Showing posts with label My hero. Show all posts

Wednesday, September 17, 2025

My hero / Mr Badger by Patrick Barkham

'The moral core of Grahame’s book' … Mr Badger and friends. Illustration by Michael Foreman.

My hero: Mr Badger by Patrick Barkham

The welcome arrival of Kenneth Grahame's Mr Badger marked a turning point in human relations with the brave and elusive creature

Patrick Barkham

Friday 6 December 2013

In 1908, Mole caught sight of Badger peering from a hedge. Badger trotted forward, grunted, "H'm! Company," and disappeared again. "Simply hates society!" explained the Water Rat. With that beautifully accurate cameo, Mr Badger stepped on to the pages of The Wind in the Willows – Will Tuckett's adaptation of which is at London's Duchess theatre this Christmas – and transformed our perception of Britain's largest carnivorous mammal.

My hero / Ronald Searle by Quentin Blake

Ronald Searle

Partly to escape his celebrity, Searle moved to the south of France, where he was pictured here at home in 2006.

Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/Guardian

My hero: Ronald Searle by Quentin Blake

This article is more than 12 years old

'He is a striking representative of a great British tradition, of something we do well, and where he stands with his own heroes, George Cruikshank and Thomas Rowlandson'

Quentin Blake

Fri 6 Jan 2012 22.55 GMT

My hero: Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett

An unprepossessing-looking fellow … Wilkie Collins.

My hero: Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett

Wilkie Collins had no time for Victorian pomposity, preferring to indulge his appetites, enjoy the company of friends, and become a supremely professional writer

Andrew Lycett
Saturday 21 September 2013

Wilkie Collins's No Name is perhaps the most accessible of his "sensation" novels. It tells of two sisters who find themselves dispossessed when their parents die. Cue for one, Magdalen Vanstone, to try every ruse imaginable to regain her birthright and "name". With her nod to the Biblical fallen woman, Magdalen is a typical Collins heroine – sexy, self-willed, eager to fight manmade laws and establish her position in society. She is not one of Dickens's limp child-women.

Collins espoused female causes because he hated oppression. Having battled to escape his domineering father, he targeted hypocrisy wherever he saw it – from marriage laws to animal rights. Cosmopolitan in outlook, he had no time for pomposity, preferring to indulge his appetites for food, drink and sex, enjoy the company of friends, and become a supremely professional writer. This unprepossessing-looking fellow maintained two separate families, wasn't married to either woman, and kept the details quiet. But that's what makes his story so intriguing.

His mistresses and children did not enjoy properly fulfilled lives in that unliberated age. But Collins was clear he opposed marriage, which he considered institutionalised prostitution, and injurious to both sexes.

No Name has a magnificent scene where Magdalen, married to a man she despises, attempts to swap places with her maid, who works to support her illegitimate child. Magdalen understands not only that they are both victims of matrimony, but that their social positions are interchangeable – a truly Collins epiphany.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero: John 'Araucaria' Graham by Sandy Balfour

Guardian crossword compiler Araucaria's birthday celebration in 2001, with editor Alan Rusbridger. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian

My hero: John 'Araucaria' Graham by Sandy Balfour

I had gone to ask for a crossword, but fell in love with his mischievous erudition, his humility and his courage

Sandy Balfour

Saturday 21 December 2013

Like many fans who came to Araucaria's door, I found a warm welcome. I had gone to ask for a crossword; what I got was friendship and laughter and a decade of playing bridge together. And like so many others, I fell in love with his mischievous erudition, his humility and his courage.

As the world knows, John announced his cancer in a crossword puzzle that appeared in 1 Across, the magazine he founded, in December 2012 and was reprinted in the Guardian in January of this year. I saw him several times in his last few weeks. He had lost none of the twinkle that so infused the puzzles that made him famous. Once he asked whether I would speak at the memorial event that he knew would follow his death.

"Of course," I said.

"Make sure you say something sensible. The others will overdo the praise."

"I'll give it a whirl. I'll tell them you were ordinary. And a bit dull."

"Thanks."

"They won't believe me."

"No, well, we can but try."

On 25 November I made the journey to see him again. By then he could no longer speak, but he liked us to read to him. I had a couple of books with me: the collected writing of CLR James on cricket and a dog-eared copy of Poems on the Underground. John's breathing was laboured and he may or may not have heard me. I read essays on D'Oliveira, on Weekes, Walcott and Worrell and James's particular favourite, Learie Constantine. Men who, like John, were the cream of their generation and whose genius found expression on a very public stage.

My monotone was punctured by his breathing. Regular, but loud and harsh. Every now and then his breaths would skip a beat and my heart would do the same. And then it would start again and I would return to James.

But even I tire of cricket, and so after a couple of hours of this, I moved on to Poems on the Underground ... snippets of this and that, all too familiar to bear repeating, except perhaps Adrian Mitchell's paean to Charlie Parker: "He breathed in air / He breathed out light / Charlie Parker was my delight."

And John was ours. He died that night.

THE GUARDIAN

My hero Fanny Trollope by Lucy Ellmann

'Let it be as bad as it will, I shall get something for it' … Fanny Trollope.

Photograph: Auguste Hervieu/National Portrait Gallery

My hero Fanny Trollope by Lucy Ellmann

Fanny was a feminist before the word existed, voicing principles and defending the underdog – as well as producing 40 novels and travel books

Lucy Hellmann
5 October 2013

orced by financial hardships to write, Fanny Trollope, who died 150 years ago tomorrow, produced 40 novels and travel books at the rate of two a year. "Let it be as bad as it will, I shall get something for it," was her attitude. She was a natural. That she could rescue her debt-ridden menage this way was remarkable, but she also managed to voice principles and her instinct was always to defend the underdog.

She was a feminist before the word existed. She wrote one of the first novels in English about American slavery – The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw (1836). In Domestic Manners of the Americans, she railed against the injustice meted out to Native Americans, too: "You will see them one hour lecturing their mob on the indefeasible rights of man, and the next driving from their homes the children of the soil, whom they have bound themselves to protect by the most solemn treaties." Trollope was one of those foreigners not taken in by the American dream: she came, she saw, and she returned to Europe (although for a time she was stuck in Cincinnati).

Trollope loved a spectacle, and was willing to make one of herself, too. For this, she was denounced as unfeminine and lacking in decorum. "Oh! ... that ladies would make puddings and mend stockings!" Thackeray moaned after reading one of her books. The novelist Elizabeth Lynn Linton was more indulgent, describing Trollope as "a vulgar, brisk and good-natured kind of well-bred hen wife, fond of a joke and not troubled by squeamishness."

The woman was undeniably brave, but what I like most about her is her curiosity. She talked to everybody and visited everything: mountains, cottages, waterfalls, schools, prisons, Viennese catacombs stuffed with corpses, and Congress, employing every means of travel then available (donkey, steamboat, raft, carriage). She also had an eye and ear for the telling detail. Americans, she observed, were always spitting and never thanked anybody, and alligators actually ate people.

Her take on autobiographical fiction? "I draw from life – but I always pulp my acquaintance before serving them up. You would never recognise a pig in a sausage."

THE GUARDIAN

Friday, December 8, 2023

My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson

Inhabiting another reality … Kate Bush in 1986.

My hero: Kate Bush by Jeanette Winterson

Kate Bush gave my 19-year-old self a strategy for both life and art – that's why I'll be there next week to watch her again

Jane Winterson

Idrove from Oxford in my hand-painted yellow Morris 1000 van to see Kate Bush at the Hammersmith Apollo in 1979. I was 19. It was my first visit to London and my first live event, not counting a lifetime of Gospel Tents. But this was salvation of a different kind.

A reputation for severity … Karl Miller.

My hero: Karl Miller by Blake Morrison

Karl Miller, who died this week, had the ability to get the best out of people. That's what made him a great editor

Blake Morrison
Friday 26 September 2014

Imagination. Attention to detail. Courage in the face of controversy. An ability to get the best out of people. Few of us possess even one of those qualities. Karl Miller, who died this week, had them all, and that's what made him a great editor.

He got a taste for it as an undergraduate at Cambridge, where Ted Hughes was among his contemporaries. Miller ran the book pages of the Spectator and New Statesman, and turned the Listener into a must-read weekly; he then founded and co-edited the London Review of Books.

He had a reputation for severity, often attributed to an Edinburgh childhood, and essential when dealing with writers, not all of whom give literary journalism their best shot. If he felt that someone should be using a semicolon instead of a comma, he'd get on the phone and argue the toss, and never mind if the someone was a Nobel laureate or Booker prizewinner. A few foolishly resented his scrupulousness. Most were grateful. And it wasn't just his editing that was fearless; his commissioning was too. At the height of the Troubles, he got a poet called Seamus Heaney, little known and unused to reportage, to write from Belfast – with memorable results.

One of Karl's best books is called Doubles, about split personalities. His own had a softness to balance the hard. His standards may be demanding but he enjoyed a good joke and gossip, and followed football as closely as he did politics. Though he saw himself as embattled, the friends far outnumbered the enemies. And he was generous in encouraging young writers. "It's very good," he said, when I last saw him, about a first collection by the poet Emily Berry. From Karl, that was high praise.

I count myself lucky that he embarked on a second, midlife career, as a professor at University College London, shortly after I began my PhD there. He taught me how to think and write. In my head, he'll always be my first reader, difficult to please but astute at diagnosing what isn't working. There was no other editor like him.

THE GUARDIAN