

In the small Italian town of Foligno the central character, Mihaly, recalls (though not by name) Fitzrovia, ‘that rather forbidding bit of London behind Tottenham Court Road, just north of Soho, where the painters and prostitutes live who can’t afford Soho proper or Bloomsbury. I don’t know for certain, but I think it very likely, that this is the part of London where you find the founders of new religions, Gnostics and the seedier kinds of spiritualist. ...

'As I made my way through the dark streets looking for Roland Street in the fog - it was mist rather than fog, a white, transparent, milky mist, typical of November - I was so overcome by this sense of spiritual abandonment I was almost seasick’

For more on writing and London see London: City of Words

William Caxton and the birth of printing in England

The first in an occasional series of extracts from London: City of Words, the literary companion to London: In the 15th century the vernacular tradition of writing in English, as opposed to Latin or French, was further consolidated by the establishment of Britain’s first printing press, set up by William Caxton in a shop by Westminster Abbey.

Caxton had been apprenticed to Robert Large, a mercer and former Mayor of London. In 1462 he became governor of the English merchants operating in Bruges, the centre of a flourishing trade in cloth, manuscripts and paintings. He travelled widely and, encouraged by Margaret, Duchess of York, Edward IV’s sister, began translating Raoul le Fevre’s History of Troy, a popular French romance. Having learned the art of printing in Cologne, Caxton printed and published his translation of History of Troy in Brussels in 1474.

In 1476 Caxton returned to Westminster and on 29 September (Michaelmas) his name is recorded on the account roll of John Estency, Sacrist of Westminster Abbey, paying a year’s rent in advance for premises, where he set up his press.

The first known piece of printing in England, a Letter of Indulgence by John Sant, Abbot of Abingdon, issued from this press on 13 December 1476. The existence of this work remained unknown until February 1928, when it was discovered at the Public Record Office.

Here Caxton also produced the first book to be printed in England, The dictes or sayengis of the philosophres, translated from the French by Caxton’s friend and patron, Earl Rivers and completed on 18 November 1477. From this time a steady stream of work issued from the print shop, including most notably a translation of Boethius (1478) and the Chronicles of England (1480).

In 1482 Caxton moved the press to a house he rented at the south eastern end of Tothill Street. Here he printed the first editions of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1483) and Troilus and Criseyde (1484), as well as Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1483). He also issued poems by John Lydgate, the Benedictine monk of Bury St Edmund’s, and a version of Virgil’s Aeneid (1490).

Caxton had begun incorporating woodcut illustrations in his work as early as 1480, but these are used most strikingly in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur (1485). In total, nearly one hundred books were printed on Caxton’s press, including seventy-seven original works written in English, the majority of which he edited. He died in 1491.

After his death his press was maintained by his assistant Wynkyn de Worde who, in late 1500 or early 1501, moved the press to Fleet Street, to a house opposite Shoe Lane, at the sign of the Sun. Fleet Street’s status as a centre for printing dates from this time.

However, early readers made little distinction between printed books and manuscripts which were copied by hand. Indeed, they were not effectively seen as separate until the 1620s and manuscript books existed alongside printed books well into the seventeenth century.