Recent Sussex-related publications.
Great historical forces, no doubt, were pushing America away from British rule in 1774. However you cannot help but wonder at the crucial part played by a handful of individuals, portrayed in Patriots, Radicals and Revolutionaries – The British Role in American Independence (Pen and Sword Books) by Leanne O’Boyle. Thomas Paine, who kicked off the revolution, lived in Lewes, five miles away from Lord Gage, commander-in-chief of British forces in North America. They practically passed each other on what is now the A27, one leaving England and the other returning home in defeat.
Thomas Paine left Lewes for Philadelphia in 1774 after he’d lost his job as an excise man and his marriage had broken down. In history’s most consequential example of divorced-man energy, Paine wrote an angry pamphlet against the King of England, the British aristocracy and Britain’s rule over America. Common Sense was a bestseller and set the revolution in motion.
Later, instead of finding a hobby or a new girlfriend, Paine wrote books that inspired the French Revolution and attacked each of the world’s great religious faiths by name in colourful language. The British, American and the French governments tried to imprison, exile and behead him with varying degrees of success.
After the Boston Tea Party, Lord Thomas Gage was stuck. He’d been told to defend America for the Crown at all costs, which would have been strong stuff if the Crown had been willing to pay those costs. As it was, Gage had neither the budget to prosecute a war nor the authority to negotiate a peace. After the first shots at Lexington and Concord in 1775 he was somewhat unfairly recalled to his brother’s estate at Firle.
As for Benjamin Franklin, who knows if he ever stayed in Sussex? Certainly not his wife, waiting for him in Philadelphia. She died while he kept extending one of history’s most consequential sales trips, to London and Paris.
Along with profiles of those protagonists, as well as of King George and Lord North, O’Boyle offers advice on Revolution-connected places to visit, including Paine’s former Lewes home at Bull House, where she is starting a new Centre for Democracy. The United States was born in Philadelphia in 1776, but there is a good argument it was conceived in a hotel room above the bar at the White Hart Hotel down the road, where Paine cut his political teeth at the weekly debating society now known as The Headstrong Club. O’Boyle has the receipts.
Words by David Burke
Memoirs are all the literary rage, though nowadays they generally need a niche to earn their place on the shelves: my life through the bottom of a whisky glass; my experience teaching a multiethnic secondary school class; what I learnt about myself from the death of my father, and so on. It’s no surprise, then, that three of the four Sussex-authored books to have hit my desk this month are memoirs, each taking a strikingly different route through the terrain of personal history.
Let’s start with The Singing Ambassador, by ROSA contributor Hugh Philpott (Rowanvale Books, £29.99). A retired diplomat turned culture writer, Hugh’s first book works on many levels, recounting his ambassadorial posting in Tajikistan from 2015 to 2019. He introduces several motifs that build to a tumultuous crescendo, embracing the musical culture of his adopted country and eventually recording – in the original language – a much-loved Tajik folk song. It’s the sort of cross-cultural gesture that could have gone terribly wrong; instead, it went viral. The result is a cracking, informative tale, rich in insight into Central Asian culture and the ups and downs of diplomatic life in a far-flung post. But above all, as any memoir must, it charts Hugh’s own learning curve, told in a voice that’s curious, open, and quietly self-deprecating. ‘Imagine Bill Bryson as an international diplomat,’ reads the blurb on the back, which hits the nail on the head (I wrote it, as it happens).
Memoir through psychogeography is another flourishing subgenre, but don’t expect Kate Mosse’s latest book Autumn (Hodder, £16.99) to wander into the obscurantist urban vein of an Iain Sinclair or a Will Self. Kate Mosse grew up in Fishbourne, near Chichester, and has returned to her home village in middle age. This slim volume, illustrated by Samantha Rock, reads as a seasonal journal, taking us through the mass-selling author’s autumn – of 2025, I presume – from lingering, summery September, to bracing, bare-branched November. The author revisits childhood haunts – Kingley Vale, Chichester, Brandy Hole Copse – stirring old memories and emotions, weaving in references to poetry, art, history, myth and nature with a pleasingly elegiac touch. This gently contemplative mood is rather shattered in the last section when she goes east to visit Lewes and witness the Bonfire celebrations for the first time, where she becomes less surefooted. Note to Kate: referring to the Bonfire societies’ processions as ‘parades’ is something close to an effigy-worthy offence in Lewes circles. But I did appreciate an unexpected nod, when she cited the ‘livestream commentary of the local radio station’ (co-hosted by yours truly).
David Bramwell, meanwhile, is a ubiquitous force in Brighton’s cultural ecosystem – a polymathic author, presenter, broadcaster and musician with a lifelong appetite for cultural quirk. His latest book, Ghosts of the Medicine Show (Independent Publishing Network), is, as its subtitle promises, ‘an odyssey into the shamanic roots of popular entertainment’. The spark comes from Bramwell’s discovery of a rare 1985 non-fiction work by a young Rogan Taylor, The Death and Resurrection Show. Taylor’s study triggers a cascade of memories – one of them particularly traumatic – which Bramwell deftly folds into a present-day narrative shaped by late middle age and the loss of his parents. Connecting these strands is his enduring fascination with counter-culture. Taylor’s book becomes a guide to Bramwell’s realisation that many of his heroes – David Bowie, Nick Cave, Tom Waits – endured their own personal hells before imparting their messages to the world, echoing the trials of shamans of old. I make no cameo appearances in this one, alas, though my best friend’s wife, the performance artist Marisa Carnesky, receives an entire chapter as Bramwell increasingly seeks out close-to-home scenarios to spin out Taylor’s theory.
An Impression of Murder (New Generation Publishing, £12.99) is a very different kettle of fish, or ‘un autre paire de manches’, as the French would say. Gerard Gilbert’s second novel is a political murder mystery, set in Dieppe in 1897, told through the eyes of a startlingly numerous cast of narrators, mostly fictional, but including Walter Sickert and Edouard Degas. The first of these is a Tunisian soldier who doesn’t make it to chapter two, stabbed in the back and dumped into the brine, though not before he manages to unload a secret document into the hands of a young prostitute. Other protagonists include a rookie policeman of artistic bent, his corrupt and spiteful boss, an Anglican priest with a crisis of faith (and a dwindling congregation of expat Brits), an easily outraged golf-playing Colonel, a middle-aged gossip columnist, a salacious Duchess, two ham-fisted private dicks, a pair of love-interest English sisters, and Oscar Wilde. Gilbert has had a second home just outside Dieppe since the early 90s, and you can tell. His considerable knowledge of the town and its history shines through all the elaborate plot twists he devises to keep the reader turning the pages. And turn them, I did, at rapid pace. The author’s first novel, The Concierge, is being adapted into a TV series, and I imagine that An Impression of Murder might just spark similar interest.
I heard the live preview of Almost Starlight (Rough Trade Records), featuring Jem Finer on hurdy-gurdy and John Matthias on fiddle, one August evening in St Pancras Church in Kingston-near-Lewes. It happened to be the night when the government sent out repeated alerts to everyone’s mobile phones warning them not to light barbecues.
Finer’s contraption – part keyboard, part string instrument, which he referred to as a ‘medieval synthesiser’ – fascinated me, as I’d never before heard one of these remarkable machines. Cranking a handle with his right hand and poking inside the instrument with his left, he coaxed from it a drone-like fuzz threaded with melodic, fingerpicked refrains, while Matthias’ soulful fiddle wove around it. Across a range of songs, some algorithmically composed, others of a more traditional composition, the pair developed a compelling symbiosis, punctuated by the Big Brother buzz of the alerts, which ricocheted around the church like an unexpected third instrument.
Thankfully this component does not appear on the recorded album, though we do get haunting cello from producer Jay Auborn. Recorded in a church in deepest Devon, the result is hard to define. Modern classical? Experimental folk? Whatever the case, it’s a triumph.
Words by Alex Leith