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Welcome to Hertford's literary podcast, I'm Emma Smith. I teach English at Hertford, and I'm really delighted that

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my guest today is James Hawes; prolific writer, novelist, historian, teacher of creative writing and Hertfordian

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and I hope we're going to talk about all of those elements of James's career as well as his memories of Hertford.

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Can we start there? James, hello. Welcome. Good morning. Thanks very much for having us.

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It's lovely to be here. Tell us a bit about you and Hertford. You read German, didn't you?

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I did. And I'm one of those people who who was tremendously lucky in that I benefited from from the Tanner scheme.

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I went to a state school, a very, what would nowadays be called offensively a bog standard, comprehensive,

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I suspect, a very rural Shropshire comprehensive, which had no no tradition really of sending anyone to Oxford.

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And one of my friends had got into Corpus the year before.

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and my history teacher, whose name unforgivably I forget, had been to Hertford and said I should apply.

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And I did and got one of those wonderful offers of a place with only two E's and

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which I remember I remember going straight to the pub in my small Shropshire town,

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which of course is in the seventies you could go to in your school uniform and celebrating with with my various friends,

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most of whom were farm laborours and things. So it completely changed my life coming here and the tanner scheme  was it

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And I suspect, you know, whenever I hear today people objecting to the notion of special schemes for entrants from various groups,

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I have to put my hand up and say, well, you know, in my day, I was one of them.

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Yeah, that's fantastic. And what was Hertford like when you arrived? Was it was it as you expected?

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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,

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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.

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And so I was able to allow myself to completely fall in love with the place

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in a way which an ordinary interview candidate doesn't dare do in case they fail.

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And knowing I was going to go there for sure because I was not going to get two E's, obviously.

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And so I came and all prepped up and already half in love with the place really when I came here.

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And it absolutely, absolutely fulfils my sort of Oxford dream and in a very good way,

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because I think what made Hertford special then and as far as I know still does now is

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that it seems to me to mix the very best of Oxford without some of the less good.

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It is a place full of it has its own traditions, its own wonderful buildings,

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which have become an icon for the whole university and in the case of the bridge and so forth.

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But it didn't and I don't think it does, have all that sort of blooming Brideshead Revisited and Zuleika Dobson thing,

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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,

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and and people who get entranced by all that sort of thing and think that's the real Oxford are falling for,

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you know, something invented by very self-consciously, by literary people like Evelyn Waugh in the 20th century, essentially.

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And Hertford was thankfully free of almost all of that, which I think made it the perfect balance.

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We were all that very amused when the latest film version of Brideshead was filmed in Oxford.

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And of course, Hertford didn't look Hertford enough to be Hertford. And those scenes were all shot in Jesus college.

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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,

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I would be hoping to get Evelyn Waugh although I'd be terribly frightened, I think, to discuss with him.

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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,

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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.

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So because the set up, which we, of course, know is in Hertford, is just an absolute masterpiece.

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And the creation, a brief, wonderful economic creation of a world.

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And so and I adore Waugh.

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as a writer and I wonder about whether one would have liked him as a person is another matter entirely? Absolutely,

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absolutely. And did you think of yourself as a writer or did you want to be a writer when you were at Hertford?

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I did, actually. But this is one of the interesting things.

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It's something I have been vaguely talking and hoping to get something going with our new principal

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Tom about this is this and what I suffer from is I had to because I had actually no literary connections of any kind.

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I mean, I went to a school where where the height of culture was an annual trip to Birmingham Rep.

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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.

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But I realised that some of the people and even in Hertford, some of the people, other colleges, moreso

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they were young people of my age who who'd had adventures to the Royal cCurt, have grown up with publishers.

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And I remember being very jealous of Will Self because he he had a girlfriend from Hertford who I was desperately and hopelessly,

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hopelessly in love with. But of course, I had an entirely different background from him.

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For him, having dinner with publishers and things was just something he'd done all through his youth.

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And I was very, very struck straightaway and a bit thrown back.

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I have to say, by realising that I, coming from rural Shropshire and a comprehensive as a would-be writer,

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found myself completely out of my depth when I joined the writing circles and things at Oxford,

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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.

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And one of the things I think that that's that's that's something which I would love to do

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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.

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And they have a fantastic programme of alumnae only internships, absolutely open, and there's no there's no beating about the bush.

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And as I was talking to Principal Tom about this,

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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,

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because one of the things that people who aren't Oxfordians misunderstand is they seem to think that by virtue of coming here,

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you are immediately an insider of the big world.

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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.

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Others don't. And I think one of the things would be a natural extension of Hertford's unique.

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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

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who,

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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.

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I did, because even if I left, I still had really had no idea how to go about these things at all.

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I think that's such a good idea. And it would, I think, help.

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I mean, it would it would help all kinds of students, but it would do something which is really close to my heart,

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which is maintaining the humanities as degree subjects, which are really open to a diverse range of students.

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We're all worried that in the age of fees and all these kinds of things,

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that the humanities look decorative or indulgent rather than as they are a proper training for all kinds of professional roles.

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And I think that would be fantastic to to see that I am.

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And I would I would I would love to see as a concerted effort by by people in the humanities,

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as we have been talking to some colleagues about already elsewhere,

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to really sit down with people in the non humanities or certainly in the social sciences

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and point out the enormous benefits to people that accrue from being literate,

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from being commanders of language. You know, it only has to look at the enormous success of popular science, for example,

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to think that one really ought to be able to whet the appetite of everyone in Oxford working in science.

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To train themselves and, for want of a better word, rhetoric, storytelling, because what the hell has Yuval Noah Harari [INAUDIBLE],

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done, for God's sake, you know, and what did Jared Diamond do?

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And though these people, as scientists who absolutely made their names by telling a story of their work,

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which they would not be able to do, where they not also, you know, in the humanities sense, cultured literary people.

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Yeah, I really agree with you. And I think one of the things in in my subject, in English literature,

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that we we sort of did wrongly, it was intellectually an interesting experiment.

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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.

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Can literature make you a better person? Of course, they were terrible people who did terrible things, who were very literary,

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and we sort of lost confidence in the humane aspects of the humanities.

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And I do think we probably need to come back to that a bit.

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No, I absolutely agree. I mean, I think I'd go further than you.

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I take the sort of freedom of being a non-professional to go further than that and say that I think

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that loss of confidence in what you rightly said called the humane act of humanity led to this,

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I think, generational dead end of excessive theorising,

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which I think is largely responsible for the fact that bizarrely, one might think as recruitment in English is under threat, in many places,

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recruitment in creative writing is soaring because essentially creative writing

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is in many ways simply doing what English did before the so-called theory boom.

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And I think that is largely at fault for the collapse of recruitment.

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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.

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for my PhD and I was told in 1988, you cannot to write a Phd about Kafka and Nietsche without a chapter on Derrida.

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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.

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And I found it outrageous. And I find it outrageous now.

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So I wrote I wrote an entire introduction as an attack on deconstruction, which I'm very glad to say was very well reviewed.

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I really I think that if we abandon this really ridiculous attempt to say to science-ise

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the humanities and refind our mojo, our confidence as teachers of humanities,

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of what you rightly called the humane humanities. I love that.

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Then I think we will be able to approach other disciplines and say, you know, we're not trying to ape you.

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We're not trying to persuade and to persuade ourselves that Saussure is a scientist, for God's sake, or something like that.

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And we are we are offering something completely different, which is of great value to you.

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The pandemic has been instructive, I think, in that it's who would have thought that people would want to watch

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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.

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I was just thinking about a colleague of mine who is the head of medical sciences here at Oxford, Alistair Buchan.

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And we would go to university council meetings together where millions and millions of

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grant money would be allocated to medical sciences for research into cancer and so on.

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And and he and I would talk afterwards and he would say, you know, well, our job is to prolong life.

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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.

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But I've thought about that quite a lot during the pandemic when we've

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been so focussed on Oxford science and the wonderful work of the vaccine,

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but also thinking a little bit about what does the humanities give to that.

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But let's let's move to your stuff, because I mean, you've been an amazingly inventive and prolific writer.

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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.

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And I've got here in front of me the shortest history of England, which came out last last year.

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How would you describe the shape of your writing career?

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Well, I think it started off simply by imitating writers I loved.

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And that's something I always recommend to my students is to not only not be ashamed of the idea that you're imitating,

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but to absolutely embrace it. And I seem to give them a couple of examples.

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You know, look at the Samuel Beckett, who was literally carrying James Joyce's bags for years.

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If you look at, I sometimes starts off by with the first the first paragraph of The Corrections by Jonathan

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Franzen and take them through it and show that on an almost clause by clause level

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It's a rewrite of the beginning of Bleak House.

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And the one so I started off, I was absolutely, immortally in love with the works of Franz Kafka as a student at Oxford,

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I had this extraordinary experience where Sir Malcolm Pasley actually let me hold very briefly hold the original manuscript of The Castle,

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which would never be allowed these days, of course, not even two minutes and showed me a wonderful,

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wonderful part where Kafka's writing changes within the text, in the original, in Kafka's handwriting.

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And so I always, I copied him for years and years until I finally sort of I suppose,

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as they put it, I found my own voice in conversation with one of my students at Sheffield University,

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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,

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it all starts off with assiduous copying until you can learn the craft, you know.

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And once you've got the craft, I'm a firm believer, then that you can apply

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I won't say the rules, but, whatever the templates of writing to to anything, really,

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whether it be screenwriting or writing of what I would call creative non-fiction.

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It all works in the same way a story is a story is a story,

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and whether you're writing the story of the Seasalt company and its foundation, the chain of shops,

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or whether your Yuval Noah Harari writing the history of humanity or Philip Pullman starting its story,

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you find if you look at them closely, they're all doing exactly the same thing, essentially.

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And so I'm just eternally fascinated by the way that without trying to pretend they are rules,

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there are nevertheless paradigms which work for almost everything, and which every student,

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whether of creative writing or simply of being literate, really should be aware of. That's

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so striking because one of the questions I wanted to ask you about was how you saw the differences between the fiction,

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your adaptation of your own novels for cinema, the these powerfully,

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brilliantly successful The Short History of of Germany and then of England.

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But what you're saying is that fundamentally, these are all about storytelling and storytelling is your craft.

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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.

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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.

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He was at Univ. And he and he said, would I like to write the second one if he'd published one already?

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The Sort of History of Europe which had done very well and would I would I like to write for nothing, basically.

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And I was so taken by him, by the idea that I said yes and I'm very delighted.

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But it was thoroughly collaborative.

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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.

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And so what I write is really genuinely collaborative.

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I mean, I it is my proud boast that if I am writing something,

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whether it's a book or a big article for Prospect magazine or something, I tell the editors, I really mean this.

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You're right. If you don't like something, take it out.

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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.

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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.

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Clearly you're right and I'm wrong, the pair of you to take it out.

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Has that been hard work to sort of step off, as it were, killing your darlings, stepping, taking the ego out of it?

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Or does that does that come quite easily to you? It doesn't come naturally.

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It comes with it comes in my case, it came with the recognition of disaster,

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because I didn't do that when I when my second novel came out and it was immediately

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optioned for a film and I was allowed to write the film and co-produced it,

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you know, I thought to myself here, I'm thirty seven years old.

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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,

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and the fact that I hadn't the first notion how to write a screenplay, I had not mastered that craft at all.

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The result was absolute disaster. I think Halliwell Film Guide describes that film and you name it like the Russian

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film in the sense of the Scottish play and the worst film ever made in the UK.

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And that's against some pretty tough opposition. And it was a complete disaster.

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And it could have ended my career then and there, and it almost ended the director's career.

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But I took a step back from it and realised I really need to wake up here and understand that I am

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not always right because my inverted commas feelings are not a reliable guide to what works.

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And that's a vital thing for any person, particularly a young person in this age.

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I am saying this very unconventionally now I mean the romantic age beginning around 1810, not this age now.

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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.

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The feeling is everything is go to set and that's complete bullshit

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Frankly, it's not. The craft is everything. What you feel is not a reliable guide to what is actually going to work.

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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,

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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.

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And that means you've got to understand how it works, the mechanisms, the craft,

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the architecture and so forth, which can be taught, which can be learnt.

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Wow. Yeah, I was wondering whether to bring up the Russian film.

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So I'm glad that you did. I mean, partly because your career is so, so glittering and successful and brilliant.

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And I love I love this. The book that I've just been reading, The Shortest History of England.

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Thank you. I'm so enjoying it. I can't recommend it enough to other people.

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I suppose it will be easy in that line to just brush under the carpet things which have not gone quite so well.

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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.

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Here's someone talking about something which really didn't go well. And, you know, that was not the end of the world.

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I've always been my teaching whether it's Oxford University or Oxford Brookes,

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by sitting my students down saying, you know, you do have a right. You should never forget the students.

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You have the right to ask, you know, by what right does this person stand before me?

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Ex Cathedra and all that and my right is that I have made the mistakes and can teach you not to

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make them. Provided always you can get through it and pick yourself up.

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Mistakes are, of course, the finest education on God's earth.

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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.

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Obviously, I can imagine. I can imagine it is great for our students, I think, to hear this,

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not least because our brilliant students often come to us not having put a foot wrong.

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That's how they get to us. They've got these wonderful academic records.

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They've been sparkling in extracurricular activities.

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They are lovely, competent, engaged, creative people.

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And that all ought to be good. But I think it can sometimes make the idea that you would fail at something or something,

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would not go well, seem catastrophic and unthinkable, catastrophic.

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And it's just really great to be reminded. That's just not the case. Absolutely not the case.

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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.

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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.

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That's back to, I think, to what you're saying about storytelling without being completely bogged down by particularities.

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And this is brilliant running gag almost that I found so revelatory about the factors that have made the south

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east of England the kind of privileged centre and the kind of ruling heartlands of England and how that still,

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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.

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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.

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How did you get to that?

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Well, again, that's an enormous amount of input from my publisher, who's an editor himself and his editor,

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the wonderful Matt Bayliss, who are that lovely book about the island where they worship Prince Charles.

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The Duke of Edinburgh rather. And we worked very hard.

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And I say we, we worked very hard on that last sort of 30 pages to make sure that it

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still maintained that sense of a sort of Olympian distance from things while not ducking issues.

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And and I'm very, I'm delighted you think it came off because that was by far the hardest bit to get

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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.

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But you have to not allow yourself to do that, at least not to visibly.

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And what do you think is the historian's sort of narrative obligation to those resonances between past and present?

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I mean, one of the things I enjoyed about this book was descriptions of apparently the far past,

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which seemed and sort of drily I mean, dry as in wittily rather than as in boringly, wittily pointed towards something.

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Much more much more recent.

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What's that past, present, you know, that seems to be a big discussion in historical writing at the moment, doesn't it?

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Is the past ever the past? Is it always the present in sort of doublets and hose?

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As I would see it. I'm I should probably have to say so.

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I'm a firm believer. I think we underestimate the past ness of the present, to sort of always paraphrase William Faulkner.

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And there are so many things which go on.

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Which we fondly believe are new, are original.

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But when you start looking with open eyes at history, you see and I'm paraphrasing Indiana Jones,

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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.

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For example, I'm sitting here talking to you in Bath,

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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.

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He still uses the word Herr to mean, he, which is German.

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You know, that was outdated by Chaucer's day. Well before Chaucer's day.

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Herr be going to market, that sort of thing. And it's an illustration in a way.

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If our very speech patterns seems to be almost time proof in that way,

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I suspect that also our patterns of political and social thinking are actually far more contingent on the past than we believe,

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which is why the and I must stress this when I was writing this book, when I first began this book,

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if you'd asked me when did the north-south divide become important in Britain and in England particularly,

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I would probably have said Margaret Thatcher and the industrialisation of the North.

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If you had asked me when did the Normans start speaking English,

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I would probably have said, well, I don't know about probably about twelve hundred.

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I'd be completely wrong on both counts.

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Of course. Just on that right at the beginning of your book, there's an amazing map on page five which gives,

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gives a division of England from the sort of Humber to the seven and marks it as the the geological jurassic divide,

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but also the limits of coin minting tribes, which I just thought in itself is just so fascinating.

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The graphics in this book, as part of what you said about collaboration are really, really wonderful.

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They really add a lot to that pithy sort of summary of how things work.

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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.

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In the present day, it felt as if that line still still exists.

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I mean, really, as I say, I knew nothing about this when I started my technique

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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.

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I read and read through them for a year and a half or two years.

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And I start writing the book. The German poet Goether had this theory, which I suppose we could try.

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We would say something like in the Kantian sense, looking at things without any angle, just quietly looking at things.

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And try to let us try to let the story kind of show itself, and that sounds very highfalutin,

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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.

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And as you say, well, if you can have that wide spread and you read the map, which you describe there,

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as he did at these Venerable Bede describing the north south divide in 731.

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And then you come across a map by Danny Dorling, the Oxford professor of social geography right now in 2007 about social differences.

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And it's the same line, you know,

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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?

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Yes, there must be something in this. And that's when it gets kind so exciting.

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And then and when you when you then trace it and and other things come, you don't know.

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I had no idea that that both Oxford and Cambridge formerly divided their student bodies into southerners and northerners along the Trent,

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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,

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Cordelia, the youngest daughter, is, because that's the bit she's going to get.

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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.

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Goody two shoes. I hadn't thought about that. How lovely.

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Goddamn it. I'm just getting the next edition anyway. That's fantastic.

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I once I did some stuff at the Playhouse and also they want to be professional actor for a while.

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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,

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for one, it had never occurred to me that there's this thing called the tripartite.

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How extraordinary this tripartite indenture really is in history.

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You know, this is the very moment when the kind of French speaking unity of the English elites after the conquest,

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it's just crumbling suddenly here and the Percys is in the Mortimers planning in cahoots flowed into it to split England up forever.

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And then the tripartite indenture is a formal Latin document signed by the King

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of France himself says it's going to be for each man and his successors forever.

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This is a permanent state. They're planning to permanently divide England into northern and southern kingdoms.

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And that has slipped my mind, despite actually having been Hotspur for a couple of weeks.

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You know, so it's amazing when one rediscovers the excitement of these sort of insights.

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I just there were days when I had to say to my wife, you know,

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I understand why in cartoons they have a light bulb on people's heads when they have an idea,

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because I just feel that my head is full of light right now, you know? Well, and absolutely.

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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.

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And I really do. I can't recommend it highly enough.

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James, we're probably coming to the end of our conversation, but I wanted to just ask you something else about Hartford.

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I wanted to round off with that.

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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,

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perhaps to focus our minds a bit on the library in Hertford 

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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.

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But I wondered about you and Hertford Library. Was that was that a haunt of yours?

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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.

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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,

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just looked up and said Oh Mr Hawes, I believe the fine is ten pounds and went passed on his way in his gown.

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I was actually playing the French horn to celebrate a friend of mine coming back through through the doors in the main quad,

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having just finished his PPE exams, which I this is a secret which students might like to know.

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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.

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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,

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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

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celebration of the end of finals than the current vogue for shaving foam and glitter,

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which is the bit that makes me like a sort of old fogey.

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I'm very much against this. That really is an invented tradition. Not in our day, I think.

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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

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is tremendously special at Hertford because I did most of my finals work in Duke Humphrey.

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Which is just such a wonderful experience and what is so special is, I mean,

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even if you're walking from, say, Christchurch, where my son was, up into the main, you know,

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you're passing takeaways and coffee shops and things, but when you walk out of the main quad in Hertford,

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you can turn, you can walk down your college lane under the bridge or you can walk round the Rad Cam

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and there is no sign of commercialism. There's no sign of the 20th century essentially around you.

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There are no neon and no special offers.

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And you can and just that experience of walking out of the old quad and across to the Bod and into the Duke Humphrey,

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I found just a wonderful bath of being able to escape from the modern world when I really had to my finals, you know,

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and I think the centrality of Hertford is something which, again, people underestimate what a small but definite difference,

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that difference makes to your experience of being in Oxford, actually being in the centre of things.

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You know, even if you even the walk from Magdalen or Christchurch, never mind from from that from the former women's colleges,

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you have having to sort of get into Oxford, whereas Hertford, you walk through the door and you're there straight away.

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And somehow that's a subtle but I found important difference.

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I hadn't thought, I mean, like everybody, I've been far away from my workplace, if not geographically, then somehow mentally over lockdown,

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and I hadn't thought quite so clearly how slipping out of the door in Hertford

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going either across into the main part of the Bodleian or into Radcliffe Square,

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you are really in a in a cityscape in which is centuries centuries old.

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I suppose that perhaps makes it clear why New College was so against the bridge of

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Sighs You know, when we had the Bridges birthday, 100th birthday,

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some of the opposition from from New College was read out to the to the bridge being built

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that it was going to be a great eyesore and nobody would ever would ever want to look at it.

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And actually, it's Jacksons, the architect's great triumph. I think that it fits so well into into that rather timeless feeling

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space.

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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.

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Yes. We have wondered about that.

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And I also became very fascinated by those Christo sort of sculptures and happenings, you know, where they wrap up,

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Yes, you're right. Right. Marble Arch or something. I thought we should have had it wrapped up, which would be wonderful.

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James, this has been a great really such a great conversation. Thank you for your generosity in in being part of our literary podcast.

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Thank you for having me.

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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.

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It's been a pleasure. Then the next podcast is moving to a different part of Hertford's literary output.

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And I'm going to be talking with Anya Glazer about her illustrated books for children.

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So if you might be in the market for a book for four or five or six year olds,

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or to think more about books for children and how they should be, do listen next time.

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Thanks very much.