HAMNET by Maggie O'Farrell - the novel and the film appraised by Celia Rees

"Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed ..."

Celia Rees is a leading writer for Young Adults with an international reputation. Her titles include Witch Child (shortlisted for the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize), Sorceress (shortlisted for the Whitbread - later Costa - Children's Book Award), Pirates!, Sovay, The Fool’s Girl and Glass Town Wars. The chance discovery of an old family cookery book has now taken her writing in a new and different direction. In 2012, she began researching and writing her first novel for adults, Miss Graham's Cold War Cookbook, paperback edition, Miss Graham’s War, published in 2021.

Twitter: @CeliaRees Instagram: @celiarees1

Like William Shakespeare, I am Warwickshire born and bred. I was born within the area of the Midlands which was once covered by the great Forest of Arden. My grandfather came from a village not many miles from Henley-in-Arden; his family had lived there for many generations: carpenters, blacksmiths, small farmers. Stratford-on-Avon would have been their nearest big town. As a child, I visited Stratford regularly, to shop, go for tea, walk by the river, feed the swans, visit the market, which is still held on Rother Street, just as it was when Shakespeare lived a couple of streets away. Stratford was very familiar to me and there was still an echo of the town that Shakespeare once knew. Less so now, the streets thronged with tourists, every other shop selling souvenirs, but down by the river on an autumn morning, walking in the graveyard of Holy Trinity Church with the Avon flowing below the wall, it’s still just about possible to sense a continuity of place with the man whose son is buried close by. Similarly, the Great Forest has dwindled to tufts and patches, some of the last precious remnants destroyed to make way for HS2, but Warwickshire remains an arboreal county and from certain perspectives, it is possible to look across the landscape and maintain the illusion that the Great Forest is still there.

Perhaps, sharing a county is the reason I’ve always felt an affinity to William Shakespeare. The Stratford boy, son of a tradesman, who went to London to make his way in the theatre, taking his town, his people, his county, the forest and trees, the fields, the river, the plants and animals with him. His origins were humble. Like most people of his sort, the only records are in official documents: birth, marriage, death, a Will, the purchase of property. The bare facts of a life. The rest is conjecture. For me, this makes it possible to glimpse the man behind the towering genius. This gave me permission to make him a character in The Fool’s Girl. I had the idea while watching an outdoor performance of Twelfth Night by the river, a stone’s throw from the Royal Shakespeare Company Theatre. The production was in a natural amphitheatre, a group of drama students performing on a wooden platform, changing behind bushes, much more in keeping with the theatre Shakespeare would have known than the grand edifice I could see through the trees. Twelfth Night is one of my favourite plays, the line ‘What country, friends, is this?’ one of my favourite lines. I spent much of the play lost in speculation: ‘What happens to them after the play ends?’ Although a Comedy, the play’s end is ambiguous, to say the least. By the time the players took their final bow, I had an idea and two characters: Violetta (Viola and Orsino’s daughter) and Feste, the clown. A long way from Illyria, they are performing tricks on Bankside. Shakespeare is on his way from the theatre to his lodgings. He stops to watch. He is in need of a clown, but more than that, he senses they have a story to tell and, like all writers, he collects stories. He invites them to the Anchor Inn and the rest is The Fool’s Girl.

Shakespearian scholarship has changed in recent years and changed radically. In attempting to discover the possible truths about a life lived beneath the historical records, scholars have turned to the social history of the period, reasoning that, setting aside his genius, Shakespeare was a man of his time who can be discovered through extrapolating known facts about what life was like for people of his station in Stratford and the life of the London theatre. This is where I went to do my research. James Shapiro’s 1599, Jonathan Bate’s Soul of The Age, Charles Nicholl’s The Lodger and above all, Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife told me what his life could have been like and in Germaine’ Greer’s case the life of his wife. A life that could have been lived, very probably was lived. As a fiction writer that was good enough for me and I think, good enough for Maggie O’Farrell.

I must admit to being a great admirer of Maggie O’Farrell, her skill in weaving one story into another, past into present, just as memory is woven through everyday consciousness. She has a powerful sense of place. In Hamnet, her meticulous research never dominates or overpowers the narrative, but subtly confirms the world her characters inhabit, what they see and sense around them. Their world is there on the page, fully formed, as it would be for them. Her characters were real people, familiar to us because one of them is universally recognised. We can visit their different houses, see where they lived but not how. We cannot know them. Maggie O’Farrell makes them known. Particularly, the wife, Anne. She calls her Agnes, which distances her from the stock character of Anne Hathaway (of Cottage fame) and makes her into someone else entirely. Agnes pronounced with a soft ‘g’, sounds very much like Anne. Names were not fixed in sixteenth century Stratford: Agnes for Anne, Hamnet for Hamlet and there we have the key to the book.

Maggie O’Farrell does not just re-claim Anne/Agnes, she makes her a powerful, rather mysterious woman, a daughter of the ever present forest, herbalist, hawker, bee keeper with the gift of second sight. It is these qualities that mark her out as ‘other’, mysterious, mis-trusted, seen as dangerous and as such powerfully attractive to the Latin Tutor who comes to teach her younger brothers. The tutor is, of course, William Shakespeare. He is never named in the book because he doesn’t have to be. The author doesn’t only reclaim Shakespeare’s wife, she reclaims his children, too. Susannah, the oldest and especially the twins Judith and Hamnet. The book begins with Hamnet searching the house and then for any of the women folk of the family who can care for his sick twin. His search is desperate, the reader knows that Judith has plague as does Hamnet, he’s seen the buboes on her neck, ‘A pair of quail’s eggs, under Judith’s skin. Pale, ovoid, nestled there, as if waiting to hatch.’ His search is intercut with the past, his parents’ courtship and marriage. later, his mother’s equally frantic attempts to save her child are interwoven with the birth of children, her husband’s move to London and the plague bacillus’ ominous journey from Alexandria to Stratford-on-Avon.

The story turns on the interchangeability of the twins, as if they are two aspects of one person, as it does in two of Shakespeare’s plays The Comedy of Errors and particularly Twelfth Night. ‘One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons,’ Orsino exclaims on seeing Viola’s twin. Hamnet changes places with Judith, takes her sickness onto himself. He dies, so that she will live. The profound sorrow felt by everyone at his death, contradicts the glib idea that a child’s life was cheaply held.

Shakespeare uses the alchemical power of his enormous talent to turn his beloved boy’s death into perhaps the greatest of his plays, Hamlet. Agnes goes to London to see the first performance. The whole book has been working towards this moment when Hamnet is brought back to life, if only for the span of the play.

Being such a big fan of the book, I was very much looking forward to the film and I was not disappointed. The stripping back of the complex narrative to a linear structure, allows more room for the story to develop from the initial courtship to the children falling ill. Jessie Buckley as Agnes and Emily Watson as her mother-in-law, Mary, bring alive the position of women at the centre of the everyday Elizabethan world, the harsh reality of their lives, the ordeal of childbirth, the constant threat to their children. The central tragedy was as harrowing on the screen as it was in the book, Jessie Buckley’s/ Agnes' frantic, inconsolable grief is visceral.

The most powerful part of the film lies in the performance of Hamlet in The Globe. Film is a child of theatre and it took a visual form to do justice to the scene. Part of the power lies in Agnes never having been in a theatre, never having seen a play, puzzling out what was going on, but the real power lay in the merging of the boy Hamnet into the young man Hamlet, played by two brothers Jacobi Jupe and Noah Jupe, and the effect this has on Agnes. Her reaching out to Hamlet and the reaching out of those around her, until the whole audience is reaching toward the stage says something about the power of theatre, the yearning to be part of it, for it to be true. Weeping audiences have become a cliché of the film, but when the young Hamnet turns for one last look at his mother before entering the black void at the centre of the painted backdrop, I must admit to shedding a tear.

Guest feature by Jamila Gavin: the research and influences behind MY SOUL, A SHINING TREE, Nero Prize category winner

"I knew that many Indians (1.5 million) had volunteered for the First World War, and I wanted their unknown stories to be represented."

Jamila Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas in Mussorie, India, in 1941. After the war, her family relocated to England where she spent the remainder of her childhood.

Those first experiences of life at that time, between two countries and cultures, became the main inspiration for much of Jamila's writing. She wanted to reflect the changing face of multicultural Britain, knowing the importance of every child being able to find their mirror image in books. Her first book, The Magic Orange Tree, was published in 1979, followed by numerous other short stories, collections and several novels including The Surya Trilogy (Egmont,) Coram Boy, (Egmont: winner of the Whitbread Children’s Prize 2000) and Blackberry Blue, (Random House.) She lives in Stroud. Find out more on her website.

'I have inherited two rich cultures which have run side by side throughout my life.'

Some books seem to leap, almost fully formed into the mind, with the characters waiting for you to notice them, name them, and build them into the narrative. Coram Boy started life like that, for which I researched on the hoof – so to speak – as the narrative took hold.

Although Coram Boy was fiction, it was set in a real period, with one or two historic characters, so research was essential. In any case, research is my main way of confirming that my plots work – and that it could have happened. This is especially the case with the so-called “historical” novel; you always take a chance, when writing fiction in the context of real history. There’s always someone who is bound to wag the finger, and say, “Aaah! That didn’t happen” or, “you got that wrong!” Then your whole book can lose its credibility. In any case, for me, to fully engage with the plot and the period, I need to satisfy myself that my scenario and characters were as thorough and as credible as could be in fiction.

My Soul a Shining Tree started life as a contribution to an anthology, Stories of WW1, commissioned by Tony Bradman. I knew that many Indians, (1.5 million) had volunteered for the First World War, and I wanted their unknown stories to be represented in this anthology. In researching, I came across Khudadad Khan, a British Indian soldier in the Regiment of the Duke of Connaught’s 129th Own Baluchis. It was his uniform that clinched it – especially the red trousers - my title was definitely going to be The Man in the Red Trousers. Everything else had to make that title viable.

The original short story, set in in WW1, involved a young ten-year old Belgian character, Lotte. Lotte lives with her family on a farm in the village of Gheluveldt in Flanders, where she encounters a man in red trousers.

But to make it a novel, as Tony Bradman later recommended, I needed to extend the scenario, which had started with Lotte and Khudadad Khan, to Ernst, an under-age German Cavalry hussar. I knew what I wanted Ernst’s character to be. However, to make sure his story was viable: I found myself seeking out a book I had heard of, by Robert Musil: The Confusions of Young Törless. This book confirmed what I knew was most likely to be the case in a German military boarding school where Ernst was sent: the bullying, the need to find a way to survive, and the friendships that developed. I also felt certain that the issues I had read about many years earlier in Tom Brown’s School Days, by Thomas Hughes, would also apply to Ernst in his school.

Finally, almost insisting on a voice too, was a walnut tree, which dictated the title. It became their shelter, and was also able to observe the characters and events into which they all got swept up. I even researched the walnut tree to be sure it could actually have grown in Flanders. The deeper I delved, the more I wanted to be sure of my facts, so I went to Gheluveldt, to see for myself its geography, and where there was highish ground – so essential to my story. The outcome was My Soul, a Shining Tree. The title is taken from a poem by Siegfried Sassoon, Tree and Sky – this poem and so many others by First World War poets were part of my emotional research.

My Soul, a Shining Tree is published by Farshore

Stories of WW1, where Khudadad Khan's story first appeared, is edited by Tony Bradman and published by Orchard. It includes stories by WR contributors Paul Dowswell, Adele Geras, Linda Newbery and Leslie Wilson.

ETTA LEMON: The Woman who Saved the Birds by Tessa Boase, reviewed by Linda Newbery

 

'The RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women ... but it was Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives."

Photograph by Saira Archer

Linda Newbery edits Writers Review. Her second novel for adults, The One True Thing, was published in 2025 as one of the launch titles for Writers Review Publishing. Her first adult novel, Quarter Past Two on a Wednesday Afternoon (in paperback as Missing Rose) was a Radio 2 Book Club Choice. In addition to her many fiction titles for young readers she has written This Book is Cruelty Free - Animals and Us, a guide to compassionate living for teenagers and adults. The Hide will be published this autumn. 

As I'm trying not to add to my already overflowing bookshelves, I attended Tessa Boase's event for Rye Arts Festival in September with no intention of buying Etta Lemon. But the talk was so packed, informative and entertaining that I couldn't resist, and bagged a copy before they'd all been snatched from the pile. 

As Tessa Boase points out, birdwatching - especially twitching - is still mainly the preserve of men. But the RSPB was started by the determined efforts of four women: Etta (Margaretta) Lemon, Emily Williamson, Eliza Brightwen and Eliza Phillips, names known to only a small fraction of the million-plus members of what's now one of our largest conservation bodies. Of the four, Boase says, it was always Etta's voice that spoke most clearly from the archives. Yet when she began her research, there was 'not a plaque, not a portrait at headquarters, not a mention in the canon .. It was as if (Etta Lemon) had been completely erased from the conservation narrative.' Part of Boase's achievement has been to right that wrong. Etta now has not only her plaque, and a portrait at RSPB headquarters, but this compelling tribute, too.

The trade in plumage, skins and entire birds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was horrific, not only because it depended on the mass capture and slaughter of birds in many countries, but also because of harsh conditions for the workers involved in dyeing and tweaking feathers for the millinery industry - a labour force that included children. Millinery was certainly big business; in 1891, Boase records, there were 548 milliners in Greater London alone. Hats were adorned with feathers, wings (classed as 'novelties') and even whole birds; an illustration shows a grotesque hat with what appears to be three budgerigars flattened and fastened around it. 

It's widely known that the great crested grebe was driven to the verge of extinction by fashionable greed for its showy plumage. Whereas once ostrich plumes had been de rigeur, the choice widened alarmingly. Describing a plumage sale in London in 1888, Boase writes: "Here were birds by the shipload." The plumes of snowy egrets were much in demand: an undercover reporter noted that 16,000 packages of these were on sale, along with seven or eight thousand parrots, over 12,000 tiny hummingbirds and "several hundred each of Hawks, Owls, Gulls, Terns, Ducks, Ibises, Finches, Orioles ..." Horrible to contemplate, especially with our hindsight knowledge of the drastic decline in bird populations.

Noting the weekly parade of feathers in church each Sunday, Etta, in her late teens, began her campaign by writing individual letters to 'Feather Bedecked Women', soon joining the Fur, Fin and Feather Folk run by Eliza Phillips, a considerably older woman. The Society for the Protection of Birds was founded in Manchester by another campaigner, Emily Williamson, and began as an all-female group in which members signed a pledge not to wear feathers. These two groups - The Fur, Fin and Feather Folk and the SPB - were brought together by the RSPCA which then, as now, saw itself as a moderate pressure group, distancing itself from 'extremists'. The amalgamation of the two, with Etta as Honorary Secretary, attracted attention, allegiance and - crucially - donations. However, support from highly-placed women led to an exemption for feathers from so-called 'game' birds, the aristocracy not wishing to jeopardise its favoured occupation, field shooting. (Hmm, not much change there, then.) In 1904, with royal approval granted, the SPB became the RSPB.

Boase draws parallels between Etta Lemon and her contemporaries Emmeline Pankhurst and Millicent Fawcett, examining the various approaches to campaign strategies. The suffragettes, drawn mainly from well-heeled women, were highly fashion-conscious and publicity aware. To Etta's distress, bird plumage featured prominently on their headgear - just look at the photographs of suffragette marches - and certainly on the hats of Emmeline Pankhurst herself. (In fact this book was first published as Mrs Pankhurst's Purple Feather.) There are other ways, too, in which Etta Lemon's campaign was at odds with the suffrage campaign. It seems barely comprehensible to us now that there could have been an anti-suffrage counter-protest, led by women, yet Etta was one of its members. Ironically, as Boase points out, those women who led this faction were bold, articulate and determined - qualities which would have admirably fitted them for politics. 

Although it's taken so long for Etta's conservation work to be acknowledged, she was a public figure in other ways: she became lady mayoress in 1911 when her husband Frank was appointed mayor of Reigate, and during the First World War she took on the management of the Redhill War Hospital, for which she was awarded MBE. 

If it's hard to imagine nowadays that it could have been acceptable to use the feathers of a bird of paradise for adornment, consider one of the modern equivalents: the high status of reptile-skin bags sold by Hermès and other designers, including the iconic 'Birkin' bag. Apparently the singer and actress Jane Birkin wanted her name removed from the item when she learned that crocodiles and alligators were reared for the purpose in bleak conditions and horribly killed, but the name has stuck. If you should want one (though I hope you don't), be prepared to pay upwards of £450,000 - though the real price, of course, is in animal suffering. On the plus side, London Fashion Week declared itself fur-free from 2024, with a ban on wild animal skins too. A ban on the use of wild bird feathers is yet to come. Fashion has a way to go before it can be called cruelty-free, but fortunately there are plenty of latter-day Etta Lemons pushing for change. (Step forward, PETA - People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, among other organisations.)

Tessa Boase is as engaging a writer as she is a speaker. Her book, an illuminating sweep of social history, illustrates the much-quoted maxim of the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

Etta Lemon: the Woman who Saved the Birds is published by Aurum

Linda Newbery's The One True Thing is published by Writers Review Publishing.

More bird-related reviews:

This Birding Life by Stephen Moss, reviewed by Nick Hodges

12 Birds to Save your Life - Nature's Lessons in Happiness by Charlie Corbett, reviewed by Linda Sargent

A Sweet Wild Note: what we hear when the birds sing by Richard Smyth, reviewed by Dawn Finch

Lost Animals, Disappearing Worlds - Stories of Extinctions by Barbara Allen, reviewed by Linda Newbery

Guest review by Nicki Thornton: THE IMPOSSIBLE THING by Belinda Bauer

 

"The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling."

Nicki Thornton is a bestselling children’s author who has recently published her first crime novel for adults. Little Bookshop of Murders is about Keera Munroe, who tries to escape her shady past by opening a bookshop in an idyllic village. But when Keera argues with a customer who then dies in mysterious circumstances, she’s forced not only to try to find out what really happened, but to confront the fact that even the loveliest places can be hiding the darkest secrets.

Little Bookshop of Murders is inspired by Nicki's twenty years of working in and with bookshops – perfect places for solving crime!

The Impossible Thing was my favourite read of 2025. Many of my favourite writers are those who use crime fiction to comment on times past and present and Belinda Bauer is one of the best, writing with so much humanity and dealing with big and tricky subjects with a nice line in humour as well as a mystery plot.

A break-in in the present day plunges two unlikely heroes into the historical, unexpectedly murky, obsessive, and very lucrative world of oology, or egg collecting.

I was delighted to see that one of the unlikely heroes is the return of one of my favourites of her previous characters, Patrick. Belinda Bauer won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year with Rubbernecker, another absolute cracker of a story and one I’m always recommending, where a young autistic man, Patrick, signs up for an anatomy class examining a corpse to determine cause of death. Smart but socially inept, Patrick suspects murder. I was thrilled to see Patrick featuring again.

Told in a dual-timeline, The Impossible Thing starts in the 1920s when egg-collecting was both legal and huge. Obsessed and fanatical rival collectors were in desperate competition to have a rare egg to show-off.

The historical timeline doesn’t focus so much on the collectors, but on a group of Yorkshire farmers discovering they have new source of wealth – in all the nests beneath their cliff-top farms. One family is desperate to be part of this new business of egg-collecting, but they have a farm atop a totally inaccessible cliff.

Tiny, brave and always hungry, Celie Sheppard risks her life going over a cliff no one else will dare. She discovers a near mythical red egg, the Impossible Thing. Celie’s bravery changes the fortune of her entire family and everyone connected to her.

A greedy collector knows a red egg is going to be laid every year, and over time will form into an incredible collection, because a nesting guillemot will return to the same cliff nest every year. Each mother lays eggs with distinctive markings so they know which egg is theirs. Of course, if they're collected, none will ever hatch. Every year each chick will be killed. I particularly love that Belinda Bauer weaves the consequences for the birds into her narrative and shows how birds are also innocent victims of greed and ego.

From the wild cliffs to stuffy gentlemen’s clubs in London to council estates, protected woodland nests and the hidden back rooms of a natural history museum, the story loops between the timelines and what happened to those rarest of rare eggs. Patrick and his friend are unwittingly drawn into the now underground, present-day world of egg collecting and all its hidden dangers.

Belinda Bauer triumphantly weaves both timelines together. Crime, mystery, family drama, romance, tragedy, characters you wish you could stay with and the consequences of wildlife trafficking, all is delivered in an enthralling way as the dots are connected as things get increasingly thrilling. I did not want the book to end.

The Impossible Thing is more than just a perfectly plotted thriller, it’s a masterpiece of storytelling. I’m really hoping it will win a lot of awards this year. I encourage everyone to seek out and read it.

The Impossible Thing is published by Bantam.

Nicki Thornton's Little Bookshop of Murders is published by Chimneys Publishing.

Guest review by Graeme Fife: GOD'S SECRETARIES - the Making of the King James Bible, by Adam Nicolson

 

"Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all."

Graeme Fife is a regular reviewer here. He has written many plays, stories, features and talks for radio, stage plays and articles for newspapers and magazines, and is a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4's From Our Own Correspondent. He's the author of a string of books - children's stories, biography, works of history and fiction. His novel of the French Revolution, No Common Assassin, tells the story of Charlotte Corday. His new novel, Memory's Ransom, a compelling wartime story, is published by Conrad Press.

*

tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (Lucretius De rerum natura)

‘I have glorified God in Greek and Latin, the consecrated languages spoken by the Lord on Earth’: Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno)

Many of us grew up with the sonorities of the King James Bible attuning our ear to the glories of the English language. Nicolson tells a story not only of the remarkable process of rendering the original Greek and Hebrew in what was, effectively, an entirely new language, he broadens his canvas to create a sharp portrait of the England into which James I of Scotland came as successor to Elizabeth I, under whose aegis the turbulence of religious division and factional rivalry had extended a reign of terror, the vicious excesses of extremism visited on the people of a nation subject to the caprices of a succession of bigoted monarchs dealing with vicissitudes of creed and the challenge of external enemies beholden to a different faith and pretended universal church.

The James Bible was not the first vernacular edition of the sacred text and many former translators had suffered vicious intolerance for their desire to make the Bible available to all God’s children, releasing it from the stranglehold of Latin. James, his childhood blighted by neglect and the persecution visited on his mother, was an awkward, socially inept man but a man of books, quick in temper but studious in manner. Under his immediate supervision, a gathering of groups of scholars set about rendering the Bible in a language which would make scripture available to be read in church and intelligible to every listener. Nicolson’s account of how this highly complex operation evolved and succeeded is riveting. He explores not only the process of translation per se, but the interaction of scholars in all their egocentricities, vanities, personal likes and dislikes. How to coordinate the work of teams of Translators – the approving capital was added at the time – to produce an integral work? It was a fiendishly difficult task and I quote one example only of many to illustrate how beautifully they succeeded in evincing a melodious and accurate translation based on ‘heard rhythm’ the majesty of a new English matching the majesty of the sentiment enshrined in scripture itself, but also a plain simplicity and directness, which delivered to the people as a whole a call to and retaining their attention. ‘Behold: I tell you a mystery…’

James came to a country riven with faction and disagreement, himself very shortly the target of a group of Catholic fanatics who wished to restore their faith to the land and its people: the gunpowder conspirators. The new King sought peace and consensus, to be, as it were, the sun that shone on all as against the effect of other faiths which kept people in ‘ignorance and darkness’.

Studied reference was made to those versions which had preceded this new rendition and I don’t quote the Tyndale here, let Nicolson make his own assessment, but the new reading delivers what he calls ‘a pace of deliberate and magisterial slowness … as solemn and orderly as the beginning of a steady and majestic march’. These are word written to be heard, remember, for their simplicity of effect and for their emotional power: ‘and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

Now, in the Hebrew the word means ‘surface’ but at the time in English that meant ‘the superficies or upper part’ and thereby drains any sense of the deep force of the creative power deployed by the Demiurge and ‘face’ has, as Nicolson nicely stresses ‘a rich plain Englishness to it’. That is, above all, the beauty of this Bible, the move away from the denser, often tangled diction of the contemporary dramatists to the language which would, later, inform so much of the homespun diction of the American founding fathers and on to the work of a novelist like Melville, a glorious, heartfelt simplicity which gives, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg address such emotional strength, even its melodious sway. Moreover, punctuation used as a sort of musical notation, rests and pauses to increase the dramatic effect in recital.

There are anecdotes aplenty and I particularly enjoyed the tale of one of the Translators, Miles Smith, Bishop of Gloucester – and most were, as well as eminent scholars and linguists, in holy orders - being so bored by a sermon that he walked out and made for the ale-house. Some were insufferable bores and pedants themselves but, in sum, they produced an astonishingly fine work which no other version rivals. T S Eliot said of the New English Bible (yawn) that it ‘astonishes in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic’. It’s flat and entirely lacks the sensitive concentration on words that any true translation absolutely requires; it also lacks soul and musicality, both of which inform the James Bible. As a clarion for peace in a quarrelsome, fissile realm, what better?

There were objectors – this was religion - and Nicolson relates the arguments dispassionately with perception, in lively writing: deft portraits of characters, strengths, quirks and all. As for James, a man of books himself – he once said that he would be glad to be held captive along with the other chained prisoners in a library of protected books – his inspiration and authority unleashed a work of English in what some regard to be its apogee of style.

God's Secretaries is published by Harper Perennial

More of Graeme's choices:

The Mighty Dead - Why Homer Matters, also by Adam Nicolson

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan

The Go-Between by L P Hartley

Special feature by Paul Dowswell: THRILL POWER - in praise of 2000 AD

 

"Despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something  essentially benign about 2000 AD ..."

Paul Dowswell's journey from foolish youth to mithered old codger is near to its end. In between these two points he has written some books and hopes to write some more. His website can be found here. 

A 2000 AD cover from 1983. Here, the unfortunate Bizmo Klutz, who is already 80% bionic parts, falls into a radiation pit. His human remains dissolve, leaving his malfunctioning bionic frame to set out on a quest for human parts …

I have never liked the Superheroes of the Marvel or DC Comic world – Superman, Spiderman, the X-Men et al. I heartily agree with comic author Alan Moore who described this genre as ‘revenge fantasies of the impotent’, although I don’t think the phrase is his own. I can’t be doing with the endless Superhero movies either, although their huge popularity does suggest I’m in a minority. I always had a soft spot for the Beano, though. And graphic novels like Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

I’ve been in ‘Swedish Death Cleaning’ mode these past few months – clearing out our overstuffed attic, and I was fascinated to find two boxes of a moth-eaten sci-fi comic I’d squirrelled away decades ago called 2000 AD. First published in the misty 1970s, by 1980 the comic had really hit its stride and was popular with secondary school kids. I was introduced to it in the early 1980s by my younger brother Alan and liked it so much I bought it every week for the next three or four years, despite being well into my 20s.

2000 AD is mostly famous for its flagship character Judge Dredd, a near-future Judge/Jury/Executioner tasked with keeping law and order in Mega-City-One, a huge and chaotic conurbation making up most of the east coast of the United States. Post nuclear war, and outside of a handful of other vast cities, the North American continent is now a howling hellscape known as The Cursed Earth. The vastly overcrowded cities aren’t much better and ‘The Judges’ are tasked with bringing judgement to law breakers. The comic strip has spawned two films you may be familiar with. The first, a 1995 effort with Sylvester Stalone in the title role, is breathtakingly dreadful. I’d rather be boiled alive than watch it again. Another go, in 2012, is much better, and Karl Urban plays Dredd in a manner more in keeping with the spirit of the comic book. Both films regularly pop up on Netflix and other platforms. If you can bear the graphic violence, the Karl Urban one – Dredd – is very watchable. In truth, both films were hobbled by the fact that the original character is so obviously based on Dirty Harry era Clint Eastwood, and by the time Dredd was popular enough to be made into a film, Eastwood was way too old to play him.

Typically pithy dialogue from the Judge Dredd story ‘The Apocalypse War’ where America goes to war with the 22^nd Century version of the Soviet Union.  

Read again, forty years later, the Dredd stories remain the most engaging in the comic, not least the extraordinarily creepy tale of Judge Death and his three companions: Fire, Fear and Mortis – a parallel-world quartet of unnerving Judges whose mission in life is to wipe out all living things. One story ends with Judge Death captured inside of the mind of the Psychic Judge, Anderson (also featured in the illustration above), and both are then encased in a single plastic cocoon to prevent Death escaping – something to give any child nightmares.

2000 AD’s most terrifying baddies, the four Dark Judges.

But Dredd could also be funny and topical. Here below are a few frames from ‘High Society’, a story where low-life slum dwellers are relocated by Mega City One’s municipal housing department to a posh orbiting satellite for the ultra-wealthy. Another story pits two huge social housing blocks against each other in an all-out war. The buildings are named Carole Munro Block and Vince St Clair Block – the aliases Coronation Street’s Jack and Vera Duckworth adopt when they both surreptitiously sign up to a video dating agency in 1983. And I loved the story about Carl Heinz Pilchards-In-Tomato-Sauce Clayderman – a name inspired by the avant-garde composer Stockhausen and the French easy-listening pianist. At a classical music concert in Mega-City One, the composer turns on his audience and starts murdering them in a variety of ludicrous ways which coincide with his music. Judge Dredd, of course, is in attendance and intervenes…

One Judge Dredd episode from 1984 sees a high society orbital suburb occupied by rehoused slum dwellers from Mega-City One. 

Like its 1980s contemporary the music magazine Smash Hits, the comic was cleverly designed to make the reader feel like they were part of a secret society with its own insider slang. The editor was an alien from Betelgeuse called Tharg (of course he was) forever reassuring his readers their stories were charged with ‘thrill-power’. 2000 AD even invented its own pretend swearwords ‘Grud’, ‘Drokk’ and ‘Stomm’, like ‘Frak’ in Battle Star Galactica and ‘Pigging’ in Jack Rosenthal’s The Dustbinmen.

Reading again from a distance of 40 years it’s easy to see how many of the strips were borrowed from other sci-fi films and books. ‘Rogue Trooper’ for example, owes a debt to Blade Runner, as does ‘Robo-Hunter’, which also comes with a large dose of Sam Spade. ‘Mean Arena’ was clearly inspired by Rollerball. Inspiration also came from history. In ‘Nemesis the Warlock’ a strangely horse-like alien defends his fellow extra-terrestrials from Spanish Inquisition style human space explorers intent on genocide. The stories, illustrated in a detailed steam-punk style, also have more than an echo of the Nazi racial state, with its evil baddies banging on about ‘keeping pure’.

Plagiarism, or maybe it’s ‘homage’, also abounds in Alan Moore’s ‘DR and Quinch’ a cheeky lift from National Lampoon’s OC and Stiggs, itself a deplorable but amusing tale of two repellent high school students from the Eisenhower era who create Olympic standard mischief. Moore’s version is set in the far future and features two bizarre aliens getting up to malevolent high-jinx on their home planet.

Waldo ‘DR’ Dobbs and Quinch fall foul of Judge Thorkwung in the episode ‘DR and Quinch Go Straight’.

But my favourite story of all takes inspiration from E.T. and, incongruously, Boys from the Blackstuff. Running in 1983, ‘Skizz’ is another invention of Alan Moore and reading this again I still found it engaging and moving. Here an alien interpreter from some far-off planet’s diplomatic corps crash-lands in the West Midlands and is taken in by two kindly and unemployed Brummies, Roxy and Loz. They help him learn to speak English and adjust to life on Earth while also keeping him out of the clutches of a brutal South African policeman who bears a passing resemblance to PW Botha, who is working in league with the British military.

Stranded Interpreter Zhcchz (Skizz) is taken in by kindly Brummies Roxy and Loz. Uneasily adjusting to Earth food and atmosphere he vomits frequently, an event he thinks the Earthlings call ‘Flippi-Neck’. 

The copies I have were produced during the high tide of Thatcherism and fortunately 2000 AD was not on the radar of the Daily Mail. The insult ‘Woke’ was, of course, decades away from coinage, but they would have gone into orbit at the comic’s anti-establishment stance. Almost all the characters are either brutal representatives of a repressive state or men and women who have been done wrong by authority.

Like Viz, the quality of the artwork and stories was variable and sometimes you had to sift through a lot of dross to get to the gold. The weekly schedule put tremendous demands on the artists who often produced highly detailed work, so they were rotated to keep to the deadlines. But despite the plainly terrifying nature of some of the stories and characters, there was something essentially benign about 2000 AD. Occasionally a strip would feature editor Tharg and his office ‘droids’ – robot caricatures of the staff and freelancers – and in one story the office is infested by mice. The staff buy mousetraps in an effort to exterminate them but Tharg is having none of it. He opens a space portal, gets out his magic flute, and leads them across space to a planet entirely made of cheese. The snowflake!

2000 AD was formerly published by IPC Magazines Fleetway Publications and currently by Rebellion Developments

SPECIAL FEATURE Q&A: David Breakell talks to John Case about THE ALCHEMIST OF GENOA

 

"Writing as a lawyer, employing clarity and precision, is very different from writing a thriller, where what you don’t say is just as important. It took me a long time to unlearn the way a lawyer drafts a document …"

David Breakell was born and grew up in Sussex. After his schooldays, he read law at Worcester College, Oxford. Despite spending too much time on student journalism, filmmaking and fencing for the university, he somehow managed to get his degree. After hitchhiking around the US for a summer, he tried various other jobs before deciding to qualify as a solicitor. His legal career culminated in nearly 20 years as a banking partner in a global law firm. David is married with grown-up children and lives close to the sea at Pett Level, East Sussex. His first novel, The Alchemist of Genoa, was published in 2025 and he's currently working on the second in the series - find out more on his website.

Training initially as an actor, John Case spent his early 20s working in theatre in the UK, before moving into the Arts and Heritage Sector, working as a senior manager with Surrey County Council’s Cultural Service Department, covering Performing Arts, Libraries and Heritage. For four years John was Festival Director of the Rye Arts Festival, one of the South-East’s largest multi-arts festival, held every September since 1971. 

This interview was first published in Rye News in October 2025.

John Case: Your book has been recently published, to great reviews. Tell us a little bit about it. 

David Breakell: The setting of my debut novel is the city of Genoa in 1587, in other words, one year before the launch of the Spanish Armada. The threat of war is in the background, but it’s not the subject of the story. My focus is on the lives of the men and women in one particular Genovese family: the events of this turbulent year are mostly seen through their eyes. They are a banking family and through them we also see how money itself was a secret weapon in that historic conflict. But it’s not just about financial machinations: the human dimension – love, honesty, religious faith, or their opposites – also drives the action

JC: Where did you get the idea for the story?

DB: I remember that it was not long after the banking crisis in 2008 – the Lehman Brothers crash, in which I was involved professionally – that I read an old history book which hinted that some sort of credit crunch (they didn’t call it that, but I recognised the symptoms) had happened around the time of the Armada. It was the proverbial light bulb moment as far as the idea of the book was concerned.

JC: Why a wealthy banker as your principal character? It’s not an obvious hero choice.

DB: That was the attraction – and the challenge. Nico Castello emerges from the story as an honourable man, unafraid of sticking to his principles despite the cost, but he was not the most obvious choice perhaps, save for the fact that I understood his business world. And as the novel evolved, I found him the most interesting character to write about.

JC: How much of the story is based on fact?

DB: Well, I couldn’t put a percentage on it, but certainly all the background events, like the manner of Mary, Queen of Scots’ execution, the Vatican’s loan to Philip of Spain and the delays in launching the Armada, are factual. The city of Genoa plays a key part and if you visit its historic centre, you’ll still see many of the locations I describe. And of course, many of the characters are historical persons, for example, Walsingham, Archbishop Sauli of Genoa and King Philip and his Foreign Minister, Idiaquez.

JC: Was your previous career as a lawyer an advantage or a disadvantage?

DB: Both! I spent my professional life, 35-plus years, crafting words on paper of course, but at the same time, writing as a lawyer, employing clarity and precision, is very different from writing a thriller, where what you don’t say is just as important. It took me a long time to unlearn the way a lawyer drafts a document…

JC: When did you take up creative writing?

DB: In my 50s – I guess it’s never too late to start! I began the novel several years ago, but it evolved into something very different over time.

JC: Who are your own favourite writers, in historical fiction or generally?

DB: I read historical fiction, naturally – but also spy fiction and some crime fiction. John Le Carré’s writing is the absolute pinnacle as far as I’m concerned, but there are several other writers who excel at the spy genre. In crime, it’s got to be Kate Atkinson, whose writing never fails to impress. The first chapter of When Will There Be Good News? is my all-time jaw-dropping opening. In historic fiction, someone who recently read my book compared it to Robert Harris and C J Sansom, which I found very flattering.

JC: What are you reading currently?

DB: Robert Harris’ latest novel, Precipice. Harris can take a well-known character or period and show it to us through a very different lens. I hope that readers will feel my own novel has done something similar.

JC: Is there a sequel in the pipeline? Is it set in Genoa?

DB: Yes. And partly. You’ll have to wait and see for the rest!

JC: Where can people buy a copy of your book? 

DB: The paperback is available from Amazon and other online retailers, or a copy can be ordered via any bookstore. Or you can order directly through my website. An e-book is also available from Amazon and, if you’re a subscriber, through KindleUnlimited.

The Alchemist of Genoa is published by Dower House Books.

See David's review of Robert Harris' Precipice

and of Kate Atkinson's Death At the Sign of the Rook.