Brocaded 
Robert Macfarlane
- The Mulberry Empire by Philip Hensher
Several years ago, Philip Hensher decided that he wanted ‘to do something impossible: to write a 19th-century novel’. To that end, he has composed each of the many chapters of The Mulberry Empire, which fictionalises the First Afghan War of 1839-42, in imitation of a 19th-century prose writer. He has gleefully scrumped the styles of Dickens, Surtees, Tolstoy, Custine, Thackeray, Eliot, Austen, Gogol and possibly dozens of others – ‘possibly’, because he never names the writers he’s pastiching: it’s up to the reader to identify them.
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Robert Macfarlane teaches at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination won the Guardian First Book Award.
Other articles by this contributor:
Read it on the autobahn · Vanishing Victorians
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