Blog – Jack Sanger

The Fields of Dreams

The green sward stretched out before us. Ladies in fine gowns held the favours of their champions as they sat in the gallery waiting for the tourney to begin. Knights, to a man, were armoured and horsed with lances held perpendicular by their saddles. Shields protected them. Some were like Lancelot, in disguise, willing to… Know More
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Intimations of Mortality

I need to backfill slightly for those of you who have not read an earlier post this year but which kicks off the present one. I was born in India. By the time my family returned with me to the UK I spoke Urdu and English. By then I was aware that my elder sister… Know More
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The Colour of Memory

The Colour of Memory Modern life is destroying colour in a kind of genocide, a universal clearance of the natural spirit of tone, shade, tint and hue. So it appears to me in retrospect. The following lines by A E Houseman encompass the notion that for each of us, memory has its own presiding colour.… Know More
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Autobiography 5: How to be a man

My father found it much easier to show affection to a daughter (hardly surprising, having had the terrible heartbreak of the first born girl’s death by drowning) and to the youngest versions of me, his son. As I grew older, the physicality of touch diminished until, one day in his seventies in Lanark, when he… Know More
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Autobiography 4: From the Big Bang to Steady State

The latest scientific speculation suggests that there had to be something before the Big Bang, poetic flat universes like bed sheets occasionally coming together to create a terrific flap and give birth to yet another. If the first of this series of posts on my childhood began with a memory of my own big bang,… Know More
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Autobiography 3: Abandoned child, wild gorse and honey bees

I think I may be dashing about in time. I cannot really put things in date order. My memory seems to be a bit like a dark night sky wherein a star suddenly appears and I fasten on to it with my telescope. My parents drove me to friends of theirs where I was to… Know More
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Autobiography 2: Earth, Air, Water and Blood

So my earliest memory was fire. Casting my mind back I have a sort of metaphorical sense of what memory is. It’s a concertina which, when pulled out reveals all that extra capacity that cannot be seen at the outset. Or like a set of books whose spines are all that is visible on the… Know More
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In an autobiography, a thousand memories must begin with one

Writing an autobiography represents a worrying collision of two gropes of thought. I am not talking here of the autobiographies of those who have jumped to fame on the serendipitous back of media-enhanced celebrity and deliver their usually ghost-written accounts of their first years of fame. I am more concerned with autobiography as the summing… Know More
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Ghosts in the Machine

I have just finished the second or third draft of a short story called Rupture. The title has strong resonances for me. Life contains ruptures though, being survivors, we try to gloss them over, smooth them out, fill in the voids and talk ourselves through the miseries they cause because we want our lives to… Know More
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New Review for The Azimuth Trilogy

Jack Sanger’s sprawling epic, Azimuth is a trilogy that brings to mind myth and folklore of times long gone. It conjures memories of a barely remembered past; one that feeds the subconscious and brings to life archetypes almost forgotten, yet still resonate in our collective unconscious; the stuff of dreams and legends. The narrator, Kamil… Know More
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