Registered charity no. 328095 Newsletter Interesting Narratives

West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song whose Poems on Various Subjects, thought to be until 16 February 2016 Religious and Moral (1773) achieved a predecessor fame in England and the American of the banjo. The curators of the new exhibition in colonies, and Olaudah Equiano, author One section the PACCAR Gallery intend it to be ‘a of The Interesting Narrative of the Life is dedicated multidimensional experience’, bringing of Olaudah Equiano (1789). The to the Notting together works representing 17 nations 20th-century writers include Chinua Hill Carnival, from an area of six million square miles. Achebe, Wole Soyinka and another to the Among the 200 items on display are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Afrobeat music manuscripts, books, brass weights and of the singer musical instruments, printed textiles Sound and film recordings at the activist Fela and a carnival costume made by the exhibition include carnival calypsos, Kuti with a Brixton-based artist Ray Mahabir. drums and Christian hymns sung in display of posters and album covers There are letters and texts by the Yoruba, as well as the atumpan ‘talking from the 1980s. African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, drum’ and the Gambian akonting, A series of talks, events and performances planned to accompany Recent Grants the exhibition will include a celebration of the music of Fela Kuti and a screening of the documentary film The Friends have agreed to make a A grant of £5,000 is to be made for Finding Fela, as well as a season grant of £3,250 for the purchase of the purchase of two more items from of West African cinema. two artists’ books Howl for a Black the Christopher Hogwood Library Cockatoo and Quaranta Australis by chosen by the curators. The sum of A page from a saddleback Qur’an designed to be fitted the Australian artists Sue Anderson £3,000 will enable the purchase of into a leather pouch for carrying on horseback and Gwen Richardson. The purchase the remaining archive of the novelist will enrich the existing collections Phyllis Bottome (see page 3). The Issue 91 Winter 2015 in colonial and Australian history Friends also supported the puchase of Quarterly Newsletter and complement other artists’ books unpublished letters from Ted Hughes www.bl.uk/friends based on works in the ’s to his friend Elizabeth Hicklin which collection. Howl for a Black Cockatoo cover the years from 1954 to 1956, (2015) uses Alice in Wonderland to a period which is otherwise poorly consider the abuse of single women documented. They will join the Inside this issue held on Cockatoo Island between existing Hughes papers. 1871 and 1888. Quaranta Australis 02 Festive Friends (2008) focuses on the notoriously A further £10,000 has been pledged 03 Charlotte Brontë’s letters harsh quarantining of deportees in for the Authors’ Lives Project to enable 04 Some views of the Dome Sydney in the early years of the 19th the recording of five more interviews 05 My British Library century. with living writers. A special Friends’ 06 Winter Visits event is planned for the interviews. 07 Winter Visits 08 Prize crossword 02

In the evening, a joint event has been arranged with the Festive Friends Friends of the National Libraries, with curators talking about items supported by the Friends of the British Library The big day is Monday 23 November. We’ll have our and the Friends of the National Libraries. This will begin normal Friends’ pre-Christmas social event in the Friends’ with a cash bar in the Conference Centre from 5pm until Room on the 3rd floor, running from 2pm until 4pm. 6.15pm. From 6.30pm, a diverse programme of talks has been arranged: • Welcome by Ferdinand Mount and Lord Egremont • Claire Breay, Lead Curator, Medieval and Earlier Manuscripts, British Library Recent research into the St Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest intact European book. • Richard Chesser, Lead Curator of Music, British Library My Lady Nevell’s Booke and The Old Hall Manuscript: a choir book compiled and written for the Chapel Royal 1399–1413. • Peter Barber, former Head of Map Collections, British Library The Bryanston Estate Map of 1659. We expect to have mulled wine and mince pies (arrangements still progressing) as well as tea and coffee. • Joan Winterkorn, Independent Researcher The British Library Shop has again agreed to offer Friends Laureates, Loiners, and Girls of Slender Means: an extra discount, so a voucher will come in the post Preserving our Literary Heritage. nearer to the time which you can use for 20% off one • Jacquie Crosby, Archives Service Manager, Lancashire regular priced purchase in the Shop. It will be valid for Archives use from 23 November until 29 November. This is an The Hulton Archive, a family and estate collection of opportunity to stock up on Christmas gifts (or treats national significance. for yourself) and support the Library at the same time. The evening will end at 8pm. Tickets for the Curatorial Talks There will also be tours available of both the Centre for are free but must be booked through the British Library Conservation and the Library itself: booking system. Go to www.bl.uk/events/festive-friends- • Tours of the St Pancras building, starting at 2pm and lectures-for-friends-at-the-british-library and then click on 2.30pm ‘Book Now’ for the Festive Friends: Lectures for Friends at the British Library. You will have to register an account as • Tours of the British Library Centre for Conservation the tickets will be sent by email, but I can confirm that you at 2pm and 2.30pm will not be charged. These are free of charge. To sign up to one or both of these tours, please contact Edmund King at: [email protected]. Places are very limited and are offered on a first come, first served basis. Michael Borrie Friends will be sorry to hear that Michael Borrie, a long-standing supporter of the Playful and political Charity, died in May. Michael joined when the Friends were founded in 1989 and was Number Animal Tales 13 on our Membership Roll. At that time he was joint Head of Manuscripts in the Library. Among notable acquisitions he secured for it The way in which animals are used in literature was the central were the celebrated Waterloo Despatch, concern of the recent exhibition in the Entrance Hall Gallery which G K Chesterton’s Archive and the papers of looked at the roles of cats, mice, lions, sheep and birds in works Kenneth Tynan and Evelyn Waugh. After he from Ovid to Helen Macdonald. Stories aimed directly at children retired, he went on to be Honorary Secretary included Peter Rabbit and T S Eliot’s Practical Cats, while the of our sister organisation, the Friends of the power of political allegories such as Animal Farm, Franz Kafka’s National Libraries, a post he held until 2013. Metamorphosis and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (seen here on its first At his funeral in June, the eulogy was delivered appearance in the underground comic Funny Animals) were also by his friend Sir Roy Strong, with whom he had examined. The typescript of ‘Mr Lyon’, a story by Angela Carter shared a flat for four years in the 1960s. written for Vogue in 1968, suggests that it is a feminist fable, while Black Beauty’s plea for animal rights remains powerful. C K Wright 03

Charlotte Brontë’s letters to Constantin Heger

withholding, and after a while he gave own vivid story too, one that became up answering altogether, provoking increasingly clear to me as I inspected the most wrenching pleas from his these documents during the research miserable correspondent: ‘I will tell for my new biography of Brontë. The you candidly that during this time of letters show fold-marks and signs of waiting I have tried to forget you […] wear extra to the ones made by sealing but I have not been able to overcome and posting; they were clearly folded either my regrets or my impatience – smaller after reading, and kept like and that is truly humiliating.’ ‘I am that before being torn up. I surmise in a fever – I lose my appetite and my that they were still untorn in 1856, sleep – I pine away’. when Heger read extracts to Elizabeth Gaskell and copied out some passages Madame Heger showed these for use in her biography of Charlotte, letters to her daughter Louise many and were possibly still intact in 1869, Charlotte Brontë by George Richmond (1850) years later. Heger had torn them when a friend of the family attested up and thrown them away – soon that Heger had shown Charlotte’s One of the most remarkable sets of after receipt, Louise implied – but agonised love-letters to his wife’s letters owned by the British Library Madame, sensitive to the reputation cousin and ‘told the whole story’. must surely be the four surviving of of her school and thinking that the those written by Charlotte Brontë letters might be useful evidence that As the fame of the Brontës grew in to her former teacher in Belgium, her husband had not been carrying the last decades of the century, the Constantin Heger, in 1844–45. These on an illicit affair with Miss Brontë, Hegers seem to have become more were sent by Charlotte – not yet a clandestinely picked the pieces out of and more proud of their association published writer – on her return to the wastebasket, reconstructed them with Charlotte and Emily (who had Yorkshire from two years living and with thread and gummed paper strips also been a pupil at the Pensionnat). working with Heger and his wife Zoe and kept them carefully in her jewel It is astonishing to think that Monsieur at their Pensionnat des demoiselles in box, unknown to her spouse. was prepared to brag about Charlotte’s the Rue d’Isabelle, Brussels. During heartrendingly painful letters, but that time, Charlotte had fallen under It is thus they appear in the Library, never thought fit to answer them, the spell of her charismatic ‘Master’ put back together like jigsaw puzzles, but, as the same family friend said, and longed more than anything in double-sided glass frames made ‘He is a finished specimen of a Jesuit’. to see him again, to deepen their specially in 1913 when the manuscripts intimacy and – at the very least – to were donated to the nation by Heger’s Claire Harman stay in touch by post. This didn’t children. The contents of the letters happen. The Hegers had both become caused a sensation then, exposing Claire Harman’s Charlotte Brontë: wary of Charlotte’s ardour and Charlotte Brontë’s agonised unrequited A Life was published by Viking neediness: Constantin’s responses love for the first time, but the paper Penguin in October 2015. became increasingly formal and on which they are written tells its

Phyllis Bottome

The Friends have agreed to make a grant of £5,000 a British diplomat who also worked for MI6. Having for the purchase of additional papers for the studied under in , she and her archive of Phyllis Bottome, the popular novelist husband started a school in Kitzbühel Austria, who published 34 novels and six volumes of where was a pupil in the 1920s. short stories in her 60-year career. The archive She moved to Germany in 1930 and her consists of 16 boxes containing drafts for bestselling novel The Mortal Storm (1937), short stories, unpublished manuscripts, an account of life under the Nazis, was made reviews and radio plays. It also contains into a film starring James Stewart which was correspondence with writers and public released by MGM in 1940. Films were also figures including Max Beerbohm, Violet made of Private Worlds (1934) and Danger Bonham Carter, Daphne du Maurier, Gerald Signal (1939). She wrote biographies of Durrell, Barbara Hepworth, Lord Mountbatten, and Alfred Adler, and a study Ivor Novello and H G Wells. Phyllis Bottome of six friends, among them Ezra Pound and (1884–1963) was the wife of Alban Ernan Forbes, Sara Delano Roosevelt. 04

Some views of the Dome Early Readers in the British Museum

Somewhere in one of those boxes her, but by no effort could fix in which one keeps old papers, there her attention upon them. It was must be my first British Museum gloomy, and one could scarcely Reading Room Card. It was 1964. see to read; a taste of fog grew I had just embarked on a doctoral perceptible in the warm, headachy thesis on Thackeray. As I entered air. She kept asking herself what Smirke’s domed ‘room’ (inadequate was the use and purpose of such a word), and heard for the first time life as she was condemned to lead. those gently echoing thuds, as books And I must confess to a perverse landed from the dumb waiters, fondness for that vignette in I felt closer companionship with my M P Shiel’s The Purple Cloud (1901). subject. Thackeray, an early adopter, my English birth-right, freely to The whole human race, other than had got his readers’ ticket a century partake of these bountiful books, Adam Jeffson, has been asphyxiated. before me. As he enthused, in a and to speak the truth I find there. Adam, goes – where else? – to the ‘Roundabout Paper’, five years after British Museum and finds: the Reading Room opened: So, too, I have often felt – not just for the Bloomsbury institution but In the great round reading-room I have seen all sorts of domes of its St Pancras successor. But, in not a soul, except one old man with Peters and Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon – the drudging periods of ‘research’, a bag of goitre hung at his neck, what not? – and have been struck who will not confess to feeling an he lying up a book-ladder near the by none of them so much as by occasional kinship with the luckless shelves, a ‘reader’ to the last. that Catholic dome in Bloomsbury, hackette Marian Yule, in George under which our million volumes So, I hope, shall I be. Gissing’s novel New Grub Street are housed. (1891), tied to her futile work like John Sutherland What peace, what love, what truth, a galley slave to the oar: John Sutherland is the author of what beauty, what happiness for The days darkened. Through Is Heathcliff a Murderer? (1996), all, what generous kindness for November rains and fogs Marian The Longman Companion to you and me, are here spread out! went her usual way to the Museum, Victorian Fiction (2009) Lives of It seems to me one cannot sit down and toiled there among the other the Novelists (2011) and Jumbo: in that place without a heart full toilers. The Unauthorised Biography of grateful reverence. I own to have of a Victorian Sensation (2014) said my grace at the table, and One day at the end of the month to have thanked Heaven for this, she sat with books open before

Book Review strangers. The volume begins with G K Chesterton, Dorothy L Sayers, Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake Edited by Martin Edwards a Sherlock Holmes story by Arthur and Edmund Crispin are familiar British Library Crime Classics. £8.99. Conan Doyle published in Strand names here but Edwards, who aims Magazine in 1892, in which the great to introduce a new generation to The fifteen stories detective is involved in a ‘whimsical the detective writers of the period, collected by little incident’ concerning an old has tracked down some lesser-known Martin Edwards hat, some stolen geese and the authors: H C Bailey, a founder member date from the Countess of Morcar’s blue diamond. of the Detection Club; Marjorie Bowen ‘Golden Age of Edgar Wallace’s ‘Stuffing’ takes place and Joseph Shearing (both pen- Murder’ when it three days before Christmas and names used by the same woman); seems that contrasts life in one furnished room Ralph Plummer (who remains a man Christmas was the in Pimlico for a young married couple of mystery since nothing has been ideal time for a with lunch at the Ritz-Carlton for a found about him); Raymond Allen mysterious death Lord and a Prince; the plot involves and Ethel Lina White. At the end in a country house a stolen turkey stuffed with dollar of the volume are some solutions full of titled bills and some missing jewels. to the puzzles the stories present. 05

My British Library Michael Holroyd A challenge to Friends at 80

artists. I had absolutely no idea how On 6 October a small celebration to do this: but then (as so often at was held by the Royal Society of the British Library) fortune smiled. Literature at the Library to celebrate A silver-haired but youthful-looking the eightieth birthday of the gentleman with a pink face, wearing biographer Michael Holroyd. a bow tie, beamed at me from behind the central desk. ‘Can I help?’ Hermione Lee led a panel of He could. He did. In fact he did all biographers, who included Patrick the work for me so that I was able French, Richard Holmes, Ruth Scurr to return to Cork Street with a and Jenny Uglow, in a discussion of dazzlingly impessive report. It was Holroyd’s work and of his influence Angus Wilson. on their own writing. Holroyd read passages from his own work: a I will pass over a lifetime of amusing description of Bernard Shaw in his incidents mainly good, occasionally eighties enjoying gardening and an bad and some both at once. I refer autobiographical account ‘Illness in to the lascivious note left on my desk England’ which described a recent Antonia Fraser while I had a coffee break. I was able telephone call from a journalist to pass it deftly on to the next door who wanted facts about him for I shall begin with an intentionally desk, occupied by a huge gentleman in an obituary. provocative statement. I believe that I clerical clothing, and then scarpered am the living person who has worked so as not to witness the consequences. The panel considered the practical longest in the Reading Room of the difficulties of writing biography British Library, and who is still But I will end on another provocative and its particular challenges past, working there today. note. Ever since the age of admission present and future. The influence has been lowered from 21 to 18, there of Facebook, Twitter and email That is to say, I made my first have been considerable difficulties in and the effect of social media tremulous steps into the Round getting a seat in any Reading Room. on biographical was discussed. Reading Room in September 1953, This can be particularly frustrating if Hermione Lee asked Michael when I was just 21 (and thus newly one has successfully ordered a number Holroyd: ‘Are you on Facebook or eligible for a ticket by the standards of books online. There they sit waiting. Twitter?’ ‘Not to my knowledge’, of the time). I am still studying there, But we can’t sit down to receive them. he replied. in one of the Reading Rooms of the It arouses the obvious question. If books newish British Library, 62 years later. can be ordered online, why shouldn’t seats also be ordered in advance? When I describe my statement as intentionally provocative, I mean Antonia Fraser Volunteers that I genuinely hope it will be contradicted. I am expecting Antonia Fraser’s first book was A Reminder magisterial figures to rise up either Mary Queen of Scots (1969). in person or in print to put me right, Her most recent one was her The Friends of the British Library and in so doing, provide a fascinating memoir Must You Go? (2010) are appealing for Volunteers to help account of their own experiences. man the desk in the Entrance hall These are mine. which is kept open six days a week. The work is pleasant and sociable The reason I first entered the Round and it is a way of helping the British Reading Room was to do research of Library. If you have experience of a fairly simple sort. I had just started dealing with the public and enjoy to work for George Weidenfeld at talking to people you might be Weidenfeld & Nicolson, then a small, interested in becoming a volunteer. recently-founded publishing company Contact Jean-Anne Ashton on in Cork Street. My first job was to [email protected] find suitable classic foreign books (out of copyright) which could be translated and illustrated by living 06

Winter visits

Islington. Built in the late-19th century Participants need to be able to walk Royal Academy of Music Museum in the Gothic revival style, the church is quite a distance; we will be on our feet NW1 Grade I-listed. for almost two hours. Tuesday 12 January, 3pm, £10 Maximum 20 people The Chapel is home to a unique pipe organ, built in 1877 by master organ builder Henry ‘Father’ Willis, recently Bethlem Museum of the Mind restored following an HLF grant. A Beckenham BR3 recital will be held at 11am. Friends Tuesday 9 February, 2pm, £10 will take in the recital before being Maximum 15 people shown around the chapel and have time to ask questions.

The Royal Academy of Music’s museum Angels the Costumiers and collections contribute to music’s London NW9 capacity to inspire, unite, console Thursday 21 January, 2.30pm, £30 and stimulate using its collections Maximum 12 people of instruments, art, photography, manuscripts and scores. The Museum has three permanent galleries, alongside regularly Opened in 2015, Bethlem Museum changing displays and exhibitions. of the Mind focuses on the history Together they cover a variety of of Bethlem Royal Hospital, its eras and subjects, including stringed programme of care, and its patients. instruments and manuscripts. The The museum’s displays include work galleries act as a showcase for the by artists who have suffered from work of performers, composers, mental health problems, such as instrument makers and scholars former patients William Kurelek, from a wide range of musical and Richard Dadd and Louis Wain. other relevant disciplines. Angels is a supplier of costumes to the Another work is a pair of statues

film, theatre and television industries, by Caius Gabriel Cibber known as as well as to the general public. The ‘Raving’ and ‘Melancholy Madness’, company, founded in 1840, is the from the gates of the 17th-century Union Chapel longest-established costume supplier in Bethlem Hospital. Other displays London N1 the world, and has supplied costumes feature restraining devices, including Wednesday 20 January, 11am, £10 to 36 films that have received Best iron shackles, padded 19th-century Maximum 20 people Costume Oscars, including the 2010 restraining garments and modern filmAlice in Wonderland and, most devices. recently, The Grand Budapest Hotel. Since 1970 there has been a small Since its founding in 1840, the company museum at the hospital mainly has stayed in family ownership for six displaying items from the hospital’s consecutive generations. art collection. Due to the size of the former museum, known as the The tour will offer a wide-ranging look Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives behind the scenes of the world’s largest and Museum, only a small fraction costumiers. It will take approximately of the collections could be displayed two hours and we will look at all the at a time. departments in Angels including Mens Tailoring, Ladies Making, Alterations, Friends will have an introductory Union Chapel is a working church, live Uniform Department, Fancydress.com, talk, and a selection of items from the entertainment venue and charity drop- Ecclesiastical, Light Entertainment and handling collection will be available. in centre for the homeless in many more. Winter Visits 07

Guildhall Art Gallery At 12.5 metres long, the model its connection with Sir Rowland Hill, London EC2V covers more than 85 square kilometres the history of the Royal Mail. The Thursday 18 February, 2pm, £10 of London, 19 Boroughs and building also houses the archives of Maximum 25 people approximately 170,000 buildings, the London Borough of Haringey. including 34km of the Thames Since 1892 the grounds have been with its corresponding 21 bridges. a public park, Tottenham’s oldest. It extends from King’s Cross in the north to Peckham in the south Tea and coffee will be provided at the and the Royal Docks in the east to start of our curator-led visit, which Old Oak Common in the west. will last approximately one hour.

We will have a 45-minute talk around the Model, to give an introduction to London’s built environment and the Annual General Meeting 5pm; current challenges it faces. There will Annual Lecture 6.30pm be time to ask questions. British Library Conference Centre Monday 14 March Established in 1886 as ‘a Collection Free, no need to book of Art Treasures worthy of the capital city’, the Guildhall Art Gallery includes Bruce Castle Museum Once again our Annual General works dating from 1670 to the present, London N17 Meeting will be held in the Conference including 17th-century portraits, Tuesday 8 March, 2pm, £25 Centre. Pre-Raphaelite masterpieces and a Maximum 25 people range of paintings documenting After the business of the AGM is London’s dramatic history. completed, our Annual Lecture will be held. The speaker will be announced The Gallery was originally built in shortly and further information will 1885 to house art collections from the follow in a separate mailing in the City of London Corporation and the new year. present collection consists of about 4,000 works, of which around 250 are on display at any one time. Many of the paintings are on London Whitechapel Bell Foundry themes. There is also a significant London E1 collection of Victorian art, which Saturday 19 March, 4pm, £20 features paintings by artists such as Maximum 22 people John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Bruce Castle (formerly the Lordship Rossetti, Abraham Solomon, Edward House) is a Grade I-listed 16th-century John Poynter and Edwin Landseer. manor house in Lordship Lane, Tottenham. It is named after the House Friends will have a guided tour. of Bruce who formerly owned the land on which it is built. Believed to stand on the site of an earlier building, about which little is known, the current house New London Model is one of the oldest surviving English London WC1E brick houses. It was remodelled in the Thursday 25 February, 2pm, £16 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. Maximum 50 people The house has been home to Sir New London Architecture’s 1:2000 William Compton, the Barons The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is scale interactive model of central Coleraine and Sir Rowland Hill, Britain’s oldest manufacturing London is the centrepiece of the among others. After serving as a company, established in 1570 and in NLA galleries at the Building Centre school during the 19th century, when continuous business since then. The in Store Street. It covers the story a large extension was built to the present buildings date from 1670, of London’s historical and physical west, it was converted into a museum four years after the Great Fire. development to life through a exploring the history of the areas Whitechapel’s famous bells include sophisticated projection system now constituting London Borough the original Liberty Bell (1752), the integrated with films. of Haringey and, on the strength of Great Bell of Montreal and ‘Big Ben’. 08 Prize crossword

Win tickets to the Samuel Pepys exhibition

The senders of the first three correct solutions opened will each receive a pair of tickets to the exhibition Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire and Revolution at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, which opens on 20 November. With the candid, witty and irreverent Pepys as the fly-on-the-wall guide, visitors will explore this period of revelry and rebirth, revolution and catastrophe, which saw kings fighting for their crowns and London transformed following the devastation of the Plague and your name, address, membership number and an email the Great Fire. address or telephone number, so that the winners can Subject to availability, the tickets will be valid until be contacted quickly by the exhibition’s representative. 31 January 2016 (excluding public holidays and peak Closing date is 27 November or seven days after delivery of periods). Send entries to the Friends’ office at the address your Newsletter, whichever is the later. below, marking the envelope “Crossword” and including

Across 1 Engineers go into farm building but find it unproductive (6) 4 Danish moralist takes ball game to Ulster and America (8) 9 Baking hot outside but frozen within – what a sweet state! (6) 10 Science turns garrulous singer into a fighter (8) 12 Ceremony that sounds just fine (4) 13 Caroline goes it alone at Westminster – but for what? (5,5) 15 (with 20 down) Wildly over-concentrates in vital part of the Library (12,6) 18 Stirred? Call hot nanny, but coolly (12) 21 Notes on paper (5,5) 22 The recess? Perhaps Edward has it in him (4) 24 Come in here and enchant me (8) 25 If a run is scrambled, it’s not cricket (6) 26 Once yeast is mixed, place lid backwards – but take it easy (8) 27 Portia observed that it singed the moth (6)

Down 1 Much ado as she triumphed against the grain (8) 2 Encircle kiln and get a right telling-off (8) 3 You’ll find them in 9 (4) 5 Part of auditorium where 21 comes in handy (9,3) 6 Paradoxically, even if you hate Lonsdale’s play you won’t get a refund (2,8) 7 I tramp all over the place to deliver the message (6) 8 Wanderers could find themselves barking in Battersea (6) Answers to Autumn Crossword 11 Convenience makes local authority a more prestigious body (5,7) 14 Yes, sneak on the joker – it’s a disciplinary tool (6,4) Across: 9 Peasant, 10 Chaucer, 11 Oxonian, 12 Infidel, 16 Lately this scribe has tackled a hard problem (8) 13 Bracknell, 15 Eye to, 16 Silence, 19 Sceptre, 20 Altos, 17 Goodness gracious – this seems to be the Chancellor’s 21 Plentiful, 25 Gorilla, 26 Regency, 28 Earache, 29 Patella. own doing! (2,6) 19 British actor in America finds them front of house (6) Down: 1 Aplomb, 2 Samosa, 3 Mali, 4 Stance, 5 Achilles, 20 See 15 across 6 Bafflement, 7 Acid test, 8 Trollope, 14 Kings place, 16 Spangles, 23 It’s an Indian coin whichever way you look at it (4) 17 Literary, 18 Emphases, 22 Europe, 23 Finals, 24 Layman, 27 Gate. Membership Secretary Friends of the British Library Nichole Chapman The British Library 96 Euston Road The winners of the Autumn crossword, who won vouchers to Editor Lindsay Duguid London NW1 2DB T +44 (0)20 7412 7734 spend in the Library Shop, were Helen Eldridge of London W14 Volunteer Co-ordinator F +44 (0)20 7412 7017 and J Wootton of Nottingham. Jean-Anne Ashton [email protected] T +44 (0)20 8964 2292 www.bl.uk/friends

Registered charity number 328095