Given the confusion each year around the start of British Summer Time, it’s worth recalling that William Willett’s original proposal was to move clocks forward by 80 minutes, in four 20-minute increments each Sunday in April, then reversed in September. That this was simplified to a single hour forward in March, reversed in October, now seems merciful.

Maurice Denton Welch was born on 29 March 1915. To mark his centenary I drank two gin and limes—a drink he often mentions in his Journals, alongside gin and French. Like Sebald, Denton’s writing forms a seamless body of work: he returns to the same motifs across novels, stories, journals, shifting their tone and form, refining their reach. The Journals are uneven, as journals are, but they contain passages of extraordinary lucidity. A reader suggested his short stories bridge the expressive gap between his first two novels and A Voice Through a Cloud. I’ve ordered two collections and will read them in sequence.

In the meantime, I’ve begun a book I found unexpectedly in Cecil Court: Barbara Reynolds’s The Passionate Intellect, a study of Dorothy L. Sayers’s fourteen-year obsession with translating Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’ve never read the Lord Peter Wimsey novels, but I share her fascination with the Comedy. Reynolds draws heavily on Sayers’s correspondence with Charles Williams, whose book The Figure of Beatrice first prompted her immersion. That volume now moves up my list.

Sayers began reading Divine Comedy in August 1944, at the height of the V-1 campaign. Welch writes vividly in his Journals of that same summer: the atmosphere, the interruptions, the unreality of routine. Sayers, meanwhile, wrote of her reading:

“The plain fact is that I bolted my meals, neglected my sleep, work and correspondence, drove my friends crazy, and paid only a distracted attention to the doodle-bugs, which happened to be investing the neighbourhood at the time, until I had panted my way through the Three Realms of the dead from top to bottom and from bottom to top.”

Welch, Sayers, Dante: the text takes hold.