Whitcoulls Recommends: Our London Lives and A Voyage Around the Queen

Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey. This is wonderful. In 1979 Milly and Pip are misfits, part of the Irish diaspora in London who after a brief romance go their separate ways - but out of sight they’re rarely out of mind over the next 40 years. This is an eloquent and wonderful story of lost opportunity and regret, spanning four decades against the landscape of an ever-present London.

A Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown. This is a biography of Queen Elizabeth the second, by the author who wrote the wonderful Yes, Ma’am about Princess Margaret and One Two Three Four about The Beatles. Combining biography, essays, cultural history, dream diaries, travelogue and satire, he presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of a woman who was the most public, and the most private.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News TALKSEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Joan mackenzie joins me now to talk books. Good morning, Hello,
what have you got for us today? The first book
is called Our London Lives by Christine Dwyer Hickey, which
is a novel set in London. Starts thinking about nineteen
seventy nine from memory, and it's the story of essentially
two Irish refugees. Milli's a teenage runaway and she's headed

(00:33):
down to London and Pip is a guy who's a
bit lost but he wants to become a professional boxer.
And Milli gets a job in a pub, which is
where they meet, and you can see pretty quickly that
Pip's professional boxing dreams might founder on the rocks because
he likes the alcohol rather a bit too much. And
they start a friendship and have a very brief romance,
very brief, after which they go their separate ways and

(00:56):
they don't see each other very often over the next
forty years. But you read the story of their lives
over those four decades and you see the hopes and
the dreams, the aspirations, and then looking back at that
forty year point. You can see that they're thinking about
all of the regrets and the lost opportunities. It's beautifully done,
and it's done against the landscape of London, which is

(01:19):
very real and very present. There's one scene that stayed
with me when one night there's a fire in the
neighborhood and all the people come out to see what's
going on, and you can smell the smoke in the
air and see the flames, and one of our characters says,
what's happening, And there's a woman in a hejab and
she says she says, it's called Grenfell, So that was

(01:40):
the tower's burning. And then there's the fact that when
the IRA start to plant bombs in London, the Irish
become a bit persona non grata. So you've got the
kind of politics of the time and the landscape of
London in the background. But for people who like a
really thoughtful, well written, put together novel, this one is
just wonderful.

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Tell me about a Voyage around the Queen by Craig Brown.

Speaker 2 (02:04):
Well, this is terrific. Craig Brown is a satirist, he's
a columnist, he's a really interesting guy. He wrote a
book on Princess Margaret a few years ago called Mam Darling,
and now he's taken on the Queen. And in order
to do that, he read every single book which has
been written about the Queen. He went to the London
Library and he checked the indexes for every biography and

(02:28):
memoir that is held there, and whenever he found the
queen in the index, he read the book. And he
said something like, ultimately, at the end of all that
it was a bit like eating far too much candy floss,
you're coming out and feeling a bit pink but underwhelmed.
But he's written this book and it's chronological, so it
starts right back with the birth of Queen Elizabeth and
goes all the way through to the time when we

(02:49):
lost her. But there's anecdotes and there's witty things. He
gives a guide to pronunciation so that you can speak
like the queen. He has some wonderful stuff in there.
He says that it was famously known that she loved
her corkies and her horses, and then her children came third.
And one of the books that's been written about her
even has a guide to the succession of the Queen's Corgies,

(03:12):
so that you can see the lineage that they each
came from. There's just wonderful information. It's gossipy, it's fun,
it's entertaining, and of course because she lived such a
long life, there's so much social history behind it which
is just wonderful.

Speaker 1 (03:28):
And of course we've just had the second anniversary of
the Queen's death, so very timely as well.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
If you've been thinking about Queen Lisbeth, I can tell
you that when she first turned up at Madame Tusode's waxworks,
she was portrayed as a two year old. Two years
after that she was on top of a pony with
a riding crop. But they updated the Queen at Madame
Tussode's every four years, so there were twenty four different
incarnations of her during the course of her life. Wonderful

(03:54):
information about that, filled with all.

Speaker 1 (03:56):
These neopets of information which I know that everyone's going
to the love hearing. Thank you so much. Joan Our
London Lives.

Speaker 2 (04:02):
By Christine dwyer Hickey was the first book, and A
Voyage Around the Queen by Craig Brown.

Speaker 1 (04:08):
Was the second.

Speaker 2 (04:08):
We'll talk next week, see you then.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin. Listen
live to News Talks it B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio