Nicky Dunne – Favourite Things

Each week Reaction Weekend brings you Favourite Things – interviews with interesting people about the skills, hobbies, pleasures and past times that make them who they are.

Nicky Dunne is the Chairman of Heywood Hill, the bookshop in Mayfair, London. Heywood Hill is known for its tailored literary services, assembling libraries for clients all over and on every subject under the sun. It operates a popular and very personalised monthly book subscription.

On Saturday 17 October Heywood Hill is launching a uniquely altruistic prize draw for booklovers across the world: a chance for someone deserving to win a monthly book subscription for life. To enter simply visit www.heywoodhill.com and nominate someone else to win a hand-picked hardback book a month for life, anywhere in the world, and explain why. The winner will be drawn at random in November and they will be notified thereafter. This incredible free to enter prize draw ends at midnight on Sunday 8 November 2020.

These are a few of his favourite things. 

Rearranging bookshelves

We gave our house a partial facelift during lockdown: walls painted, bed moved, pictures rehung. A previously obscured bay of bookshelves became more accessible. But what to put in this intimate corner of the bedroom? The answer is my own miniature Olympus: literary gods, in chronological order, within genre. Updike is listed first by his novels, then short stories, then criticism, then poetry and others. Above him, Proust and all the enriching and digestible books about the “old windbag”, as his first English translator put it.

Next James Woods, not the demonic American actor, but the finest, most revelatory and penetrating literary critic at work in English today. Alongside him John Gray. Hero to the sane. (Neither is complete, will be one day).  Further down lurks Amis, M. (One short of complete). The greatest English living stylist, and the most companionable literary voice. Don’t believe me? Read his latest – Inside Story – and feel life in all weathers.

Move your books around. It will keep your body active and your mind even more so.

Remembering dead friends

Books lodge themselves in the memory at varying depths, but nothing like people. I am 50. Three good friends have died during my middle age thus far. Three heavy losses.

When a popular person dies many are sad, quite a number mourn but, only the intimate few truly grieve. Those few include a mix of some family and some friends. Their pain runs horribly deep and fades not all that much over time. Meanwhile, the rest of us move on, and quite right too.

But if you loved the friend, if you miss them, they appear unbidden and often, swimming into view all the time and much more so than when they were alive. And they look (or appear) glorious. Free of whatever pain took them; youthful, vibrant and glowing with vitality. This is a literal afterlife. A brain-conjured presence, and a great comfort it is too; consciousness as a store of one’s most beloved identities, a treasure house of human affinities and love.

Watching the greats

Where do you choose to give your attention? The evidence is that books, and long form reading, are being overtaken by the spoken word. The best podcasts seduce the intellect and leave one refreshed and enlivened, like a form of mind work out. Iain Martin’s Reaction podcast does just that.

But this is nothing new. Before podcasts and Ted Talks there were public lectures. Michael Faraday started the Royal Institution’s Christmas lectures almost two hundred years ago, in 1825. One of the great pleasures of YouTube is the opportunity to revisit the lectures and television programmes of the past. To see Richard Feynman chalk in hand at his equation filled blackboard, and Carl Sagan revealing in his Kermit-like voice the splendours of the Cosmos.

Feynman never disappoints and I sometimes drift off to sleep listening to his resonant amused voice, explaining some aspect of physics, like the constant agitation of atoms in a solid. It goes far more over than into my head. But the wonder of it is in the fact that our culture has thrown up such figures, and continues to do so.

Dad dancing

Our social life has been cut to virtually nothing this year. Friends’ fiftieth birthday parties have been postponed again and again, and again. Opportunities to dance, all too few and far between at my age, even in the best of times, are almost non-existent. That is until my wife decided to turn the chore of filling the dishwasher into a family ritual. One person has to decide on the song, then the rest of us have to dance the dishes into the machine, and we have to do so before the song ends.

Invariably this turns into a multi-song kitchen dance-a-thon with our three young sons trying out their moves. This won’t last. Adolescence will surely make this too embarrassing for our boys to endure much longer. But for now, we all love it and dad dancing remains possible.

Temples of Print

A library offers a different kind of nourishment for the body and soul. The famous London Library in St James’s is one of my favourites. It is possible to lose days exploring the miles of open stacked books on every possible subject, shelved above and below ground. It is a wonderful place to study or to just spend time; if only they allowed sleepovers.

Libraries are living symbols of our civilisation. From modest beginnings something magnificent can arise. Henry Folger was inspired by a declamatory essay competition as a student to pursue Shakespeare and his circle to the ends of the earth. In the course of his lifetime he amassed hundreds of thousands of items on the Elizabethan theatre. Many find the acquisitive impulse – in his case mania – off-putting. More fool them. The result is a library in Washington that is the greatest possible resource and benefit for all humanity.

Another magnificent (private turned public) American library is the Morgan on Madison Avenue in New York. The original library interior is pure Gotham with its extraordinary fireplace, and beautiful galleried bookshelves. One can imagine J P Morgan reading by firelight after dinner in this gorgeous sanctuary.

My quixotic hope is to collaborate with a passionate collector in the creation of a universal library on a Morganic or Folgeran scale. Each generation throws up collectors of all kinds. We assemble around twenty much more modest libraries a year on all sorts of different subjects. It is deeply satisfying work. Blessed are the library builders.