Alice Spawls is co-editor of the LRB.
At the carol concert in St Martin-in-the-Fields, two weeks before Christmas, shoppers and squawking babies filled the church’s elegant interior. It’s a sort of Christmas cake of a building, with dark panelling and white stucco icing, but the only hints of the season were the looping boughs of fir hung from the galleries. Outside, however, hundreds of men in Santa suits (who...
‘Jai vu une robe charmante, faite de bouchons de liège,’ said Apollinaire. He can’t have been walking through Mayfair, where the autumn fashions have just been unveiled. If there’s anything to be cheerful about as the nights creep in, it’s the sudden appearance of cashmere and velvet that it’s still too hot to wear. The season comes to the...
In Almería in the heat of summer, the temperature reaches 40 degrees, and no rain falls. It looks like a lunar landscape: parched, craterous, unreal. In the distance, white tents incubate tomatoes, artificially hydrated. Gas canisters stand in the sand like strange desert plants; cargo ships float past to Greece. Against this largeness, Sofia Papastergiadis, postgraduate anthropology...
The story of a village is inscribed on its tombstones. Families are listed by names and dates, their marriages, births and declines, the work done and the long struggle; how someone was shot accidentally, walking across a field, or succumbed to illness, or simply fell asleep. The village’s history is in its street signs and buildings, the etymology of its name and what might be left of a mill or forge, and the church, with its one good stained glass window, its few marks of distinction, coats of arms and hassocks embroidered with local signifiers. In the church or by the roadside, the names of another set of the dead are inscribed: those whose bodies never returned to their parish; the war dead. But 53 villages in England and Wales have no First World War memorial because all their men returned. In his King’s England guidebooks of the 1930s, Arthur Mee calls them the Thankful Villages. Fifty-three doesn’t seem like very many. Only 14 are ‘doubly thankful’, and lost no men in the Second World War either.
British Vogue was born in September 1916, when German U-boats prevented the Americans from transporting their edition to British shores. Condé Nast, who had bought the US version in 1909, wasn’t taking any risks by launching a British edition: American Vogue was the second most popular reading material in the trenches (after the Saturday Evening Post) and that was just the men. Its US editor, Edna Woolman Chase, claimed they liked the frills and furbelows: ‘a vastly different diet from mud and uniforms, boredom and death’.
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