Madhatter Chatter

The arrival of September always feels like a good time to share some Madhatter Chatter, even though it really does not feel like a change in the seasons....yet! I am reminded of the words of Virginia Woolf..."I feel entirey dehumanised by the sun now and wish for fog, snow, rain and humanity."

I have just returned from my annual holiday and it was a joy to put my key in the door of 122 High Street and return to my world of books. September was a big month with new titles from Richard Osman, Ben Macintyre, Suzie Dent and China Mieville to name but a few - and I am delighted to bring you signed copies of all our new titles.

Books of the Month

There were so many wonderful new titles arrive this month that it was a tough choice for our book club. I settled on Broken Country by Clare Lesley Hall, just out in paperback. This highly acclaimed novel seamlessly blends a sweeping, passionate love story with the gripping pace and sudden twists of a murder mystery, it jumps between timelines to explore a complex love triangle, deeply felt grief, and the simmering class tensions of mid-century rural England.

Our YA book for September is Sleep Like Death by Kalynn Batron. A delicious retelling of Snow White. Forget the passive princess who waits in a cottage. Princess Eve is a fierce heroine who has trained her entire life to be a weapon. She possesses a rare, vibrant magic that allows her to conjure weapons directly from nature and communicate with animals.

Our fiction book of the month is The Unselected Journals of Emma M Lion by Beth Brewer. This book is witty, cozy, and a charmingly eccentric peek into 1883 London. It reminds me of a grown up version of The Little Visitors by Maria Hack, published in 1815, a gentle family adventure about curiosity, kindness, and learning through simple, everyday moments.

For younger readers we have a delightful treat, A beautifully illustrated children's edition of the Sunday Times bestseller and Wainwright Prize-winning sensation that is Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton and we are thrilled that Chloe signed copies for us. This might well become my children's book of the year.

Burford Lliterary Festival 2026

The count down has begun and it is a mere ten days until Burford Lit Fest is opened with the launch of a new book by artist and gardener, Matthew Rice, folowed by a wonderful programme of authors, here are a few words on all our guests who join us from across the UK. As a small not for profit festival we would very much appreciate your support. Each event takes a maximum of 50 so you can truly get involved and add your voice to the conversation.

Friday 25th September Matthew Rice, A Year In The Garden

Matthew has documented a lifetime of memories and moments in watercolour. This trait has led him to illustration, for magazines such as Country Life, as well as for his own much-loved books on architecture, another of Matthew’s great fascinations.

Saturday 26th September

1000 Simon Mason, The DI Ryan Wilkins Mysteries

The DI Ryan Wilkins mysteries are a contemporary Oxford-set police procedural series by Simon Mason, featuring two unrelated, contrasting detectives—polished DI Ray and gritty, ex-caravan park DI Ryan. The series, often described as a modern "town and gown" take on Inspector Morse, follows their investigations into complex murders.

1130 John Blair, Killing the Dead : Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World

John Blair is an Emeritus Fellow of The Queen’s College, Oxford, and Emeritus Professor of Medieval History and Archaeology at the University of Oxford.

Killing the Dead provides the first in-depth, global account of one of the world’s most widespread yet misunderstood forms of mass hysteria—the vampire epidemic. In a spellbinding narrative, John Blair takes readers from ancient Mesopotamia to present-day Haiti to explore a macabre frontier of life and death where corpses are believed to wander or do harm from the grave, and where the vampire is a physical expression of society’s inexplicable terrors and anxieties.

1300 Sara Clegg Perilous Enchantment : The True History of Faeries

Sarah Clegg has a PhD in ancient history from Cambridge University; she was part of the 2020/21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme.Her first book — Woman’s Lore: 4,000 Years of Sirens, Serpents and Succubi — was published by Head of Zeus and traces a group of seductive, child-snatching demonesses through folklore from ancient Mesopotamian to the present day.

We often think Faeries as tiny, glittering creatures fluttering about in pastel tulle, but fairies haven't always been so benign. Here, historian Sarah Clegg explores the true history of fairies, and the menace and ambiguity that always lurks within the shimmering fantasy.

1430 Kate McCloughlin Silence: A Literary History

Kate is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She has recently been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for her project on the history of silence in English. Literature and silence may seem a paradoxical subject, but in its treatment of silence, ‘literature penetrates the most profound aspects of our existence: our relationship with Nature and the divine; our understanding of what makes a self; our most powerful and intimate feelings of love and grief; our sense of wonder’.

1600 Sarah Ogilvie The Dictionary People : The unsung heroes who created the Oxford English Dictionary

What do three murderers, a Glasgow factory inspector, and Karl Marx’s daughter have in common? They all helped create the Oxford English Dictionary. Begun in 1858, the OED has long been associated with elite institutions and Victorian men. But the Dictionary didn’t just belong to the experts; it relied on contributions from members of the public and was one of the world’s first crowd-sourced projects. Sarah Ogilvie has discovered previously untapped archives to tell a people’s history of the OED. In this session, she tells the story of the making of one of the most famous books in the world – and celebrates the extraordinary efforts of the Dictionary People, the unsung heroes of the OED.

1730 Anthony G Hopkins The Land Where Nothing Works : How Britain Lost the Plot

What has happened to Britain? As drivers on its roads can attest, it is the pothole capital of Europe. Once-beautiful towns now feature peeling paint, weeds, and broken railings. Public services are no longer fit for purpose. A malaise seems to infect every aspect of British life: its economy, polity, social order, sense of well-being, domestic regional relationships, and place in the world. In The Land Where Nothing Works, the distinguished historian A. G. Hopkins offers an explanation, tracing Britain’s current problems to decisions made in the 1980s that abandoned its postwar experiment in social democracy and mimicked policies of deregulation and privatisation promoted by the United States.

1900 Donal Ryan Where are the Kings

with Joanna Canon An Unlikely Visitor

Joanna Cannon’s first two novels, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep and Three Things about Elsie, were both Sunday Times bestsellers and Richard and Judy picks. Her first non-fiction book, Breaking and Mending, a memoir about her experience as a junior doctor, was published in 2019 to critical acclaim. She is a regular panellist on radio, TV and at literary festivals across the country, including Edinburgh, Cheltenham and Hay, and her writing has appeared in the Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Times, Daily Mail and the Observer, amongst others. Together, her books have sold almost a million copies and have been translated into 14 languages. Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, County Tipperary, has published seven number one bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and six Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016. In 2021 Donal became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His most recent novel, Heart Be at Peace, won both Novel of the Year and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Nero Book Awards. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages.

Book nominated Ryan and best-selling author Joanna Cannon will be in conversation at this very special event. Wine and canapes are included in your ticket price.

Sunday 27th September

1000 Alison Harris Private Lies

Alison Marsh was living an ordinary life. She loved walks with her dog, drinks with her mates and nights in with her family. But one night, after falling victim to a shocking crime, Ali made a decision that would change everything: she became a private investigator.

1130 Paul Harris Warrior Walker

Weighed down by a traumatic military past, Paul's life spiralled and he seriously contemplated taking his own life at the age of 36. Then a random text from a friend delivered a route map to emotional safety during what were possibly his final few hours. Paul, why don't you walk the British coast path?With only £300 in his pocket and a 30-kilo rucksack on his back, Paul decided to leave his life as he knew it and took up wild camping, slept rough, struggled along the coast paths of Devon, Cornwall and Wales in the sideways rain, and wading through knee-high snowdrifts around the Scottish islands and the burning summer sun on England's east coast. Walking was therapy. Nature was restorative. The path was his friend. The Warrior Walker is more than just one man's journey of self-discovery. Paul's story shines a light on the kindness of strangers, of the coast path that gave him purpose, about discovering family and true love, and how even wrong turns can lead you to exactly where you need to be. In a world where so much human interaction is cruel, divisive and distant, this is an important reminder that there is light even in the darkest of moments.

1300 Nandini Das This Little World

Nandini Das is professor of Early Modern Literature and Culture in the English faculty at the University of Oxford. She is a specialist in Shakespeare studies, Renaissance romance writing, early travel literature, and encounters between different cultures.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forged a powerful image of England – Shakespeare’s ‘scepter’d isle’, proud and apart, defined by royal spectacle and myth. But beneath this familiar narrative of ruffs and gowns, kings and queens, lies a more complex and connected reality.

1430 David Woodman The First King of England : Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom

David Woodman is Professor of History at Robinson College, Cambridge. He is a historian of the early medieval period, broadly speaking of the years c. 600-c. 1200, with particular interests in the tenth—twelfth centuries

Set against the backdrop of warring powers in early medieval Europe, The First King of England sheds new light on Æthelstan’s early life, his spectacular military victories and the innovative way he governed his kingdom, his fostering of the church, the deft political alliances he forged with Europe’s royal houses, and his death and enduring legacy.

1600 Elleke Boehmer Southern Imagining : A Literary and Cultural History of the Far Southern Hemisphere

Elleke Boehmer, FRSL, FRHistS is Professor of World Literature in English at the University of Oxford, and a Professorial Governing Body Fellow at Wolfson College

For Boehmer, imaginative work stimulates and shapes our phenomenological understanding. Southerners often see themselves as far away from where things count, as outsiders, internalising the wider global sense of their relative insignificance. Conversely, when northerners read or hear legends, narratives, songs and poems from the south, it is as if they are located in the south, at least for the duration of the reading or listening. Boehmer suggests that the south-tilted world map, re-centred through song and story, invites us to claim a more involved sense of belonging to our planet, both its north and its south. The writers of the south disrupt conventional ways of seeing and invite us to inhabit our globe differently.

1730 Sue Leigh Poetry at the Priory (this event wil take place at the Lenthall Chapel, Priory Lane, Burford)

‘Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood and the rest of one’s life is spent trying to say it.’ Barbara Hepworth

Sue Leigh will be reading from her third limited-edition pamphlet, ‘Angel Roof’, inspired by time spent in East Anglia, particularly as a child. There will be poems about angels, memory, art and the sea.

Refreshments, including wine will be served in the Priory Garden.

We hope you will find something to interest you and we look forward to seeing you there.

Happy Reading,

Kim and the team