University of Oxford. - This secret garden: Oxford revisited

INTERIOR
LOOK AT IT THIS WAY
MASAI DREAMING
IN EVERY FACE I MEET
LEADING THE CHEERS
HALF IN LOVE
WHITE LIGHTNING
THE PROMISE OF HAPPINESS
THE SONG BEFORE IT IS SUNG
TO HEAVEN BY WATER
OTHER PEOPLES MONEY
LION HEART

First published in Great Britain 2008

This electronic edition published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Copyright 2008 by Justin Cartwright

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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London WC1B 3DP
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eISBN: 978-1-4088-5296-5

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Once snagged in these potent streets, once admitted to this secret garden, the initiated cannot leave. It remains a place whose friendships and mutual succour, its secret languages and codes, will go on being shared.

Valentine Cunningham, The History
of the University of Oxford, vol. 8

This book is one in a series called The Writer and the City. I have to admit now that it is not so much about the City of Oxford as the University of Oxford. The two are anyway inseparable in my mind.

Recently an interviewer, after being very cordial towards me in person, complained in print that I worked Oxford into my life story as quickly as possible. It is true. Oxford made me what I am, although it was not the real Oxford, but an Oxford I imagined.

Oxford is many things. But it has a symbolic meaning well beyond its buildings, gardens, rituals and teaching. It stands for something deep in the Anglo-Saxon mind excellence, a kind of privilege, a charmed life, deep-veined liberalism, a respect for tradition.

It is also a place. This for me is the fascination of cities, that they are both places an accumulation of bricks and stone and architecture and landscape and at the same time the accumulation of hopes, aspirations, intellectual effort and human striving. The fusion is what defines a particular city.

From the moment I arrived at Trinity College in the mid-sixties, I was in love with Oxford. It plumped up my dry colonial heart; I loved the first autumn term, the darkness, gowned figures on bicycles, crumpets after rugby, the pale although not very numerous girls, the extraordinary buildings and the water running through and around the town. I felt as though I had always known the place, or some simulacrum of it, in another or parallel life.

After I left I could hardly bear to go back: it was as if nobody else should take possession of this place that had meant so much to me, in fact formed me. I was almost embarrassed by how easily and totally I had been seduced. It took me nearly two years to get over the desolation of having to live in London.

Now I have been back and tried to understand what Oxford is, was, and might be. Its a personal account, an essay handed in late.

Other Peoples Money

Urgently topical fiction with its finger on the pulse of earth-shaking events Cartwrights fiction has an uncanny habit of catching the zeitgeist in nets of fine-meshed tragi-comic steel
Independent

The Trevelyan family is in grave trouble. Their private bank of Tubal & Co. is in on the verge of collapsing. Its not the first time in its three-hundred-and-forty-year history, but it may be the last. A sale is under way, and a number of important facts need to be kept hidden, not only from the public, but also from Julian Trevelyan-Tubals deeply traditional father, Sir Harry, who is incapacitated in the family villa in Antibes. Great families, great fortunes and even greater secrets collide in this gripping, satirical and acutely observed story of our time.

Wise, droll and beautiful fiction
David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas

Composed with a superb eye and supremely well written
Daily Telegraph

What a great read this is. Cartwright assembles a wonderful cast of characters in this masterpiece A treat from start to triumphant finish
Observer

Cartwrights subtle and pacy comedy of manners finds its humour and humanity in the shades of moral grey that define all its main characters
Daily Mail

To Heaven By Water

A BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime

David Cross is surrounded by secrets. When his wife Nancy was alive he kept secrets from her and now that she is dead, he must hide his new happiness from his children, Lucy and Ed. But they too have their troubles: Eds marriage is in trouble, Lucy is being stalked by her ex-boyfriend, and both worry that their father will find a new partner.

To Heaven by Water is a touching and hilarious portrait of a family trying to come to terms with loss in their own way.

His storytelling powers are so fluent and persuasive, the quality of his observation so fine
Daily Telegraph

A delicately patterned novel about the heroic search for happiness and its ultimate fragility. The comfortable middle-class setting and faintly fairytale ending belie a portrait of family life in which concealment and compromise are never far away. Quietly moving
Financial Times

A high-class piece of literary entertainment
Spectator

The Promise of Happiness

The Richard & Judy bestseller
Winner of the Hawthornden Prize 2005

Charles Judd wanders across a wild Cornish beach, contemplating the turns his life has taken. At home, his wife Daphne struggles hopelessly with the latest fish recipe. Two of their children are keeping it all together just. The third, the prodigal daughter Juliet, is being released from prison in New York after a sentence for art theft. This is the day, on the face of it so ordinary, on which Justin Cartwrights explosive novel opens, as all five members of the family try to come to terms with the return of Juliet, and their deepest thoughts and darkest secrets are laid bare.

A compelling and candid portrait of a family in crisis
Mail on Sunday

Extraordinarily bold This is a funny, angry, moving novel
Independent

Impressive an intelligent, generous and unsentimental take on an English middle-class family
Daily Telegraph

The Song Before It Is Sung

On 20 July 1944, Adolf Hitler narrowly escaped an assassins bomb. Axel von Gottberg and his conspirators were hunted down and hanged from meat-hooks, and the executions filmed. Sixty years later, Conrad Senior is left a legacy of letters by von Gottbergs close friend, the legendary Oxford professor Elya Mendel, and becomes obsessed with what they reveal and finding the brutal film. Award-winning writer Justin Cartwright has conjured a masterwork that addresses the nature of friendship and what it means to be human, and it is a remarkable tapestry of passion, ideas, frailty and courage.