‘Said the mouse, “Since the transgressors were expelled, this place has gone to rack and ruin. No intelligent creature would wish to go into such a desolate place. There are no breadcrumbs here, and no cheese.”
‘And the beetle said, “There is a world elsewhere.”
‘And as he spoke he rubbed his forelegs together and he began to laugh.’
Author’s Note
This is a work of fiction, although a few real people – all public figures – are mentioned in it.
Sometimes I have been historically accurate. The party Walter Ulbricht gave on August 13th, 1961 is documented. So is Günther Schabowski’s press conference on November 9th, 1989.
Sometimes I have tampered with chronology. The hymn from which my book takes its title was written at least twenty years after Mr Norris hears it sung in the chapel in the woods. In reality George Blake was sentenced in May 1961, not in August of that year. A great storm blew through England in October 1987, not, as in this novel, in November 1989.
Wychwood resembles an estate in Oxfordshire that I once knew well. Anyone trying to fit the landscape of the novel to a real one, though, will find themselves frustrated. I have swivelled avenues, shifted houses and relocated lakes.
By the Same Author
Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions
Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen
The Pike: Gabriele D’Annunzio
About the Author
Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize, the Costa Biography Award and the Political Book Awards Political Biography of the Year. Her previous books are the acclaimed cultural histories Cleopatra (1990) and Heroes (2004). Cleopatra won the Fawcett Prize and Emily Toth Award. She lives in London.
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