Acknowledgements

First off, thanks to So Mayer for being a generous, lucid and encouraging first reader. I would also like to give huge thanks to Nicholas Royle, as well as Christopher and Jennifer Hamilton-Emery, for taking a chance with this strange little book.

Thanks to all of those who have read the book along its way and offered guidance and support: Gabriel Bier Gislason, Jake Franklin, Luke Chattaway, Maia Jenkins, Patricia Palmer, Theo Whitworth (for Orlando) and Toby Mundy. Thanks to Jason Burley, for his friendship and for making me into a bookseller.

My deepest gratitude to my dad, to Liz, to Mike, to my brothers and my sisters for all their love and support.

Most of all, thanks to Lucy.

 

❦

 

Chapter 2

For the description of the American National Exhibition in this chapter, I owe a debt to Francis Spufford’s wonderful book, Red Plenty.

 

Chapter 7

At the beginning of this chapter the openings of two novels by Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, are quoted and conflated.

 

Chapter 8

The short story by Jorge Luis Borges described in this chapter is ‘The Library of Babel’, in Andrew Hurley’s translation.

 

Chapter 12

The last clause of the last sentence in this chapter is a quote from ‘Fern Hill’, by Dylan Thomas © The Trustees for the Copyrights of Dylan Thomas, published in The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (Weidenfeld & Nicholson).

 

Chapter 14

This chapter quotes freely, wantonly and rapturously from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

 

Chapter 19

The long quote in this chapter is from ‘Astrophil and Stella 1’, by Sir Philip Sidney. There are also quotes from ‘Prayer (I)’ by George Herbert and ‘An Essay on Man’ by Alexander Pope.

 

Chapter 20

This chapter quotes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116.

 

Chapter 23

This chapter quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and King Lear, Dylan Thomas’s ‘Fern Hill’, W. H. Auden’s ‘Words’, and makes very liberal use of Ancrene Wisse, a manual for medieval anchoresses of unknown authorship.

 

Chapter 25

The description of Landscape With the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder given in this chapter contains a quote from ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ by W. H. Auden. There is also a quote from Medbh McGuckian’s poem ‘Venus and the Rain’, reproduced by kind permission of the author and the Gallery Press from Venus and the Rain (1994).

 

Chapter 28

This chapter quotes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18.