National Year of Reading – Interview with David Boyd Haycock

Our next interview for the National Year of Reading is with author, curator, teacher and lecturer, David Boyd Haycock...

What was the first non-fiction/arts book you remember reading, and what was its impact on you?  

The non-fiction book I first remember reading – and it had a really profound impact on me – was Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain. It’s a gazetteer published by The Reader’s Digest in 1973, and I used to browse through it for hours as a child. Heavily illustrated, there were endless photographs, line drawings and wood engravings – a thrilling mix of the weird, the ghostly, the erotic and the faintly terrifying. Looking through it again recently I was amazed to see colour reproductions of Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Summer Solstice, Samuel Palmer’s Cornfield by Moonlight too, as well as the British Museum’s Splendor Solis on the opening pages. They are images and impressions that have almost defined my adult interests as an historian, and I didn’t realise I’d encountered them first at a young and very impressionable age. 

 
Paul Nash, Landscape of the summer solstice (1943), oil on canvas
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1952.

What’s the latest art/design/other book you’ve read?  

I’ve been rereading a number of Herbert Read’s books, in particular his 1933 classic Art Now. This has been as research for the exhibition I’m curating for Southampton City Art Gallery, ‘Art Then! British Painting, Sculpture and Drawing, 1910–1960.’ It’s a show in collaboration with the Ingram Collection, and opens in September. Right now I’m finishing off the catalogue, which looks at the critical influence (among other things) of Roger Fry and Herbert Read on modern British art. 

What is your favourite Lund Humphries book, and why?  

My favourite among the ones I own is John Hoole and Margaret Simons’ James Dickson Innes, 1887–1914. Innes studied at the Slade School of Art in the early 1900s, just before the group of artists I wrote about in A Crisis of Brilliance. A rather tortured Welsh genius, in the few short years before his death from tuberculosis he painted a series of wonderful landscapes, vibrant in colour, visionary in outlook, full of life. It’s another book I’m happy to browse through for hours, admiring his work. 

What is currently on your to-read list, and why does it appeal to you?  

I recently read John Carey’s 2014 memoir, The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books. It was funny and fascinating and full of recommendations of numerous things to read – but most of all I want to get hold of his rather controversial study, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939. It argues that modernists made themselves deliberately obscure to keep the hoi-polloi in their place. A friend recommended it to me when it first came out in 1992, and I’ve waited rather too long to read it for myself!  

If you were starting a star-studded (art/architecture) book club, who, from any era, would you like to invite?  

They’re not exactly megastars, but I’d want to invite the two people I’ve studied most deeply in my writing career, the painter Paul Nash and the eighteenth-century antiquary, William Stukeley. More well-known characters whose opinions I’d like to hear on art in particular would be William Blake and William Morris. But I think we’d probably get onto politics, too, which is an element of art that is increasingly of interest to me. They both wanted to reshape the status quo, and used art to help them achieve that. It’s a very English assembly, but that’s where I sit as a reader and a writer, going all the way back to those British folklore, myths and legends I started off with. 

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David Boyd Haycock is an author, curator, teacher and lecturer, based in Oxford. His books include Paul Nash (2001), A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War (2009), Brilliant Destiny: The Age of Augustus John (Lund Humphries, 2023) and Art-Quake, 1910: The Manet and the Post-Impressionists Exhibition (2026).