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spectator.com.uk forward slash innovator. Hello and welcome to Spectators book club

podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator and I'm joined this week by the writer and critic Laura Freeman, whose new book is Ways of Life, Jim Ede and the Kettle's Yard artists.

Laura, welcome. Now, I would think probably not very many of our listeners will have heard of Jim Ead. Some will have heard of Kettle Yard and both of

these subjects, but who was Jim Eid? Now, you know, what's your way into this book? Well, I should

probably start with Kettles Yard, because as you say, that's what people will know. It is,

Kettles Yard is four slum cottages in Cambridge or former slum cottages that were turned by one man into the most beautiful home and house for modern art.

Jim Ead was a curator, a collector, a writer, a journalist, but above all, in his phrase, he was a friend to artists.

And he had the very good luck to be a young man about town in the 1920s when British Art was booming. He made friends with people like Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Christopher Wood, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, David Jones, all these people who had become the greats we know today, except he knew them when they were young and starving in their assorted garrets across the city. So he bought their work and when ultimately he came to Cambridge, actually, you know, a long

time down the line when he's in his six-

It's not to the 50s that Keppery Yards kind of appears.

It's very strange.

It's sort of, it's a, it's an odd book in a way because there's this whole life that comes before Kettle's Yard,

the thing he's most known for. I actually rather love that because I think there's so much

pressure to be successful young or to have achieved everything you're going to achieve by the time

you're 25, to be on the grant a list of great young novelists or whatever it might be.

And he's a lovely example of someone who only really found his true calling quite late in life. And Kettle's Yard, for those who visited

pretty modest rooms on a remarkably small scale, but it's incredible because you go into the

bathroom and on top of the laboratory there's an Alfred Wallace and behind the door there's a

...