Philip Hensher at OLF

“There aren’t many novels about people simply growing old” declares novelist, columnist and critic Philip Hensher in an upper room off Christ Church Quad.

Hensher’s certainly been keen to challenge himself – The Northern Clemency is an ambitious novel tracking the adventures of two ordinary families in a quiet Sheffield suburb, and allowed him a very exciting sense of embarking on new territory – territory that “hadn’t already been written about millions of times before”.

Set over twenty eventful years – from 1974 to 1994 – and weighing in at an impressive 700 pages, the book’s an impressive chronicle of an eventful era. Hensher admitted that he’d been fascinated to revisit the changing face of British society over that relatively short period – a country that within twenty years turned from a manufacturing nation (he quotes the words of Winston Churchill, “built from coal and surrounded by fish”) to a service culture in thrall to the banker and the hedge fund.

And yet in his three lively readings – from a whistlestop tour of a 90s London PR Agency to a brief encounter with 80s Sheffield anarchists “The Sparticists” (”So left wing they smash up CND meetings”) – Hensher reveals that much of The Northern Clemency’s success lies in his peculiar eye for the small and personal details of life in the very recent past…