After being home-educated until she was fifteen and a half, Dorothy Leigh Sayers was sent to a boarding school by her parents in January 1909. They chose the Godolphin School, Salisbury. The essay presents some of the results of detailed research into Dorothy L. Sayers’s time at school. The main sources exploited are three: the letters, many of them unpublished, which she wrote while at the Godolphin; The Godolphin School Magazine; and the handwritten School Diary, with many items pasted in. Some use is also made of Dorothy’s unfinished novel Cat O’Mary, which is partly autobiographical, but not always factually reliable. As well as contributing much to school life, as a brilliant modern linguist and with her outstanding talents in music and drama, Dorothy benefited greatly from the high standard of education she received, from the civilised and stimulating atmosphere fostered by the outstanding headmistress, Mary Alice Douglas, and from the varied contacts she had with her fellow-pupils as well as with her teachers. But she also suffered setbacks, notably when she developed pneumonia after a bout of measles and nearly died, and when she left school suddenly before the end of what was planned to be her penultimate term.

Tristram Hillier made a distinctive and distinguished contribution to twentieth-century British art, moving from abstraction and surrealism to representational painting with elements of quasi-surrealism. His first visit to Portugal, in 1947, was of great importance. It arose out of a crisis in his private life: his Irish Protestant wife, Leda, had objected strongly to his recent return to the Roman Catholic Church and even threatened divorce proceedings. From a professional point of view, the visit was highly successful. The essay clarifies the context, dating, and itinerary of the visit, with full use made of the Hillier files in the Tate Gallery Archive and letters in the possession of the artist’s family. It gives special attention to scenes in the city of Viseu, presenting and discussing his paintings of Cathedral Square and the Church of the Misericordia and his very fine drawing, made en plein air, on which the Cathedral Square painting is based. The drawing, in private ownership since 1948, has not been published before. It and the painting executed months later in the artist’s studio in Somerset make a fascinating study in comparison and contrast.

Building on Karni’s thoughtful interrogation of the ways in which Ishiguro’s narrative techniques inspire questions about the novel as form, in his chapter, ‘Novel dysfunction in When We Were Orphans’, Andrew Bennett takes a similar approach, arguing that Ishiguro’s deployment of the detective genre both exploits and confounds expectations that the novel is a ‘meaning-producing artifact’. In his reading of Ishiguro’s possibly least reliable narrator (and possibly the only cognitively impaired), Bennett deconstructs the flawed logic of the fantastic narrative, suggesting that various causal uncertainties which appear to be simply locally inexplicable in fact indicate the ‘more fundamental failure of the novel to work in the way that its readers might reasonably expect’. Taking two recurring symbols, the idea of blindness and the prominence of severed body parts, Bennett playfully foregrounds the ‘narratological, hermeneutic, and intertextual’ failures of the novel, arguing ultimately that the novel’s paradox is that its success as a literary artefact derives from these structural and signifying failures. In this way, his chapter performs a critique of the novel form, the traditions of realism and the reader’s desire to understand what is, ultimately, meaningless.

The chapter reviews the history of Newgate calendars, demonstrating that there are differences between editions of them that have not been adequately understood. The calendars in the 1830s and 1840s began to include numerous reports on riots, demonstrations, and apparent acts of sedition. They became increasingly politicised just as Chartism emerged. Yet the notorious way calendars would explicitly condemn rogues and rascals, but implicitly celebrate their courage or daring, continues with the representation of Chartists and their leaders, such as Feargus O’Connor. Though the admiration is qualified and sometimes muted, support for Chartists and their activities, for engagement and agitation, is palpable. In this way, the calendars made themselves available to an audience assumed to be interested in class and politics, an audience that enjoyed both popular crime and political innovation.

In his chapter on Nocturnes, Ishiguro’s only collection of short fiction, Yugin Teo delicately unthreads the stories’ engagement with the feeling of nostalgia which plays such a prominent role in Ishiguro’s fictions. Teo thinks through this ‘longing for a better world’ as it manifests in three ways: home and the desire to return to innocence; the utopian spaces facilitated by shared reminiscence; and the form of the short story itself as a medium through which to convey the fleeting nature of nostalgic hope. Developing from insights in his own important monograph Kazuo Ishiguro and Memory (2014) Teo thinks through the complex relationships and tensions which nostalgia presupposes between longings for the past and hopes for the future; as he remarks, the ‘collection of stories is ultimately about dreams and dreamers, and the difficulties of holding on to one’s dreams and initial optimism for the future’. Questions also arise which have implications for Ishiguro’s works more broadly, to do with regret, whether or not characters experience epiphanies (the traditional heart of the short story) from which they learn, somehow, to negotiate their pasts and alter their futures. However, as Teo points out, there remains a characteristic ambiguity in the stories, and one can never be sure whether nostalgia enables or hinders elusive happiness.

For some critics, Ishiguro’s 2015 novel The Buried Giantmarked an unexpected turn to fantasy, serving as an urgent parable for a nation hung up on the former glories of its cultural past. In ‘Disinterring the English sublime: haunted atmospherics in The Buried Giant’, Kristian Shaw frames the novel in relation to the political climate of twenty-first-century Britain. Drawing on Ishiguro’s own comments relating to nationalism, populism and the recent rise in xenophobic political rhetoric, Shaw suggests that Ishiguro’s post-Arthurian landscape contains allusions to mythical constructions of Englishness which were also deployed during the 2016 EU referendum campaign. Despite being published in the months leading to the referendum, the novel carries a clear anticipatory logic, gesturing to the nationalist violence and cultural amnesia which would come to define the subsequent post-Brexit period. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how Ishiguro utilises the fantasy genre to expose the fallacious nature of our foundational myths and warn of the dangers in assuming a backward-looking national perspective to attend to our troubled present. In developing these ties, Shaw argues that The Buried Giant attempts to disrupt what he terms the ‘English sublime’, forcing us to consider ‘the internal ailments affecting the body politic’ and pointing towards the need for England to radically overhaul its comforting cultural imaginary.

Essay 1 presents two recently discovered portraits by Roger Fry. One is an unsigned drawing of an unnamed woman. The identity of the artist is certain, as is that of the sitter. Comparison with other images proves that she is Roger’s wife, the artist Helen Coombe. The drawing was made on their wedding day in 1896. The occasion is indicated by her dress and jewellery and clinched by a passionately loving note in her handwriting. The other portrait, executed in pencil and gouache on paper, is of Vanessa Bell. Roger and Vanessa had fallen in love on a visit to Turkey in the spring of 1911, and his “new” portrait of her is to be dated 1911–1912, when their affair was going strong, his style was much influenced by Matisse, and he had recently put on the first of his two post-impressionist exhibitions in London. So the second portrait, like the first, belongs to a very important time of his life.

Ishiguro’s most recent novel, Klara and the Sun (2021), seemingly marks a return to the posthuman speculative future of Never Let Me Go, but also offers a quiet meditation on what it means to be human. In ‘Klara and the humans: agency, Hannah Arendt and forgiveness’, Robert Eaglestone suggests that the novel utilises science fiction tropes to interrogate personal agency, the possibility of forgiveness and the complications of technological design. Though Klara, an Artificial Friend, is exceptionally intelligent, the chapter suggests that she can only follow her programming in matters of agency; however, her limitations come to reveal what is truly human in her fellow characters. Drawing on the philosophical works of Plato, Arendt and Heidegger, the chapter argues that Klara and the Sun responds to the foundational questions of Western thought, projecting an uncertain future to highlight the choices of the past. As Eaglestone goes on to demonstrate, the novel contains powerful echoes of – and forges a dialogue with – Ishiguro’s earlier works, revealing the universality of his characters and authorial vision.