A WALK AROUND MY BOOKS

Nicholas

Murray

This page was updated 14 April 2008

 A Walk Around My Books

Thank you for joining me on this quick stroll through my twelve titles, listed over to the right here.

The story begins in 1993 when, after having published poems, articles, essays and reviews in a range of newspapers and magazines my first  book was published.  Its title was Bruce Chatwin and it was issued by the leading Welsh literary publisher Seren in a series edited by the poet and critic John Powell Ward called "Borderlines".  The series was devoted to writers who had a connection with the landscape of the Welsh Marches where I was then living and Bruce Chatwin - then at the height of his fame - was included on the strength of his novel, On the Black Hill. Because of Chatwin's fame, together with the fact that the official biography by Nicholas Shakespeare would take another decade to appear, my book did very well and had the field more or less to itself for ten years.

My next book, published three years later in 1996, was a biography of the Victorian poet and critic, Matthew Arnold.  The great Arnold scholar, Kenneth Allott, who taught me at Liverpool University, first woke my interest in Arnold
whose passion for poetry and whose role as a public intellectual chimed in with my interests.  It was very well received and the most appreciative review was by Mick Imlah in The Observer who described it as: "A lucid and balanced biography...both comprehensive and compact, neither reverential nor easily scornful, and written with accuracy and charm."

This was followed in 1997 by a short publication from the British Library, the text of a lecture given in 1997 while I was Gladys Krieble Delmas Fellow at the Library's Centre for the Book.  In this lecture I made connections between Arnold's writings on culture and the current state of British culture.  It was the first of several essays and reviews I wrote around this time on the same subject.  It won't be the last.

My next biography appeared in 1998 and was titled World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell. Another personal passion, Marvell's poetry had delighted me since I was an undergraduate and, challenging as it was to write the life of a poet so full of mystery and whose life lacked documentation for key periods, the book was well recieved.  The fearsome critic Eric Griffiths in the Evening Standard wrote: "Nicholas Murray persuasively conveys the perpetual alertness of the man and his work."

My next book was quite unpredicted (especially by me!).  Having produced three intensively-researched literary biographies I suddenly found myself wanting to release a more personal and creative vein of writing and so A Short Book About Love appeared in 2001.  It was a deliberately unusual book, mixing fact and fiction, and combining three elements: reflections from literature and philosophy on the theme of love, autobiographical passages, and a light-hearted re-working of the Tristan and Iseut legend.  It was meant to be light and funny but very serious at the same time and the reviewers seem to have liked this "ludic" interlude.  Boyd Tonkin in The Independent said "this multi-faceted little jewel is a reader's delight" and The Independent on Sunday called it "profound, warm and witty".  The writer and critic Paul Binding said that it was "reminiscent of Kundera and Theodore Zeldin, but owing nothing to anybody but himself".

My next book was a return to biography and Aldous Huxley: An English Intellectual was published in 2002.  Jeanette Winterson in The Times wrote the most enthusiastic review: "The research is immaculate...the writing is lively and sympathetic...this excellent biography has come at the right time."  John Gray, in The New Statesman called it "Wonderfully balanced and unfailingly interesting."  It was shortlisted for the Marsh Biography Prize.

My second novel followed in 2003 and it was called Remembering Carmen, a story of love, betrayal and loss set in London's Fitzrovia.  "As a treatise on the nature of romantic passion, this book succeeds brilliantly," wrote the Independent on Sunday while the Times Literary Supplement said that the book's evocation of an "unarticulated disquiet...is Nicholas Murray's most enduring accomplishment in Remembering Carmen."

A new 48 page collection of poems followed in 2006 from Rack Press.  A poem from the collection was featured in the Independent on Sunday "Sunday Poem" feature on 22 January 2006.  Sarah Crown in the Guardian Review on Saturday 29 April praised the collection's "quick, vivid snapshots of nature" and the "moments of real style that [Murray's] clear sense of internal rhythm and strong feeling for the well-honed phrase produce".

2008 is Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture and since it is my native city I decided to write a book about Liverpool, the writers down the centuries who had described it and responded to it, and my own memories of a 1950s and 1960s childhood.  So Spirited a Town: Visions and Versions of Liverpool has just been published.

Hot on its heels came my book about the Victorian travellers and explorers, also just published, marking a slight change of direction away from literary biography towards wider group portraits of a period but still using the biographical approach.

And what next...?  Let's wait and see.

Bibliography

Bruce Chatwin (1993)  Seren Books (revised edition with new afterword, 1995). 

Plausible Fictions (1995). Rack Press [poems]. 

A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996) Hodder & Stoughton (London); St Martin's Press (USA).

After Arnold: Culture and Accessibility (1997).  The British Library, Centre for the Book. 

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell (1999) Little, Brown (London); St Martin's Press (USA).

A Short Book About Love (2001).
Seren Books.

Aldous Huxley: an English Intellectual (2002)
Little, Brown (UK); St Martin's Press (USA) 

Remembering Carmen (2003)
Seren Books

Kafka (2004)
Little, Brown (UK); Yale University Press (USA

The Narrators (2006)
Rack Press

So Spirited a Town (2007)
Liverpool University Press

A Corkscrew is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire Spirited a Town (2008)
Little, Brown

Other Contributions

Art for All? Their Policies and Our Culture (2000)

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And on a lighter note...

Nicholas Murray was a regular contributor in the 1980s and 1990s to the New Statesman Weekend Competition, the Independent Magazine competition and others.  This dedicated pursuit of literary frivolity resulted in occasional brief contributions to titles such as Bindweed's Bestseller edited by David Godwin and the title below edited by Gavin Ewart:

Other People's Clerihews (1983)

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