Tom Crewe

I’ve​ been home only once since Christmas 2019. Home with a capital ‘H’ is the North-East of England, where I grew up and where my parents still live. The government’s most unambiguous message during Covid – ‘Stay at Home’ – contains, for a lot of people, an ambiguity: staying at home has often meant staying away from Home. In truth, I’m...

‘Watching a good plot,’ Penelope Fitzgerald wrote in the LRB (21 February 1980),

is like watching something alive, or if it is adroit and sinuous enough, something struggling for life. Between the once-born and the twice-born plot (which makes the reader, even if he is reading it for the twentieth time, want to interfere at every stage), the difference, of course, is great. But I am...

Interviewees describe brown hotels, leaking holiday cottages, caravans, walks and pebbled beaches and fields. Some rapturously, some ruefully. ‘I remember thinking, as we arrived at the stationary caravan at the far end of a field in Cornwall, maybe this will be the year when it’s going to be exciting or exotic,’ one says. If you did venture overseas, overcoming material and psychological barriers (‘Darling, going abroad is vulgar,’ John Mullan’s mother told him), you usually carried Britain with you – tinned. When Eleanor Oldroyd and her family went to France in 1972 they took a can of baked beans for every day of the holiday, 21 in all; her mother fitted them ‘around the wheel arch in the boot, along with the tinned mince and tinned Campbell’s soup’. When Juliet Gardiner went to Le Bourget on a school exchange, she presented her penfriend’s mother with a box of cornflakes. Still, Abroad could be a revelation. Harry Ritchie, from Kirkcaldy, went to Majorca in 1969: ‘Being able to take your clothes off for a holiday, rather than having to put more on: that was wonderful in itself.’

‘Women have always written about men,’ Jane Miller remarks in Women Writing about Men (1986),

but they have needed to be extremely circumspect about doing so. To read as a woman is to confront that circumspection as a mode of being and a kind of language … Of course, I too want to hear what women writers have been telling us about women. I am almost certain, though, that it...

Some of us​ are trapped all our lives. This is the lesson of Beryl Bainbridge’s novel Injury Time, first published in 1977. It is a sort of dinner party farce, except better. The aptly named Edward Freeman asks his friend Simpson and Simpson’s wife, Muriel, to spend the evening with him and his mistress, Binny, at Binny’s house. Binny, a divorced single mother, is...