Welcome to Hertford's literary podcast, I'm Emma Smith. I teach English at Hertford, and I'm really delighted that
my guest today is James Hawes; prolific writer, novelist, historian, teacher of creative writing and Hertfordian
and I hope we're going to talk about all of those elements of James's career as well as his memories of Hertford.
Can we start there? James, hello. Welcome. Good morning. Thanks very much for having us.
It's lovely to be here. Tell us a bit about you and Hertford. You read German, didn't you?
I did. And I'm one of those people who who was tremendously lucky in that I benefited from from the Tanner scheme.
I went to a state school, a very, what would nowadays be called offensively a bog standard, comprehensive,
I suspect, a very rural Shropshire comprehensive, which had no no tradition really of sending anyone to Oxford.
And one of my friends had got into Corpus the year before.
and my history teacher, whose name unforgivably I forget, had been to Hertford and said I should apply.
And I did and got one of those wonderful offers of a place with only two E's and
which I remember I remember going straight to the pub in my small Shropshire town,
which of course is in the seventies you could go to in your school uniform and celebrating with with my various friends,
most of whom were farm laborours and things. So it completely changed my life coming here and the tanner scheme was it
And I suspect, you know, whenever I hear today people objecting to the notion of special schemes for entrants from various groups,
I have to put my hand up and say, well, you know, in my day, I was one of them.
Yeah, that's fantastic. And what was Hertford like when you arrived? Was it was it as you expected?
Did you feel did you feel at home? How was that transition? I felt wonderfully at home because thanks to that wonderful Tanner offer I had,
I had the sense that I came back once in my job after six year to visit a place knowing I was going to go there.
And so I was able to allow myself to completely fall in love with the place
in a way which an ordinary interview candidate doesn't dare do in case they fail.
And knowing I was going to go there for sure because I was not going to get two E's, obviously.
And so I came and all prepped up and already half in love with the place really when I came here.
And it absolutely, absolutely fulfils my sort of Oxford dream and in a very good way,
because I think what made Hertford special then and as far as I know still does now is
that it seems to me to mix the very best of Oxford without some of the less good.
It is a place full of it has its own traditions, its own wonderful buildings,
which have become an icon for the whole university and in the case of the bridge and so forth.
But it didn't and I don't think it does, have all that sort of blooming Brideshead Revisited and Zuleika Dobson thing,
which, frankly, is neither old nor truly traditional. I think things like the Piers Gaveston Society were invented in the 60s, for God's sake,
and and people who get entranced by all that sort of thing and think that's the real Oxford are falling for,
you know, something invented by very self-consciously, by literary people like Evelyn Waugh in the 20th century, essentially.
And Hertford was thankfully free of almost all of that, which I think made it the perfect balance.
We were all that very amused when the latest film version of Brideshead was filmed in Oxford.
And of course, Hertford didn't look Hertford enough to be Hertford. And those scenes were all shot in Jesus college.
So it is interesting that we've got Evelyn Waugh as one of our, if we were doing a Hertford literary podcast back in the day,
I would be hoping to get Evelyn Waugh although I'd be terribly frightened, I think, to discuss with him.
Well, I mean, as a writer, I absolutely adore him, I have to say, you know, just as a literary stylist, I think he's one of the very few novelists,
the 20th century who I reread for sheer pleasure and I use is I use them, decline and fall in line in my creative writing classes to this day.
So because the set up, which we, of course, know is in Hertford, is just an absolute masterpiece.
And the creation, a brief, wonderful economic creation of a world.
And so and I adore Waugh.
as a writer and I wonder about whether one would have liked him as a person is another matter entirely? Absolutely,
absolutely. And did you think of yourself as a writer or did you want to be a writer when you were at Hertford?
I did, actually. But this is one of the interesting things.
It's something I have been vaguely talking and hoping to get something going with our new principal
Tom about this is this and what I suffer from is I had to because I had actually no literary connections of any kind.
I mean, I went to a school where where the height of culture was an annual trip to Birmingham Rep.
And when I came up to Oxford, I did once we had tried writing mad things like a five act, blank verse drama in the sixth form.
But I realised that some of the people and even in Hertford, some of the people, other colleges, moreso
they were young people of my age who who'd had adventures to the Royal cCurt, have grown up with publishers.
And I remember being very jealous of Will Self because he he had a girlfriend from Hertford who I was desperately and hopelessly,
hopelessly in love with. But of course, I had an entirely different background from him.
For him, having dinner with publishers and things was just something he'd done all through his youth.
And I was very, very struck straightaway and a bit thrown back.
I have to say, by realising that I, coming from rural Shropshire and a comprehensive as a would-be writer,
found myself completely out of my depth when I joined the writing circles and things at Oxford,
not at Hertford but at Oxford generally, because one realised the enormous gap of just a knowledge of the way things work or of who you know.
And one of the things I think that that's that's that's something which I would love to do
If I had any role to play in trying to get things going for half the students in the future, but my son went to Christchurch.
And they have a fantastic programme of alumnae only internships, absolutely open, and there's no there's no beating about the bush.
And as I was talking to Principal Tom about this,
saying with the support of fellow Hertfordian contemporary of mine who's now very big an industry and whether we ought not to do the same here,
because one of the things that people who aren't Oxfordians misunderstand is they seem to think that by virtue of coming here,
you are immediately an insider of the big world.
And anyone who's been to Oxford knows that's not the case and that people, some people come with ready made friends and contacts and so forth.
Others don't. And I think one of the things would be a natural extension of Hertford's unique.
tone to try really hard to persuade the alumnae who've made it and have got successful to to make a special bid to help out our current alumnae
who,
when they leave Oxford, will find themselves as I did still without those contacts, and get in touch with publishers and agents and things like that.
I did, because even if I left, I still had really had no idea how to go about these things at all.
I think that's such a good idea. And it would, I think, help.
I mean, it would it would help all kinds of students, but it would do something which is really close to my heart,
which is maintaining the humanities as degree subjects, which are really open to a diverse range of students.
We're all worried that in the age of fees and all these kinds of things,
that the humanities look decorative or indulgent rather than as they are a proper training for all kinds of professional roles.
And I think that would be fantastic to to see that I am.
And I would I would I would love to see as a concerted effort by by people in the humanities,
as we have been talking to some colleagues about already elsewhere,
to really sit down with people in the non humanities or certainly in the social sciences
and point out the enormous benefits to people that accrue from being literate,
from being commanders of language. You know, it only has to look at the enormous success of popular science, for example,
to think that one really ought to be able to whet the appetite of everyone in Oxford working in science.
To train themselves and, for want of a better word, rhetoric, storytelling, because what the hell has Yuval Noah Harari [INAUDIBLE],
done, for God's sake, you know, and what did Jared Diamond do?
And though these people, as scientists who absolutely made their names by telling a story of their work,
which they would not be able to do, where they not also, you know, in the humanities sense, cultured literary people.
Yeah, I really agree with you. And I think one of the things in in my subject, in English literature,
that we we sort of did wrongly, it was intellectually an interesting experiment.
But we and I suppose this was all the kind of, is their poetry after Auschwitz and that kind of movement in the second half of the 20th century.
Can literature make you a better person? Of course, they were terrible people who did terrible things, who were very literary,
and we sort of lost confidence in the humane aspects of the humanities.
And I do think we probably need to come back to that a bit.
No, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think I'd go further than you.
I take the sort of freedom of being a non-professional to go further than that and say that I think
that loss of confidence in what you rightly said called the humane act of humanity led to this,
I think, generational dead end of excessive theorising,
which I think is largely responsible for the fact that bizarrely, one might think as recruitment in English is under threat, in many places,
recruitment in creative writing is soaring because essentially creative writing
is in many ways simply doing what English did before the so-called theory boom.
And I think that is largely at fault for the collapse of recruitment.
I believe students do not want to be theorised at. And I am speaking as someone who is absolutely forced, initially obliged to read Derrida.
for my PhD and I was told in 1988, you cannot to write a Phd about Kafka and Nietsche without a chapter on Derrida.
I said, I don't want to read it because I think is useless. And he said, sorry, you've got to go away for a year.
And I found it outrageous. And I find it outrageous now.
So I wrote I wrote an entire introduction as an attack on deconstruction, which I'm very glad to say was very well reviewed.
I really I think that if we abandon this really ridiculous attempt to say to science-ise
the humanities and refind our mojo, our confidence as teachers of humanities,
of what you rightly called the humane humanities. I love that.
Then I think we will be able to approach other disciplines and say, you know, we're not trying to ape you.
We're not trying to persuade and to persuade ourselves that Saussure is a scientist, for God's sake, or something like that.
And we are we are offering something completely different, which is of great value to you.
The pandemic has been instructive, I think, in that it's who would have thought that people would want to watch
I don't know, Patrick Stewart delivering a Shakespearean sonnet every day on social media or, you know, retreat into reading, the growth in reading.
I was just thinking about a colleague of mine who is the head of medical sciences here at Oxford, Alistair Buchan.
And we would go to university council meetings together where millions and millions of
grant money would be allocated to medical sciences for research into cancer and so on.
And and he and I would talk afterwards and he would say, you know, well, our job is to prolong life.
And your job is to make it clear why that's a good thing. And that was a very, very good and kind of generous idea.
But I've thought about that quite a lot during the pandemic when we've
been so focussed on Oxford science and the wonderful work of the vaccine,
but also thinking a little bit about what does the humanities give to that.
But let's let's move to your stuff, because I mean, you've been an amazingly inventive and prolific writer.
I think the first thing of yours that I read before I knew that you were connected to Hertford was A White Merc With Fins.
And I've got here in front of me the shortest history of England, which came out last last year.
How would you describe the shape of your writing career?
Well, I think it started off simply by imitating writers I loved.
And that's something I always recommend to my students is to not only not be ashamed of the idea that you're imitating,
but to absolutely embrace it. And I seem to give them a couple of examples.
You know, look at the Samuel Beckett, who was literally carrying James Joyce's bags for years.
If you look at, I sometimes starts off by with the first the first paragraph of The Corrections by Jonathan
Franzen and take them through it and show that on an almost clause by clause level
It's a rewrite of the beginning of Bleak House.
And the one so I started off, I was absolutely, immortally in love with the works of Franz Kafka as a student at Oxford,
I had this extraordinary experience where Sir Malcolm Pasley actually let me hold very briefly hold the original manuscript of The Castle,
which would never be allowed these days, of course, not even two minutes and showed me a wonderful,
wonderful part where Kafka's writing changes within the text, in the original, in Kafka's handwriting.
And so I always, I copied him for years and years until I finally sort of I suppose,
as they put it, I found my own voice in conversation with one of my students at Sheffield University,
just said one sentence and I realised my search is over. I found I found the voice at last, you know, but it's a long thing,
it all starts off with assiduous copying until you can learn the craft, you know.
And once you've got the craft, I'm a firm believer, then that you can apply
I won't say the rules, but, whatever the templates of writing to to anything, really,
whether it be screenwriting or writing of what I would call creative non-fiction.
It all works in the same way a story is a story is a story,
and whether you're writing the story of the Seasalt company and its foundation, the chain of shops,
or whether your Yuval Noah Harari writing the history of humanity or Philip Pullman starting its story,
you find if you look at them closely, they're all doing exactly the same thing, essentially.
And so I'm just eternally fascinated by the way that without trying to pretend they are rules,
there are nevertheless paradigms which work for almost everything, and which every student,
whether of creative writing or simply of being literate, really should be aware of. That's
so striking because one of the questions I wanted to ask you about was how you saw the differences between the fiction,
your adaptation of your own novels for cinema, the these powerfully,
brilliantly successful The Short History of of Germany and then of England.
But what you're saying is that fundamentally, these are all about storytelling and storytelling is your craft.
Yes, it's a craft. And even more so it's a craft. And I mean, it's almost literally like a mediaeval guild craft in that it's also collaborative.
You know, I didn't invent the notion of the of the shortest histories. I was approached by a publisher who is also a very good editor.
He was at Univ. And he and he said, would I like to write the second one if he'd published one already?
The Sort of History of Europe which had done very well and would I would I like to write for nothing, basically.
And I was so taken by him, by the idea that I said yes and I'm very delighted.
But it was thoroughly collaborative.
I mean, in the same way that we now know that Raymond Carver's style was essentially his editor style, not Raymond Carver's at all.
And so what I write is really genuinely collaborative.
I mean, I it is my proud boast that if I am writing something,
whether it's a book or a big article for Prospect magazine or something, I tell the editors, I really mean this.
You're right. If you don't like something, take it out.
And I know when I was writing Random House, my editor used to be astonished. So I'd say, just take if you don't like the paragraph, take it out.
You say what really? You don't mind. I say, well, no, if you don't like it at my agent doesn't like it.
Clearly you're right and I'm wrong, the pair of you to take it out.
Has that been hard work to sort of step off, as it were, killing your darlings, stepping, taking the ego out of it?
Or does that does that come quite easily to you? It doesn't come naturally.
It comes with it comes in my case, it came with the recognition of disaster,
because I didn't do that when I when my second novel came out and it was immediately
optioned for a film and I was allowed to write the film and co-produced it,
you know, I thought to myself here, I'm thirty seven years old.
I'm a sort of sexy, hot young novelist. I can do anything who needs to read Robert Mackay, that sort of thing, you know,
and the fact that I hadn't the first notion how to write a screenplay, I had not mastered that craft at all.
The result was absolute disaster. I think Halliwell Film Guide describes that film and you name it like the Russian
film in the sense of the Scottish play and the worst film ever made in the UK.
And that's against some pretty tough opposition. And it was a complete disaster.
And it could have ended my career then and there, and it almost ended the director's career.
But I took a step back from it and realised I really need to wake up here and understand that I am
not always right because my inverted commas feelings are not a reliable guide to what works.
And that's a vital thing for any person, particularly a young person in this age.
I am saying this very unconventionally now I mean the romantic age beginning around 1810, not this age now.
And when we are taught and have been taught for a very long time now, essentially that one's feelings are a reliable guide to everything.
The feeling is everything is go to set and that's complete bullshit
Frankly, it's not. The craft is everything. What you feel is not a reliable guide to what is actually going to work.
And once you've learned that, which is a painful case and in my case demanded a very big punch straight on the nose from the public,
and then you can begin to take that step back to realise that this thing is only going to work if it works for other people.
And that means you've got to understand how it works, the mechanisms, the craft,
the architecture and so forth, which can be taught, which can be learnt.
Wow. Yeah, I was wondering whether to bring up the Russian film.
So I'm glad that you did. I mean, partly because your career is so, so glittering and successful and brilliant.
And I love I love this. The book that I've just been reading, The Shortest History of England.
Thank you. I'm so enjoying it. I can't recommend it enough to other people.
I suppose it will be easy in that line to just brush under the carpet things which have not gone quite so well.
But it's really great for people. It's great for students, isn't it, to hear this is never mind hear somebody talking about all their successes.
Here's someone talking about something which really didn't go well. And, you know, that was not the end of the world.
I've always been my teaching whether it's Oxford University or Oxford Brookes,
by sitting my students down saying, you know, you do have a right. You should never forget the students.
You have the right to ask, you know, by what right does this person stand before me?
Ex Cathedra and all that and my right is that I have made the mistakes and can teach you not to
make them. Provided always you can get through it and pick yourself up.
Mistakes are, of course, the finest education on God's earth.
And so I don't regret those at all, though at the time I can't disguise it, it was extraordinarily painful at the time.
Obviously, I can imagine. I can imagine it is great for our students, I think, to hear this,
not least because our brilliant students often come to us not having put a foot wrong.
That's how they get to us. They've got these wonderful academic records.
They've been sparkling in extracurricular activities.
They are lovely, competent, engaged, creative people.
And that all ought to be good. But I think it can sometimes make the idea that you would fail at something or something,
would not go well, seem catastrophic and unthinkable, catastrophic.
And it's just really great to be reminded. That's just not the case. Absolutely not the case.
One of the things I wanted to ask you about was how it was. So you are ranging this book from the Romans up to the present day.
It's an absolutely brilliant sweep. And what I so admire about it is the way you cut through and make a shape out of that.
That's back to, I think, to what you're saying about storytelling without being completely bogged down by particularities.
And this is brilliant running gag almost that I found so revelatory about the factors that have made the south
east of England the kind of privileged centre and the kind of ruling heartlands of England and how that still,
you know, that still continues. That seemed to me to be as much about sort of HS2 as it was about the Roman roads and so on.
But I wondered how it was to write with that sort of clarity and unclogged vision about the very recent past or almost the present.
How did you get to that?
Well, again, that's an enormous amount of input from my publisher, who's an editor himself and his editor,
the wonderful Matt Bayliss, who are that lovely book about the island where they worship Prince Charles.
The Duke of Edinburgh rather. And we worked very hard.
And I say we, we worked very hard on that last sort of 30 pages to make sure that it
still maintained that sense of a sort of Olympian distance from things while not ducking issues.
And and I'm very, I'm delighted you think it came off because that was by far the hardest bit to get
Right. I think because when one started to write about events in one's own lifetime, then it's very, very hard to not to not be partisan.
But you have to not allow yourself to do that, at least not to visibly.
And what do you think is the historian's sort of narrative obligation to those resonances between past and present?
I mean, one of the things I enjoyed about this book was descriptions of apparently the far past,
which seemed and sort of drily I mean, dry as in wittily rather than as in boringly, wittily pointed towards something.
Much more much more recent.
What's that past, present, you know, that seems to be a big discussion in historical writing at the moment, doesn't it?
Is the past ever the past? Is it always the present in sort of doublets and hose?
As I would see it. I'm I should probably have to say so.
I'm a firm believer. I think we underestimate the past ness of the present, to sort of always paraphrase William Faulkner.
And there are so many things which go on.
Which we fondly believe are new, are original.
But when you start looking with open eyes at history, you see and I'm paraphrasing Indiana Jones,
we are merely passing through history that our lives are very short and they are much more contingent than the young people like to think.
For example, I'm sitting here talking to you in Bath,
but I can go 50 yards down the road and talk to one of my neighbours with you here who is essentially speaking Anglo-Saxon.
He still uses the word Herr to mean, he, which is German.
You know, that was outdated by Chaucer's day. Well before Chaucer's day.
Herr be going to market, that sort of thing. And it's an illustration in a way.
If our very speech patterns seems to be almost time proof in that way,
I suspect that also our patterns of political and social thinking are actually far more contingent on the past than we believe,
which is why the and I must stress this when I was writing this book, when I first began this book,
if you'd asked me when did the north-south divide become important in Britain and in England particularly,
I would probably have said Margaret Thatcher and the industrialisation of the North.
If you had asked me when did the Normans start speaking English,
I would probably have said, well, I don't know about probably about twelve hundred.
I'd be completely wrong on both counts.
Of course. Just on that right at the beginning of your book, there's an amazing map on page five which gives,
gives a division of England from the sort of Humber to the seven and marks it as the the geological jurassic divide,
but also the limits of coin minting tribes, which I just thought in itself is just so fascinating.
The graphics in this book, as part of what you said about collaboration are really, really wonderful.
They really add a lot to that pithy sort of summary of how things work.
But I just thought that could be a map of all kinds of things, you know, median income, sort of commuting distance and all kinds of factors.
In the present day, it felt as if that line still still exists.
I mean, really, as I say, I knew nothing about this when I started my technique
It's very time consuming. What I have said is that I, I downloaded by literally thousands, actually literally thousands of JSTOR articles and things.
I read and read through them for a year and a half or two years.
And I start writing the book. The German poet Goether had this theory, which I suppose we could try.
We would say something like in the Kantian sense, looking at things without any angle, just quietly looking at things.
And try to let us try to let the story kind of show itself, and that sounds very highfalutin,
but it isn't really it's just so moments that come up when you've got your documents literally spread out over your floor before you.
And as you say, well, if you can have that wide spread and you read the map, which you describe there,
as he did at these Venerable Bede describing the north south divide in 731.
And then you come across a map by Danny Dorling, the Oxford professor of social geography right now in 2007 about social differences.
And it's the same line, you know,
and suddenly you you can't help but feel the screen just come in in your head and think, what on earth is going on here?
Yes, there must be something in this. And that's when it gets kind so exciting.
And then and when you when you then trace it and and other things come, you don't know.
I had no idea that that both Oxford and Cambridge formerly divided their student bodies into southerners and northerners along the Trent,
of course, in the 14th century. It's amazing. It also made me understand a bit more just how much of a favourite of King Lear,
Cordelia, the youngest daughter, is, because that's the bit she's going to get.
Of course, you know, I never thought of that. Which and the sort of clarity of that made me think, yeah, no wonder your sisters hate you.
Goody two shoes. I hadn't thought about that. How lovely.
Goddamn it. I'm just getting the next edition anyway. That's fantastic.
I once I did some stuff at the Playhouse and also they want to be professional actor for a while.
And I once did. I did, I did a rep performance of Hotspur Henry the Fourth, despite which, you know, knowing what Henry the Fourth is all about,
for one, it had never occurred to me that there's this thing called the tripartite.
How extraordinary this tripartite indenture really is in history.
You know, this is the very moment when the kind of French speaking unity of the English elites after the conquest,
it's just crumbling suddenly here and the Percys is in the Mortimers planning in cahoots flowed into it to split England up forever.
And then the tripartite indenture is a formal Latin document signed by the King
of France himself says it's going to be for each man and his successors forever.
This is a permanent state. They're planning to permanently divide England into northern and southern kingdoms.
And that has slipped my mind, despite actually having been Hotspur for a couple of weeks.
You know, so it's amazing when one rediscovers the excitement of these sort of insights.
I just there were days when I had to say to my wife, you know,
I understand why in cartoons they have a light bulb on people's heads when they have an idea,
because I just feel that my head is full of light right now, you know? Well, and absolutely.
That's the that's the experience of reading reading that book. It was it's been an absolute delight to read it over the last few days.
And I really do. I can't recommend it highly enough.
James, we're probably coming to the end of our conversation, but I wanted to just ask you something else about Hartford.
I wanted to round off with that.
So partly the prompt for this series of literary podcasts was to celebrate and investigate the great range of Hertford writers and to do that,
perhaps to focus our minds a bit on the library in Hertford
We've got big plans for an extension to the library that I hope very much will be able to prosecute over that over the next few years.
But I wondered about you and Hertford Library. Was that was that a haunt of yours?
And do you have fond memories of it? It was a haunt, I have to confess, it was a haunt in a slightly bad way.
The then Dean, Dr Tanner sort of saw me on top of the roof playing the French horn one day and without a pause in his step,
just looked up and said Oh Mr Hawes, I believe the fine is ten pounds and went passed on his way in his gown.
I was actually playing the French horn to celebrate a friend of mine coming back through through the doors in the main quad,
having just finished his PPE exams, which I this is a secret which students might like to know.
I used to practise my French horn in the chapel, which has a fantastic acoustic, very forgiving for those who tend to split notes on the French horn.
But I discovered I was also accidentally given a key to the organ loft from which you can emerge onto the roof of the of the library,
Do not try this at home, gentle listeners, but a sort of 'taran-ta-raa' on the on the French horn would be a much preferable
celebration of the end of finals than the current vogue for shaving foam and glitter,
which is the bit that makes me like a sort of old fogey.
I'm very much against this. That really is an invented tradition. Not in our day, I think.
Was that an Oxford thing? I have to confess, I didn't use the library that much simply because and this is something which I think
is tremendously special at Hertford because I did most of my finals work in Duke Humphrey.
Which is just such a wonderful experience and what is so special is, I mean,
even if you're walking from, say, Christchurch, where my son was, up into the main, you know,
you're passing takeaways and coffee shops and things, but when you walk out of the main quad in Hertford,
you can turn, you can walk down your college lane under the bridge or you can walk round the Rad Cam
and there is no sign of commercialism. There's no sign of the 20th century essentially around you.
There are no neon and no special offers.
And you can and just that experience of walking out of the old quad and across to the Bod and into the Duke Humphrey,
I found just a wonderful bath of being able to escape from the modern world when I really had to my finals, you know,
and I think the centrality of Hertford is something which, again, people underestimate what a small but definite difference,
that difference makes to your experience of being in Oxford, actually being in the centre of things.
You know, even if you even the walk from Magdalen or Christchurch, never mind from from that from the former women's colleges,
you have having to sort of get into Oxford, whereas Hertford, you walk through the door and you're there straight away.
And somehow that's a subtle but I found important difference.
I hadn't thought, I mean, like everybody, I've been far away from my workplace, if not geographically, then somehow mentally over lockdown,
and I hadn't thought quite so clearly how slipping out of the door in Hertford
going either across into the main part of the Bodleian or into Radcliffe Square,
you are really in a in a cityscape in which is centuries centuries old.
I suppose that perhaps makes it clear why New College was so against the bridge of
Sighs You know, when we had the Bridges birthday, 100th birthday,
some of the opposition from from New College was read out to the to the bridge being built
that it was going to be a great eyesore and nobody would ever would ever want to look at it.
And actually, it's Jacksons, the architect's great triumph. I think that it fits so well into into that rather timeless feeling
space.
Yes, I think I think Hertford should be charging the university every time the university uses it as it's de facto logo, which it does sometimes.
Yes. We have wondered about that.
And I also became very fascinated by those Christo sort of sculptures and happenings, you know, where they wrap up,
Yes, you're right. Right. Marble Arch or something. I thought we should have had it wrapped up, which would be wonderful.
James, this has been a great really such a great conversation. Thank you for your generosity in in being part of our literary podcast.
Thank you for having me.
And thanks also to Hannah Bironzo, who has done all the work producing this, but particularly thanks to you, James Hawes, for being our guest today.
It's been a pleasure. Then the next podcast is moving to a different part of Hertford's literary output.
And I'm going to be talking with Anya Glazer about her illustrated books for children.
So if you might be in the market for a book for four or five or six year olds,
or to think more about books for children and how they should be, do listen next time.
Thanks very much.