Hobbies

Reading and collecting books. Although I have a lifelong connection with libraries as both reader/borrower and member of staff in several positions, for my reading enjoyment I always buy books. My interests change from time to time but over the years have covered most subjects and hundreds of authors. Poetry is my go-to as it is something I can understand easily, essays and short stories I find fascinating and they often bridge the gap into novels by the same authors. 

Over the last year or so Ive been focusing on the writers of the  1920s and 1930s, on all sides of the political cauldron of those years, and attempting to understand the why of the times, its a fascinating intellectual challenge using primary sources. So the Bloomsbury Group is a core interest - although Virginia Woolf is the “star” author in her groundbreaking modernist styles, I actually prefer the poetry of Vita Sackville-West, Katherine Mansfieldis prose I enjoy plus Harold Nicolson’s  and Leonard Woolf’s political observations and ideas. At about the same time in history there existed the right-radicals of Imagism and Vorticism such as Ezra Pound, H.D. , Wyndham Lewis and Richard Aldington who I am also collecting and reading. And of course those who really understood the big picture like George Orwell. It spins through and beyond WW2 with Christopher Isherwood and Stephen Spender, both champions of the LGBTQ+ community. 

It is all very political, at first glance this is a paradox as I detest modern politicians , am completely detached from 21C politics and find it massively triggering, but the 1930s were so long ago, the writers dead and the events concluded (sort of) that I can study it safely. I always prefer first editions without commentary or later opinion as I am of the view that history should not be revised nor the values of those times criticised through 21C eyes. I love it when I can obtain author signed and inscribed copies, I feel the history itself in the physical book, how it was there at the time, often handled by the author and their friends. 

It will be no surprise that the collecting is not a cheap hobby but Ive had good fortune financially in the second half of my life so am able to buy the editions I desire in most cases. Ive a first edition of Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves in immaculate condition with its Vanessa Bell wrapper in my sites which if things go to plan should be achievable. 

ALICE

Reading 

Photography 

Jigsaw puzzles 

Art and crafts