From the Castle to the Hovel

Series

Name:    Number: 3

Synopsis

From The Castle to the Hovel is a selection of Nicholas Lezard’s wildly popular, long-running column for the New Statesman, covering the years 2017–2021, when he was kicked out of London, relocated to Scotland, and then got kicked out of there, and finally settled in Brighton.

This will be than a selection of columns: there will be additional material which will illuminate several of the questions raised by the pieces on their original appearance. There will be some gossip. Look on it as the Director’s Cut.

Subjects include:

• Homelessness
• Heartbreak
• Massive cash flow problems
• Beavers
• Lockdown sex in Durham, of all places
• A deep-seated sense of absurdity
• General grumpiness
• Staying in bed all day
• Alcoholic consumption on a heroic scale
• Freezing Scottish houses with faulty wood-burning stoves
• Jackdaws
• Trees
• The middle of fucking nowhere without a phone signal

And much, much more!

Praise for Previous Work

‘Lezard is a magnet for misfortune — his finances, love life and domestic skills are equally disaster-prone, and he shares his book-infested lodgings with a variety of uninvited wildlife. Rueful and funny, this is a book to relish in the comfort of a tidy living room.’ —Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

‘Lezard unashamedly takes his cue from Orwell’s essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” with its comfortless picture of an ill-paid hack in the mid-1940s, scratching a living “in a moth-eaten dressing gown” surrounded by “cigarette ends and half-empty cups of tea”. Regular readers will be used to dispatches from the Hovel, and encounters with the Beloved, and the Estranged Wife (one hopes that they are sufficiently anonymized). They will also know that Lezard frequently has “too much month at the end of his money”, plus the hypochondriac twinges that borderline poverty and a sedentary lifestyle inevitably lead to.’ —Brian Morton, TLS

‘This is a hugely entertaining book. Lezard is, as anyone who has enjoyed his writing as a critic knows, a perceptive chronicler of human strengths and weakness, and so he is with himself. His compassionate decency shines through – as he writes, “other people’s troubles start bothering you almost as much as your own” – and buying this for a Christmas present is undoubtedly the most joyful act of charity that you can perform this year.’ —Alexander Larman, Observer

‘As a prose stylist, Lezard is the bastard offspring of a previously unsuspected union between P.G. Wodehouse and Samuel Beckett, mixing the eloquent inventiveness of the former with the sudden nihilism of the latter.’ —David Sexton, The Spectator