Olney Review of Books - guest post by Simon Lee

As the years pass, I find it interesting to look back on school and student days, and in recent years I've had the pleasure of renewing a number of friendships from long ago. Someone I've enjoyed getting to know better is Simon Lee, who is not only Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence, Queen’s University Belfast, a former vice-chancellor, chair of the Everton Library Trust, chair of the William Temple Foundation, but also and the founder of the Olney Review of Books. The latter strikes me as an admirable initiative and I'm grateful to Simon for taking the trouble to respond to my request for a guest blog post about it. Here's what he has to say:

 
'Fifty years ago, when I went up to university, I was delighted to discover that the Balliol College law library was open 24 hours a day. It would make a great setting for a murder mystery. One student in his final year would be my chief suspect because he seemed to be in the library all the time. He went on to be a successful solicitor and crime fiction writer. He is also the consultant editor of the wonderful British Library Classic Crime series. Work hard in a law library and perhaps you too could be a Martin Edwards...
 
That, at least, is what I have told my law students over the decades and in diverse institutions - for instance in this blog at the Open University half a dozen years ago
https://university.open.ac.uk/open-justice/blog/christmas-its-mystery
 
Not every law student goes into legal practice or becomes a crime fiction writer. I went on to postgraduate study at Yale where Professor Arthur Leff said, ‘Whatever you can do, I can do meta.’ That is the lot of those of us stay to work in universities, reflecting on law in fact and fiction by teaching, researching and reviewing.

 
My latest project in that spirit is the Olney Review of Books (ORB), a free, on-line quarterly. All thirteen articles in the inaugural issue are available to those who sign up for the free newsletter while three sample articles are on the website which takes you to that opportunity: https://olneyreviewofbooks.co.uk/
 
Martin Edwards kindly contributed to the launch issue which was always planned for this month to celebrate twin 250^th anniversaries. Everyone knows that the 4^th of July 1776 was the date of the American Declaration of Independence. You might even know that on 1^st January 1773, the most famous hymn in the world was written in Olney, Buckinghamshire, by the local Anglican curate, Revd John Newton. We know it as Amazing Grace although he called it Faith’s Review and Expectation.
 
Very few people, however, seem to have turned the page to see that the next hymn in the collection of Olney Hymns (a 1779 publication) is titled On the Eclipse of the Moon 30 July 1776. This hymn, based on John Newton’s observation of the Moon from Olney, has been eclipsed by its illustrious predecessor for 250 years, until now. ORB’s first article has an analysis of the hymn by a distinguished theologian, Revd Professor Kenneth Newport, who is also a student of astro-physics.
 
More generally, the idea of ORB is to challenge the assumption that it takes a big metropolitan city with millions of people, such as New York or London, to have a literary culture including a Review of Books. Olney is a small market town in Buckinghamshire with only 7,000 residents. This does not make us parochial. We are interested in the genius of small communities everywhere, including the way conversations such as those between John Newton and his Olney neighbour, the poet William Cowper, can stimulate creativity.
 
Those of us who have been reviewing for decades will have nurtured our own dream of writing a murder mystery ourselves. Mine is set at a charity cricket match and features a hat-trick of puns in its title, The Bowler’s End (how the bowler died, at which end of the pitch, and what the bowler was up to – ‘End’ as the method, the location and the purpose).
 
While I search for a publisher, what I love about crime fiction is the community it has generated and the values readers and writers share, such as appreciating tradition without being afraid to challenge it. In their own way, 250 years ago, Newton and Cowper’s conversations about hymns, faith, words and social justice (seeking to abolish slavery and to ameliorate the conditions of lace-working women and girls in Olney) created the same dynamic. 

Fifty years ago, conversations in that college law library were a sharing of culture and craft. Now, ORB is encouraging exchanges of views about books in the round, in their whole life-cycle or, as we like to say, how books go into orbit. Talking of small communities, our next issue leads on the 300^th anniversary of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. We will take Gulliver into space but we will also be celebrating little community libraries.'