Helen McCarthy Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Helen McCarthy

Very sorry to read of the death of Sir Christopher Meyer, whom I had the good fortune to meet a few times. Author of a wonderful diplomatic memoir, DC Confidential, which revealed Alastair Campbell's immortal instruction to CM on his appointment to US... https://t.co/j6cjUYrDyf

Helen McCarthy

I have tickets for Ralph Fiennes performing Eliot’s Four Quartets in Cambridge next month: rejoice! BUT. I’ve never studied said poems & feel I should do some homework. Literary followers, what would be good introductory stuff to read?

Helen McCarthy

Reading James Hinton's Seven Lives from Mass Observation & so struck by 'Helen', whose politics shifted radically left in middle-age through influence of her counter-cultural children. Any other work on this? Would be such an interesting lens for re-writing the Sixties.

Out of stock

Helen McCarthy

@agnesjuliet There's a great line in Rachel Cusk, A Life's Work, where she asks a midwife if each breastfeed is meant to take so long, and the midwife says, 'why, is there somewhere else you need to be?'

Helen McCarthy

Hazel Carby was accused of lying about her Jamaican-born father's RAF war service by a teacher in the 1950s. Extraordinary passage from Imperial Intimacies (2019) describing the brutal force of this historical amnesia, forged in the everyday setting of the postwar classroom: https://t.co/UYw2XV0rO6

Helen McCarthy

Have just finished @JuliaLaite's The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey and it is a breathtakingly brilliant piece of historical scholarship & writing. I urge everyone to buy it and read it! https://t.co/2sAuFAYztR

Helen McCarthy

My cannot-put-down summer read of the moment is The Equivalents by @magsrdoherty (thank you @PeterMandler1 for the recommendation) It’s brilliant on the complexities of friendship & solidarity between creative & intellectually ambitious women in a male world (& so well-written) https://t.co/5A0Tc1FQz8

Helen McCarthy

For instance, I've found myself drawn towards themes of intimacy & close relationships in my work on Beatrice Webb & Margaret Cole, linked I'm sure at least in part to the intense meditations on these subjects prompted by lockdown & how the virus has affected my own life. 2/2

Helen McCarthy

Am reading & enjoying Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing, & idle googling reveals that the author was 69 when this, her debut novel, was published in 2018, following a career in zoology. I find this an immensely cheering fact.

Helen McCarthy

‘Because I’m going to be 78.’ As excuses for not waiting for archives to reopen before publishing go, Ann Oakley’s seems a good one (from preface to her new book, Forgotten Wives) https://t.co/U8Hvqsje7c