The Lives of Others in 2009

Glancing through Hello magazine today at the dentist's, it occurred to me that we are all in thrall in one way or another to the attractions of celebrity. My own interest is less in the voyeurism of reality TV or glamour journalism than in memoir and biography but the motivation is similar. We all want to identify with success, whether to live vicariously a better, or more exciting life or just to share intimacies.

Such intimacies from people with a talent for humour can be particularly entertaining. Looking back on highlights of last year's reading, I enjoyed Roger McGough's Said and Done and Humphrey Lyttleton's It Just Occurred to Me, primarily for their amusing outlook on absolutely everything. They cheer you up. My life has also intersected with theirs, which is another reason for reading about certain people and not others. 

McGough grew up deep in Merseyside and went to a Catholic school a little bit like mine, on the other side of the Mersey. He was a mate of Arthur Dooley, an amazing Scouser who was a Communist with religious leanings when he sculpted Saint Anselm for our school entrance hall in the mid 1960s. I saw Roger McGough perform a couple of times in the 60s and 70s as part of The Scaffold, purveying  music and poetry popular among students and, briefly, on TV's Top of the Pops with their hit "Lily the Pink". The Liverpool Poets, of whom McGough was one, were just as famous as The Liverpool Sound. The other members of The Scaffold were Paul McCartney's brother Mike McGear and namesake John Gorman, who went to my old school. McGough is still to be heard on radio poetry programmes and as a continuity voice on Classic FM (how the mighty are fallen). And Humph was probably the most amusing (and oldest) presenter on radio, fronting I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue, an "antidote to panel games", which I have listened to for 30 years. I don't feel more important through these associations but I do feel enriched.

Equally enriching are well-written memoirs with an unusual tale to tell. Miranda Seymour's In My Father's House; an Elegy for an Obsessive Love is on one level a recent history of her family home at Thrumpton Hall, just outside Nottingham. As a piece of writing, though, it is remarkable in exposing a fractured relationship with an eccentric father, who was devoted not only to the ancestral home but also to motorbikes and young men friends he used to take as pillion passengers on night-time burn-ups down the M1 motorway. She employs her mother as a character in the story who is constantly challenging her interpretation of events, almost like in a drama.

It was the BBC dramatisation of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford that led me to re-read the book. It was a favourite of my mother's and, being set in the 1880s, describes real people who were alive when my grandparents were children. As an evocation of the past it is extraordinary. Flora Thompson had a vivid eye and ear for detail and I was fascinated to find the words of a song that her Oxfordshire villagers sang every year in the month of May that was included on a folk album I had just bought. Ordinary people living simply in changing times brought completely to life. Hence that dramatisation... 

Someone who has spent her life in drama is Sheila Hancock. Since watching her at an early age in The Rag Trade on TV I have been aware of Sheila for most of her career. I read her book about touring the country with the Royal Shakespeare Company many years ago, so I knew her talents didn't stop at acting. Her style is natural, honest and candid. Just Me, the story of her life after the death of her husband and fellow actor, John Thaw, is particularly moving. I'm sure we read biographies partly to be inspired by the lives of others. "Coping with bereavement is difficult but it can be done" is one implicit moral in this lovely book.

The last one I'll mention was less inspiring, although it was certainly meant to be. I bought Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson in 1971. Unfortunately, at 1400 pages, I just couldn't get around to reading it. For 38 years. I had taken a university module on Johnson and, after I left, probably thought the biography a bit academic. Johnson was indisputably a clever fellow but Boswell wants so much for us to believe it. I had to skip read I'm afraid. The 18th Century seems so unlike ours, especially the way educated people used Latin so much. The book is a documentary record of that century and it is tantalising to glimpse so many names we still recognise, like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Richard Sheridan and David Garrick. At least reading Boswell reminds us that biography fills in the human detail, however imperfectly, that history needs in order to be understood.