Backlisted - Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair by John Bossy

Episode Date: May 29, 2023

For this episode we are joined by the critic and former literary editor of the Independent on Sunday, Suzi Feay and the novelist and former Deputy Literary Editor of the Observer, Stephanie Merritt. Both are fans of the history-cum-detective story, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, by the late great historian of English Catholicism, John Bossy. The book was a departure from Bossy’s weightier academic publications – in it he attempts to pin down the identity of the shadowy Elizabethan spy known only as ‘Henry Fagot’. As well as creating a vivid picture of the complex and treacherous world of London during the Elizabethan ‘cold war’ in the years leading up to the Armada, Professor Bossy makes a persuasive case for Henry Fagot being none other than the Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist and dabbler in the hermetic arts, Giordano Bruno, who spent two years in London between 1583 and 1585, during which he wrote his most important books and became friends with Sir Philip Sidney and the magus, John Dee. First published in 1991 by Yale University Press, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair went on to win both the 1991 Wolfson History Prize and the Crime Writer’s Association Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction. As well as discovering how Bossy’s Bruno inspired Steph Merritt to launch her career as a novelist, we also discuss how the role of a literary editor for a national newspaper has changed over the past three decades. * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. *If you'd like to support the show, listen without adverts, receive the show early and with extra bonus fortnightly episodes, become a Patreon at www.patreon.com/backlisted * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit backlisted.fm Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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That's BetterHelp.com. No, PC Optimum members save more. For exclusive offers and members-only pricing, just scan and save. And don't forget in-stock promise, where you can count on great offers being in stock or get a rain check. Discover more value than ever at Loblaws, in-store and online. Conditions apply. See in-store for details. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast which gives new life to old books. Today you join us on the evening Ash Wednesday in 1584. We're watching three well-dressed men, their boots and breeches covered in mud, emerging onto the strand from the lane that leads down to the Thames.

As they begin their long walk towards Whitehall Palace, they're jostled and shouted at by the passing crowd. Things are beginning to turn ugly. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the crowdfunding site for books. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And today we are joined by one returning guest, Susie Fay, and by Stephanie Merritt,

who is making her backlisted debut. Welcome to you both. Welcome both. Thank you. Susie is the former literary editor of The Independent on Sunday and was TV critic for the Financial Times for four years.

A member of the Critics Circle and the Authors Club, she reviews for The Guardian, Financial Times, The Spectator, and The Tablet, and interviews authors on her YouTube channel, Susie's Book Bag.

And she joined us about, oh, I reckon it must be four or five years ago. Four years ago, maybe, yeah. At the Port Elliot Festival to record an episode of Backlisted on George Orwell and the Lion and the Unicorn alongside Billy Bragg, episode 73 of Batlisted, which ended in a huge mass sing-along led by Billy Bragg of Jerusalem, which what I remember during that

is looking at our producer, Nicky Birch, and mouthing the words, are you recording this? That's the bare minimum required for that particular gig but it was good wasn't it suzy that it was amazing the sing-along at the end was was incredible i mean it was it's the alternative national anthem and you just looked out from the stage and everybody knew all the words to all of jerusalem and then if you remember we were we were kind of backstage, which is actually a patch of grass, just punching the air, filled with joy.

We always punch the air, Susie, at the end of recording an episode of Bat List. If we do that little Tiger Woods mini air punch. We're also joined today by Stephanie Merritt. Stephanie Merritt is a former deputy literary editor of The Observer and the author of 13 books, including seven novels in her number one best-selling historical crime series under the name S.J. Paris, which has now sold over one million copies in the UK.

She writes for various publications and appears regularly on Radio 4. She also teaches creative writing at the University of Cambridge. And her new book, the latest featuring heretic and spy Giordano Bruno. Listeners, hold on to that name. You'll be hearing it later.

Your new novel comes out in July, Steph. What is the title of this seventh volume? The seventh one is called Alchemy. And it's all set in the court of the Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, who was a great patron of alchemists and magicians. And so it's all kind of set around that Renaissance occult, heretical milieu. Such a rich scene.

And strangely enough, there's a heretical occult scene almost at the very beginning of the book that we're about to discuss on this episode of Backlisted, which is Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, an account by the late great historian of English Catholicism, John Bossie, of his investigation into the identity of the shadowy Elizabethan spy known only as Henry Fagot. As well as rendering a detailed picture of the complex and treacherous world of London during

the Elizabethan Cold War, in the years leading up to the Armada in 1588, Professor Bossi makes a persuasive and exciting case for Fagot being none other than, and this is a spoiler alert, listeners, the Italian philosopher, poet, cosmological theorist, and dabbler in the occult arts, Giordano Bruno. First published in 1991, the book is best approached as a masterly detective story, and in fact, it went on to win both the Wilson History Prize and the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger for nonfiction in that year. As fellow historian Hugh Trevor Roper reviewed in the New York Review of Books, he says, Mr. Bossy's erudition is so great, his virtuosity in handling it so enviable, the story he tells

so fascinating, and he tells it so well and with such verve and subtlety and wit. This is a marvellous book. But before we go on to talk about Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair, we've never actually, it occurred to me that both Stephanie and Susie have worked as literary editors on the pages of national newspapers. We've never really talked about that job on The Batlisted.

And I was wondering if this book arrived to you guys in Proust right however many months ahead of publication how would you go about commissioning a review would you have reviewed it that's my first

question pinched for column inches as you are would you have reviewed Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair by John Bossie? And if so, why? I would have done it in a heartbeat because for the same reason, the same reasons that attracted me to this book in the first place were already in play well before it was published. I'm fascinated by Hermeticism, the Renaissance, the Italian Renaissance, and also Sir Philip Sidney. I think if you just said the words,

it's got a little bit of, it's got a dash of Philip Sidney in it, I would have been there. But also as a literary editor, the fascinating thing about commissioning a review of a book like this is your first instinct might be, well, who is absolutely fantastic on the Italian Renaissance and cosmology and Renaissance science and thought and the papacy? And the name that you would come up with might be John Boss's deepest, bitterest rival and therefore would actually not be the right person to review that book because you would get back,

this preposterous tome should never have seen the light of day. So you almost need to get the guy or gal who's won under that. Okay, yes. Steph, would you, I mean, it seems weird asking the author of seven novels whether she would have commissioned a review of this particular book but how would you have gone about well i would have tried but certainly these days i think i would have to fight to get it on the pages because i mean i started as a deputy literary editor in 1998. Back in those days, I think the literary editor had a bit more influence on the pages and a bit

more leeway to kind of put his or her own stamp on the pages. Very quickly, I began to notice that there was more of a push to be covering books that were timely, books that were in the media. It became harder and harder to make the case for an academic book. But I would certainly have made a case that this was a book of general interest, that it wasn't just for historians or historical scholars. Because it is setting out quite a controversial thesis, and it kind of poses itself as a detective story, I would have looked for somebody who might be in a position to debunk it or to suggest that it wasn't, you know, that it didn't stand up to scrutiny just to kind of

give it a, you know, to create a sense of argument. The only trouble with that is that you'd be reviewing something and saying it isn't any good. You know, it's quite difficult to get the balance right, isn't it? If you've got somebody who said this is a load of nonsense, your editor might turn around and go, well, why are you reviewing books that appear to be loads of nonsense? So it's tricky. I think it's perfectly possible that something can be very persuasively argued and very

thoroughly researched and still fail to convince and still be an entertaining read i wouldn't look for someone to give it a complete kicking obviously but somebody who's got the background to engage with whether or not it actually convinces on a historical level it's interesting that you you but both susie and step, talk about the function of reviews within the economy of book selling. We were both at Waterstones at that time, Andy, and there was a ritual. We would go and cut out the reviews on a Sunday. All the reviews, we'd have a folder there for everybody to come and look at the reviews.

We'd have books reviewed in the news table in the bookshop. And I genuinely think that books like this, in a way, were discovered because of the, I mean, there was a kind of a symbiosis between good books pages, which, you know, I think without blowing smoke, you both worked on extremely good books pages. And every time a newspaper closes or a books page gets cut, I think there's just that bit less space for proper consideration to be made of books. So I am and will always be a huge believer that reviews do... There's now a kind of a sort of, think a very lazy kind of oh well reviews don't really make any of it you know they don't sell books anymore they probably don't if you're not if you're not putting the reviews in front of people and you're not putting the books in the

front of bookshops that's always been the case anyway the point is yes it made me feel quite nostalgic because let's be honest, this is not a racy book by a crime novelist. I mean, the last 100 pages of the book, and it's a 300, but are basically texts, much of it in 16th century French, which are without translation. So good luck with that.

Yeah. This, this isn't the daughter of time by Josephine Tay, is it? It's significantly more challenging. Susie, when did you first encounter this book, Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Effect by John Bossie? I think at the time I had a subscription that someone had given me to History Today, and they featured it. what i think i must have done was was get it out of the library i i read it straight away but i didn't buy that many

hardback books at the time right yeah um so i'm pretty sure i would have put um put in a bid for it at the library um got them to um source a copy um and then it was only later I thought, I have to have one. So this seems to actually be second-hand. It's been reduced to £4, so I've got this solid little paperback. He seems to have a bat stuck to his face. It's a very strange design, but a very compelling cover design. And he's licked with flames. Well, Susie, it's funny

you say that you got a copy out of the library because I got my copy here. There's the hardback. I got this out of the library. I went to my local library and they had it in stock. And Susie, I've got a question for you. This book was last borrowed on the 8th of

October, had to be back by the 8th of October, 2002. So it's not come off the shelf for 21 years, right? And on page one of your copies, John Bossie has written a little introduction. It's called To the Reader. And he says, this book book tells a story and because it is a story i cannot dear reader reveal to you here and now what happens in it well on this library copy that's not been borrowed for 21 years when it says to the reader a foot one of a previous borrower borrower has written prepared to be bored stiff exclamation mark So my question to you, Susie, is why have you chosen a book so demonstrably unpopular with the public? Well, I guess that's what my books pages were like, really. Maybe they were only pleasing to myself, but I had a great time putting them together now that's what counts yeah you have to use as steph has done so memorably in her but you have to use a lot of imagination with this book

and there's there's an awful lot of dryness um but this incredible undercurrent. I think what John Bossie is doing, like he can't get there without all the intense, granular, forensic detail. Maybe it would have been a good book to read in lockdown because it is something that it's slow prose. You can't rush through it and gallop to the end. can't rush through it and gallop to the end but at the same time it is i think brilliantly structured i was attracted to it because of my you know my crush on sir philip sydney who is a marginal figure but he is here and a slight glimpse of philip sydney will keep me going for quite some time keep me going over pages of textual analysis put it that way and maybe this was my gateway to giordano bruno maybe i didn't know much about him at the time and and i found him a very compelling figure from this book picking up that the name giordano bruno and turning it over to steph steph is that you know you've you've employed the historical

figure of giordano bruno in your novels as sj paris i wonder when can you remember the first time you encountered either this book or bruno or a combination of the two bruno i came across in the sort of, I can't remember exactly when, but I'm pretty sure it was when I was a student. So it would have been sort of early to mid-90s. I was, like Susie, very interested in Renaissance occultism, hermetic thought, all of those different aspects of Renaissance philosophy. So when I was studying Renaissance literature, I was also very interested in Philip Sidney and the figure of John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth's court astrologer for a time, and the sort of great English polymath of the mid to late 16th century. And I must have come across a reference to Bruno in the course of studying that, I think in particular looking into the life and work of John Dee

and this sort of literary esoteric circle that was attached sort of vaguely to the court of Elizabeth I. And I certainly came across references to Bruno there. I then discovered that he had been referred to in various works of fiction. James Joyce makes reference to him, Bertolt Brecht. He appears in the Arturo Perez Rivera novel, The Dumas Club, which came out in 93. So there he was as this sort of enigmatic, charismatic figure who was kind of on the fringes of Elizabethan esoteric thought. So I remember kind of looking into him vaguely at the time and finding out a bit about his background and thinking somebody should write a novel about like a whole novel about him. You

know, he did so much and fitted so much into the years years that he particularly the years that he was um living in exile that i i thought well this is going to be a sort of thousand page book um if anybody ever did sit down to write it and so i sort of parked him for a bit and i wrote contemporary novels and then i had this idea about wanting to write something historical and something that had a kind of mystery element to it i remembered bruno and i thought i wonder if there's anything there that i could make a historical sort of mystery murder mystery out of um and that was when i came across the john bossy book because i which would have been 2008. I had a conversation with my agent about wanting to write historical fiction. He said historical crime is doing quite well at the moment. Have a

think about doing some sort of murder mystery. And I went away and looked up what else I could find on Bruno. And in the interim, this book had not only come out, but it had been through several editions. And this was the you know i've always said whenever i've talked about the origin of this series this book was like the key turning in the lock because here was this theory about how bruno spent his years in england which immediately gave me a way into writing about him and so i am you know forever indebted to professor bossy for for coming up with this theory you know whether or not we think it stands up it certainly has been enormously valuable for

the purposes of fiction good i uh steph you i'm going to come back to you in a minute to ask you to give us a one minute capsule account of the life of giordano bruno um but before i do that suzy have you read other books by john bossy or is this the one book by john bossy that you've read of Giordano Bruno. But before I do that, Susie, have you read other books by John Bossie, or is this the one book by John Bossie that you've read? Because the other books look rather fearsome to me. I've got the next one that he wrote, which I never have read.

Under the Mole Hill, that's called, isn't it? It's another spy story, partly because, you know, maybe you fear something isn't going to be as good as the book you've enjoyed and partly because literary editors don't get time to read a great deal of stuff they actually want to read we hear you yes some nodding smiling and weeping going on yeah yeah quite right yeah so it's waiting for me this is what is quite interesting john so his earlier books are the english catholic community 1570 to 1850 christianity in the west 1400 to 1700 peace in the post-reformation and there's sort of 10 12 years between each of these

and it's almost like he's you know he's put on his party hat and his Hawaiian shirt for Giordano Bruno and the embassy affair. It's a clear, we should emphasize, it's very unusual, I think, isn't it, for a book to win simultaneously a gold dagger and the Wilson History Prize? Do you think, John, that he gets the balance right between the mystery and the rigor of proving it?

It's a really good question. He's very smart that he puts all the notes at the back of the book, because let's be honest, they're mostly of interest if you really want to dig it down to a deeper level. He does this strange trick. The first half of the book, which is called A Dog in the Nighttime, wonder if that's just coincidence and mark hadney and it's a quote from arthur conan doyle you know is there any point to which you wish to draw my

attention to the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime the dog did nothing in the nighttime that was the curious incident he remarks sherlock holmes and silver blaze so the first half of the book is basically about it's a sort of history where he positions Henry Fagot and Bruno in London, in Salisbury Court, the French embassy, under the patronage of the ambassador, who is called Castelnau. And he tells that story as if they are two quite separate people. And then the second half of the book, part two of the book, is called Veritas Iliotemporis. And that, he comes out boldly and says, I think Henry Fagot and Giordano Bruno were the same person. And now I'm going to tell you the story again. And we're going to test it all the way through. We're going to test and see if this stands up to scrutiny.

Okay, so Susie, I'm going to read you an excerpt from the jacket flap of the first edition and ask you to comment because I think it's going to be relevant to what you wanted to mention. In the first part of the book, these events are narrated. In the second, the spy is identified and his story put together. In the third, the documentary remains of his spying are presented. Bossy's brilliant research, backed by his forensic and literary powers, solves an ancient mystery and cleans a varnished picture. That's quite Rococo.

Well done. His book makes a considerable contribution to the political and intellectual history of the wars of religion in Europe and to the domestic history of Elizabethan England. Not least, it makes compelling reading. Wow, they did good jacket quotes in those days, didn't they? That's an excellent word. Susie, what do you think about the structure? Well, one thing I think about this book is you could compare it

to something like The Quest for Corvo, which is an experiment in biography, the famous biography of Frederick Rolfe, where the workings are all displayed. And I think Boss's introduction is very interesting. He starts talking about true facts and real facts as if they're different things. Yeah. And he takes us on an adventure together, a sort of let's look at this. Now let's look at that.

This is a puzzle. We'll leave that for the moment. Maybe we'll come back to that. And now there's this. This doesn't go with that. What's going on? I don't know. And the reader is thinking, I don't know either. And so I think that's what's really appealing about it. That's what is the detective story, because it is like reading a detective novel where you're supposed you will be given the answer, but you're supposed to keep up and keep things in your head.

You know, there are pages that you can go over quite quickly. Sort of, yes, he went there. You know, the textual stuff is very granular, as I've said. But the overarching story is so brilliant. And it completely convinced me of his thesis. And I don't know whether it has been accepted widely in Bruno's studies but there's one point where he just says Henry Fagot has no biography he appears like magic and he disappears like magic pretty convincing and the time that he

appears and the time that he disappears is precisely the time Giordano Bruno is in the French embassy. And then Henry Foggo completely disappears. I just think it's a brilliant, brilliant performance. Steph, two questions, I suppose, related to one another. Do you think it was a brilliant performance? And has it convinced people? Is it now accepted that Bruno was engaged in espionage of some sort? this extremely plausible argument. And having come up with this thesis, he then produces a number of pieces of evidence, which he obviously believes support this thesis. It hasn't been widely accepted. And I think the thing that I think is a bit of a shame

is that actually Bossy himself then kind of hugely backpedaled he did after the first edition came out so the edition the paperback edition that i have here includes is a third edition includes a little preface from 2002 in which he says if i were writing this book now i should write it in a less confident or aggressive frame of mind and he then later on in under the molehill which he then wrote in 2001 he says in the preface to bruno i made some claims about facts which have turned out to be unwarranted um it was not the case claims about facts yes it was not the case as i said that the identification which formed the basis of the book was an addition to knowledge whose correctness could not be doubted he then goes on to say oh yes i thought so the time, but I've turned out to be mistaken.

Less fundamental things in the book have proved to be mistaken too. And I think it's almost a bit of a shame that having made this very confident and very plausible argument, presumably was daunted enough or cowed enough by the responses to it in historical circles that he then withdrew most of the claims. And he then, in the introduction to Under the Mole Hill, he talks about history as being a kind of story, which actually, if you look at it as a story, rather than demanding that every part of its argument be propped up, I think it is still a compelling read. part of its argument be propped up you know i think it is still a compelling read from my point of view as a novelist it was so perfect to discover this theory because it didn't need to be true in order to be a brilliant basis for a series of novels it's easy i think that's what he's getting

out when he starts this very puzzling discussion about both facts and real facts. I think what he's saying there is that history is a series of stories, and you have to make your story as watertight and as plausible as possible while realising that we never can get to the absolute truth. So it's almost like a scientific proposition that is put forward until it can be disproved. He also does put forward counter-arguments himself. At the end, he talks about the handwriting and says, oh, I haven't quite proved it from the handwriting. He does make clear, he says, this is a problem, I can't quite make this fit. But I think the overall problem for Bruno enthusiasts, and it is something that Bossy touches on, is if this is true, what does it tell us about the sort of man he was? And does that fit in with everything else we know about it?

Does it fit in with the rest of his career? And what we see, if Bruno is Ari Fagot, a very vindictive person. A quote on the back that I've got is about the psychology of spying, how you can smile and smile and be a villain as as as it says in shakespeare you can live in somebody's house and betray them uh utterly coldly could i request steph that you tell us just give us a potted biography giordano bruno okay so the very quick version. So Giordano Bruno was born, his birth name was Filippo Bruno. He was born in Nola, which is a small village just outside Naples, in 1548. And he was the son of a mercenary soldier. He was, by all accounts, an extremely bright boy who was able to get an education by joining the Dominican order in his sort of mid-teens.

And he was admitted as a novice in Naples at the convent of San Domenico Maggiore at the age of 17. He fled the convent because he was about to be hauled up in front of the Inquisition for questioning various doctrines and for expressing ideas that were considered to be heretical. He had a habit of reading forbidden books, books that were on the Inquisition's index of forbidden books, and he would take them into the authorities at the convent got wise to this he had been in the in the privy an unusually long time they forced the door and caught him in there with a copy of erasmus which he threw down the hole and somebody was kind of determined enough to go down into the tank and fish out this book to prove that he had been reading heretical materials. That was the point at which he was due to be hauled up in front of the Inquisition. And he, with the help of a friend, fled over the wall of his convent. He went on the run. He then became a kind of itinerant teacher

and traveled all the way up through Italy and got to France, where he worked at the University of Toulouse, I think it was, for a little while. And he then traveled again up through France. And by the time he got to Paris, he had made enough of a name for himself. He'd started attending debates and giving lectures at the Sorbonne. And he came to the attention of the King Henry III, King of France, who employed him to be his personal tutor in philosophy. At which point the Catholics, the hardline Catholics in Paris didn't like this. They didn't like the idea of this heretical ex-monk becoming too much of an influence

on the king. And Bruno was sent to England by King Henry for his own safety to get him out of the way of the sort of plotters in the French court, which was how he came to be living at the French embassy. He was sort of there under the king's protection as a house guest of Castelnau, the French ambassador. And he spent three years in England. We know that he gave lectures and took part in debates in Oxford, where he traveled with Philip Sidney.

He spent time in London. He got to know various literary figures. And this is the period of his life when Bossy is concentrating on. Then the short version is Bruno again has to leave England. He can't find a patron. He ends up going back to Italy against the advice of all his friends, but he goes back to Venice, which is quite a liberal republic at that time compared to Rome or Naples. But he is then betrayed to the Inquisition when he arrives in Venice. And he then spends eight years in prison in Venice and in Rome. He appears multiple times in front of the Inquisition, charged with various heresies. times in front of the Inquisition, charged with various heresies. And finally, in 1600,

he is burned in the Campo dei Fiori in Rome, where there is now a huge statue to him, where people go every year on the 17th of February to make a pilgrimage. That's brilliant. Thank you. So that's the short version. Enjoy your room upgrade. Wherever you go, we'll go together. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. How much of a bastard is your Bruno? Well, he's not at all.

Have you chosen to make him a rogue? He's a philosopher. There are different interpretations of Bruno, but the reason that there is this kind of annual pilgrimage on the date of his death is that in Italy, he was kind of rehabilitated

in the 19th century when this statue was put up by subscription. And because one of the things, I mean, this is all very sort of complicated and controversial, but one of the heresies

that he was condemned for, or that was associated with him, was arguing that the universe was infinite. And so for some people, he is regarded as a very early martyr for science. Because we don't have all the records of his trials, it's not really possible to say that definitively, but he is certainly regarded as a kind of hero of free thought in Italy and across a lot of Europe. For me, that's but he is certainly regarded as a kind of hero of free thought in italy and across a lot of europe for me that's who he is and so i have had to square it as a sort of psychological um question in turning him into a fictional character i have had to consider what it means to work as a spy and you know look at other people who have written about you know obviously john mccarry having concentrated on this question often but about the mentality that is required

to to create intimacy with somebody in order to then betray them for what you perceive to be a greater good and the whole of that you know the religious climate in 1580s england i think is is fascinating in terms of how people justified what they were doing. And Bossy certainly does pass judgment, doesn't he, Susie? You were going to read a section from the end of the book, which seems appropriate to hear now, because Bossy comes off the fence, doesn't he, in a very interesting way. Well, at the very, very end, I mean, the piece that I've chosen is at the end,

but then there's an epilogue because Bossy just can't stop, frankly. And he seems to be saying that, yeah, they did the right thing. You know, burning to death was sort of his just face. That's what he says, isn't he? Which, after all that we've been through in this book, you do think, wow, my goodness. I think it's one of those books where maybe somebody who's worked a great deal on a particular person decides at the end that they don't like them very much after all, after all the years of work. But I have a rather lovely piece to read, which I think sums up for me, and it sums up what I think is so magical about this book. And it's the end proper before he goes on to write another end. It's the end proper before he goes on to write another end.

From the room which we have imagined at the top of Salisbury Court, he would have had a good view of the river, and we may see him during his nocturnal contemplations, looking down from the sky to catch the moon shining on the black water as it ran past Buckhurst stairs. Not all the nights can have been so stygian, nor all the watermen so prone to industrial action as those of Ash Wednesday night, 1584. He must have enjoyed any number of trips down to the court at Greenwich with Castlenow, across to the Palatine Lasky at Winchester House, up to Dee at Mortlake, and to who knows what other enjoyable rendezvous. On the way he could admire

the Queen's swans, sing in his Neapolitan tenor, relish the thought of the papists in the tower, smell beyond Westminster and Wapping, the rutty bank where Spencer's nymphs gathered their flowers. What outrage to remember that up and down this same river, by day or after nightfall, Harron's crew was busy at the oars, barrels full of noxious books unloading at the half-moon in Southwark, Jesuits slipping into Arundel House, students and renegades down to Gravesend, conspirators, assassins and bearers of criminal letters moving to their destinations, and that half their coming and goings were under his nose. All the evil and treason which have been discovered, to quote Fagot, for the

last time, have come from giving Monsieur de Movisier, that's Castelnau's other name, from giving Monsieur de Movisier a house beside the Thames. Let malcontents and teeth grinders take their chances at the strand with the rest of the venomous rabble and leave Diana's river to her nymphs and her faithful lovers, her swans and her stars. It's beautiful, but it is quite venomous as well, actually, isn't it? The thing that interests me is he creates this kind of very modern, Hamlet-like kind of character divided against himself bruno which i can see is to a novelist it's almost like he gets so sort of sucked into the research that he creates

he creates bruno as a really complex literary character who is contemplating the infinity of the universe but is also seeing how far he can get with this double life. I mean, if you buy, which obviously Bossy does buy, if you buy that he is Faggo and that he was, I mean, he's a pretty successful spy. You know, he kind of manages to undermine the kind of the Catholic plots against Elizabeth. There's a sense in which Bossy admires his intelligence and cleverness,

but then has to sort of, as a historian of Catholicism, has to sort of rein it back in and say, well, hang on. You know, if you're a spy, you're telling lies to everybody you're professing to like, and that's just bad. And I wonder, because your Bruno is not like that. He is clever, isn't he? And he's kind of brilliant. But it feels to me that there's definitely some of the old Sherlock Holmes.

You know, he's called in because he's got some intuitive and extraordinary ability to see connections which other people might not see. That's what I was trying to go for. Really, I think there were sort of several things that inspired my portrait of Bruno, and this book was certainly one of them. And I think, you know, I think Bossy does articulate very well here, that sense of division, that sense of double standards that you have to try and square with your own conscience if you are going to betray people that you've sort of sat and had dinner with

to a particularly brutal death when they're arrested as traitors. That's something that I have tried to convey in the books, what it feels like to carry that on your conscience. But also from various other sources about Bruno, I mean, the very fact that he went from being a kind of itinerant, you know, he was basically on the run and went from that to being a university teacher to being personal tutor to the King of France within three years suggests that he was pretty good at talking his way into, that he was pretty good at talking his way into the higher circles. He must have had an extraordinary kind of confidence.

Yeah, yeah. I've got a theory that Bossy envies Giordano Bruno. His relationship to his subject is one of envy. And it's a classic academic's envy of showbiz right why has this slick fast talker attracted so much attention when i the academic have put in the hard work right so so steph you may be able to build on this thought in a moment, I suspect. But when he attributes motive to Bruno, what he's doing is projecting what he feels people like Bruno, reasons why they do things, right? So his motives are money.

He says Bruno likes the money. Yeah. You know, not much money in academia. And he owns no property, crucially. He says at one point he owns no property. Bossy specifically says he's in love with this idea that he is this very clever chap who can dazzle people, who behaves with reckless daring,

which in turn stimulates further great work and brilliant thoughts. So I think there's this whole kind of, that's, Susie, why I think he then goes on and says, well, and they burn him at the stake and it serves him right at the end. He can kill the guy that he loves and hates, right, at the end of the book. He can write him out of history. Romanism aside, his venomous passages on women, Jews, Protestants, and Jesus demonstrate the catholicity of his victims and the pleasure he took in their discomfiture or worse. Fantasies of retribution seem to have been his daily bread. Nobody is competent to say that Bruno was, clinically speaking, a sadist. If an argument to the contrary is needed, there is the excellent one that his penchant was very rationally discussed in De La Corsa, one of his own books, by himself.

However we describe his condition, I have no doubt that it was relevant to his career as faggot, to its retributory aspect, and also to the voyeurism which it entailed. You see, I'm saying that is John Vossi describing his own id. That's what that is. I think that's what gives this book its kind of energy, though.

And what I haven't read under the molehill, but pretty much everybody says, it's quite good, but there's no Bruno in it, so it's nowhere near as interesting. Because I think the other thing that we should say, Steph, isn't it that the absolute high point of his career as a writer, Bruno's career, happened in this London period, in the sort of 15,

the mid-1580s, and the Ceno della Ceneri, the Ash Wednesday Supper, which is a sort of a dialogue where he simultaneously sort of trashes all the Oxford academics and pedants who've been having a go at him, but also

manages to praise Henry III and Elizabeth I. I mean, he was gig economy avant la lettre, I think. He was having a huge amount of fun, maybe being a spy. We don't know that. But he was also having a massive kind of time being one of the most interesting, freest writers in the world. And he was also pretending to be a priest during this whole time when he had been excommunicated.

I mean, as you said in your passage, respect, chapeau. Yeah, you see, that's the argument that Bossy makes, which is, for me, the bit that I don't think stands up because part of Bossy's argument is that Bruno was, or Fagot, was acting as the kind of live-in priest at Salisbury Court at the French embassy, who would have been allowed to have... So the Catholic embassies in London were allowed to practice mass and were allowed to have priests. And so English Catholic sympathizers would

sometimes go often in secret or on pretense of going there for dinner and go there to hear mass in the embassy's chapels. And I'm not persuaded that if Bruno was Fagot, that all the Catholics in the French embassy, knowing that he had been excommunicated, would be happy to be taking mass from him. I don't know. That was the bit that I couldn't, I've never been able to square. But I think, just to go back to what Andy was saying about, I kind of envy about this kind of swashbuckling academic, you know, this writer who then becomes a spy, saying it's an academic's envy of showbiz. He is dead, isn't he, John Bossie?

He is dead. He is safely in the ground, right? Yeah, okay. When my novel Prophecy came out, it had been a very deliberate policy by my editor not to include historical notes, author's notes, in the back of the book because they were murder mysteries, they were spy novels, and so we wanted them to appeal to a crime readership as well as a historical readership. And it was felt that that would be perhaps a little forbidding, or we didn't want people to think that you had to have a detailed knowledge of the historical period in order to enjoy the book. So we didn't include author's notes, which meant

that I was not able, or I didn't in the book itself, give any credit to Giordano Bruno and the Embassy Affair and the influence that it had clearly had on the story that I told. Although I had talked about it in interviews and I put it on my website and in blogs that I've written around it, I had mentioned Bossy's book. But I'm imagining that Bossy, who I think was sort of in his late 70s or 80s by then, was not reading many crime blogs on the internet because he wrote me a letter. Someone had obviously brought his attention to the book when it was reviewed in the TLS. And he'd obviously then taken a look at it. And he wrote me, it was quite a kind of sniffy letter. The gist of it was that my book was very

silly. It was a very silly idea to have written, to have written, turned Bruno into a kind of murder detective or, you know, that there would be, that he would be solving murders as well as spying. He particularly took issue with my portrayal of Lord Henry Howard, who I had sort of made into the arch villain in Prophecy. But I couldn't really get to the bottom of what his beef was, except that he seemed quite annoyed that I hadn't acknowledged his book and also that mine had been a hint on the Times bestseller list.

Maybe that was something to do with it. Just maybe. I felt like I'd been told off, you know, so I was, I guess, sort of early, mid-thirties. And here was this venerable professor whose book I had loved and been sort of mad about and was telling me off for being silly. I did definitely remember him using that word. And I was a bit daunted about writing back to him, so I never did. And then he died a little while later.

Susie, when you were a lit head, when you received letters from disgruntled, well-known authors who hadn't written to Steph, but had written to the pages of the indie on Sunday did you welcome that as good as something you could run in the paper or did you do your heart sink a bit um but some letters were written to me personally and they weren't intended for use in the paper um and that's a different type of letter to the kind of grandstanding letter. The, you know, is so very, if so-and-so had really known anything at all

about this subject, they would not have fallen into the elementary error. That's the sort of thing that goes to the letters pages. And the simplest thing I got from a writer was um we had fax machines of course remember those and the fax came out and somebody kind of looked at it and brought it over to me and it said in inch high letters et tu brute and that was somebody who didn't like a review that I had. It was somebody who actually wrote for me occasionally

and seemed to think that that guaranteed them good reviews, which of course it doesn't. But generally what people do is they use what we now call a sock puppet. So the typical letter would be, you know, Dear Susie Fay, I'm a subscriber. They always say they're subscribers. And I was taken aback to see the review on page. And then it kind of goes on.

And then it's never properly signed because it's very, this is where Bruno was brilliant. You see, if he was Fagot, he had mastery of all these different italic hand, secretary hand. Nobody can do that if they're doing a fake letter. So you get a kind of weird squiggle for a signature. And then if you look at the address, it never corresponds to any address in the real world. You know, it's always a made up address as well. And then you think, well, that's either the author or the author's mother.

And I would occasionally reply, why are you so upset about, it seems very strange for a reader to cancel their subscription, you know, and I'd ladle on the sarcasm. When John and I were booksellers, you always could rumble an author because they had too much information. If a member of the public came in and said i'm looking for a book by stephanie merit it's called uh it's published by the isbn number is uh you go oh you stephanie merit or related to stephanie right a real member of the public exactly susie would say have you got a book i don't it's got a blue cover and i heard about it on radio four some people would show that some

people would show an extraordinary depth of knowledge in a book that hadn't actually come out yet you know and then of course the um the kind of logical extension of that was when amazon reviews became a thing and real sock puppet accounts started happening and there was very very high profile instances of that of people either kind of slating their rivals or bigging up their own books under various different uh handles um yes it's a whole but it's obviously been going on since you know since the days of the fax machine I like the idea of somebody sending just the notion of sending a of the fax machine. I like the idea of somebody sending, just the notion of sending a melodramatic fax

seems particularly... Tragically now, we'll have Deliquest, where nobody will be able to read it. I've got an interesting reviewing carcass here of the book, which leads us into, I know, something you want to ask Susie and Steph about, Andy, which is, it's a very, listen, the final paragraph is this. Regrettably, it's an American Kirkus, so it's a poor American accent, I know.

The significance of Bruno and even of the conspiracy is lost in Bossy's presentation. Obscure, convoluted, turgid, weighted with chronologies, false clues, obfuscation, irrelevant letters, artificially designed mysteries, such as a whole chapter arguing for the coincidence of Fago and Bruno's similarities when Bossy is about to reveal that they are the same man. However correct his facts, interesting, however indisputable his conclusions, Bossy compromises them by his melodramatic presentation, which is probably more suitable to fiction. A bewildering and frustrating read.

Maybe that's the reason he was a bit thin-skinned about somebody actually turning it into fiction. Yeah, I'm sure. Maybe that American is the man who scribbled in this library copy. I tell you what, Mitch, if they ever needed john houston sound alike with your american accent there you could definitely do that i've got a huge trevor roper's review here and a huge trevor rope the the famous historian hoodwinked of course by the

hitler diaries um which were fakes you quoted trevor ro, John, in your introduction. And I think Bossy was probably responding to this criticism, Stefan, in the introduction from the paperback, from a subsequent edition. But it's specifically, it's the thing about the priest, the lack of proof that Faggo and Bruno were the same man, but so much of the subsequent argument of the book is built on that. Anyway, he then goes on to say, Trevor Roper says, This is a marvellous book, which, whether right or wrong, equally multiplies rather than resolves the mystery of Giordano Bruno. Perhaps it is right. Can we believe in this new character? This high-powered hermetic philosopher, whose opaque and enigmatic works can still find a

publisher and presumably a public? This sophisticated, epicurean good companion of such agreeable manners and conversation, who was yet, at so cool ruthless and treacherous leading a precarious double life in the household of a patron who generously nourished him protected him and was betrayed by him well i suppose we can i have known one such that's a good mic drop as nobody said in 1991 i presume that's a reference to something to do with the um the hitler diaries isn't it right so you're both literary editors or former literary editors. And for all I know, you may have written Hatchet Jobs. Do you approve or disapprove of them, Susie? Of Hatchet Jobs?

Deliberately commissioned negative reviews, I suppose what we're saying. Flamboyantly. Flamboyantly negative reviews. They're suspiciously easy to write. It's much harder. It's much harder to write a flamboyant patch of job than it is to seriously praise a book without sort of sounding weird. And I mean, sometimes people would say, look, why? Why even waste space on the pages with books that you don't think are much good?

And why not just have, you just have just an ocean of praise, just have the great books that you want to recommend? And one of the reasons why not is that you just look like you were acting as part of the marketing for publishers. And the other thing is the value of a good book review is only really balanced when set against a bad book review. You know, you can't praise everything. And if I could just put to bed, this myth never, ever goes away, but you don't commission a bad review. You don't ring DJ Taylor up and say, say can you review this david i want you

not to like it i use him because you can't imagine insulting him by saying you have to i want you not to like this book it's ludicrous but people continually think that literary editors are kind of machiavels we're like Giordano Bruno, making friends with people, betraying them. Maybe that's why I like this book so much. Yes, yes, yes. Steph, I mean, there used to be, that prize doesn't exist anymore, does it?

But there was a prize for the Hatcher Job of the Year. Yeah, and again, I think that's something that belonged to what is almost a kind of bygone age of book reviewing. As we were saying earlier, the funds available, the space available gets smaller and smaller by the year. But certainly when I started in the days before the internet, if such a thing can be imagined,

there was definitely space for, you know, I think good kind of thought out criticism. And if that was negative, then, then so be it as long as the book deserved it. And I would, my measure would always be, you know, if, if someone you've never heard of is bringing out a new book of, you know, some first time author bringing out a new book of short stories and somebody absolutely slags it and tears it apart. Is there much value in running that review if barely anyone had heard this author? There's something going on when that happens. Yeah, I don't know. And you'd always want to sort of look at that. And yeah, exactly. I mean,

I think envy does feed into it. Conversely, if somebody who has a very elevated reputation produces something that is below par or you know not of the standard you'd expect of them um particularly if they've been paid a lot of money for it then i definitely think it is worth saying this isn't very good um and i'd be very happy for somebody to say this, isn't it? And it's a much smaller pool than in the States, for example. I mean, I don't know if they still have this rule, but it always used to be that the New York Times, you know, you would have to have absolutely no connection whatsoever with a book or its publisher or its agent or anyone who was remotely connected with it in order to be allowed to review it, which in the UK you just can't do because everybody is such a small pool. There would be no book pages, would there?

So I think, you know, that there's always a slight danger that there's politics involved in the background. There are still some places out there. I mean, the London Review is always, they're discouraged if you write a book review and they run the review books of taking any kind of, of making any value judgments at all about the book. It's like the people who, instead of asking questions, say here instead of a review is my own essay on this book. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's tricky.

Well, while we're talking, it occurs to me, Susie, that what is Henry Fageot, if not Giordano Bruno's sock puppet? You've never seen them in the same room, have you? You've never seen them together. That's the whole argument of this book, is that you've never seen them in the same room. I look forward to a communication from the spirit realm, from John Bossie, telling me I'm trivialising this. Silliness. I was going to say, I'm excited to know what your Bruno is doing next. That's really exciting.

There's a new one. Yeah. So my, my, my, oh, thank you very much. My Bruno is, yeah, so he's, he's in Prague and he is solving murders and dodging the Inquisition, as always. Steph, when's that published, please? Oh, my new one is coming out on the 6th of July and is available for pre-order. Links to our backlisted bookshop, which will be groovy.

Very good. Well, I think, John, we should wrap up. Should we crack on? well I think John we should wrap up shall we crack on alas it is time for us to make our way back down the strand and wave off Signore Bruno actually you didn't get in your

best joke of the afternoon that Giordano Bruno is what? it's Italian for Gordon Brown Gordon Brown and the Embassy Affair that's a book that would be harder to sell Gordon Brown and the Embassy Affair. That's a book that would be harder to sell, although it has a certain 1950s charm to it.

So we're going to wave off Gordon Brown and or Mr. Faggo as they sail back down the Thames and into history. Thank you to Susie and to Stephanie for being such sure-footed and illuminating guides on our journey. If you want show notes with clips, links, and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 186 that we've already recorded, please visit our website at backlisted.fm. If you want to buy the books discussed, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose Backlisted as your bookshop. And we're still keen to hear from you on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

If you want to hear Backlisted without ads, subscribe to our Patreon, www.patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Your subscription brings other benefits. If you subscribe at the lock listener level, for less than the price of a pot of ale in the Mermaid Tavern cheap side, you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month we call it lock listed it features the three of us talking and recommending the books films of music you've enjoyed in the previous fortnight yes john and i will continue to discuss books we've been talking about uh we've been reading this week but that will be happening now on lock listed not that listed we're still reading far too much plus people who subscribe at the Lotlisted level get their names read out,

accompanied by lashings of thanks and gratitude like this. Lisa Conway, thank you. Thank you. Elizabeth P. Stewart, thank you. Sharon Bruni, thank you. Thank you. Henrietta Brett, thank you.

Thank you. Steve Wagner, thank you. Merit McKinney, thank you very much. Tom Schutzer-Weissman, thank you. P.K. Hughes, Thank you. Jim Chaplin. Thank you. Yvonne Hewitt. Thank you so much. Before we go, Stephanie, is there anything that we haven't covered that you would like to say about Giordano Bruno or Henry Fagio or John Bossie or Queen Elizabeth I or anybody else covered in this particular episode?

Yes, I would like to posthumously apologise to Professor Bossie for not having credited his book in full in my author notes when the book came out, because I do owe an awful lot to this book. In fact, you know, the last 10, 15 years of my career really were kind of partly inspired by what Bossy did here. So I am very sorry, Professor Bossy. Excellent. And if I could do anything. Delighted to be the conduit for such a costumers.

Well, let's hope. On some level, he knows. Well, we do have listeners in the afterlife, Steph. I assumed as much. Susie, is there anything you would like to add? You chose this book. Fantastic choice, I have to say. I didn't know what to expect going in,

and I enjoyed it hugely. So thank you very, very much much it's a very unusual book and I'm glad that you joined me on this on this journey I suggested it quite a while ago and got a bit of a dusty answer and I thought oh it was the wrong thing and then you accepted with alacrity and And I'm so glad we had this chat. I've really enjoyed it. It's been brilliant. Thank you both so much. John?

It's one of those books that actually starts to gather. It sort of gathers its pace as you get through it. And by the end, not only have you bought Bossy's thesis, but I think you're also hungry to learn more about Giordano Bruno in particular and probably to delve a little deeper into just the astonishing underworld of spies and counter spies and of that period of history. It makes today look fairly kind of one dimensional, I have to say. Extraordinary.

Well, we'll be back in a fortnight with a different era, a different mystery hero and a different set of crimes committed. But we're continuing the theme. So see you in a fortnight. Thank you, Susie. Thank you, Steph. Thanks, Mitch. See you next time, everyone.

See you next time. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. © BF-WATCH TV 2021