In 1997, while in Kraków, Poland, researching his first novel, Underground, the poet and author Tobias Hill, who has died of glioblastoma aged 53, spotted an antique watch that caught his attention for its simplicity and beauty. Although it cost more than he could reasonably afford he bought it and later took it to the makers, Patek Philippe, who told him it had a postwar casing on a much older watch.
This discovery led to uneasy questions, largely prompted by Kraków’s history during the second world war: who might have owned the older watch and who had it re-cased after and why. From these questions arose Tobias’s second novel, The Love of Stones (2001), which brought together the stories of a contemporary jewel dealer in London, Katherine Sterne, and two Iraqi-Jewish brothers who arrived in London in 1833 and set up a jewellery business. That vignette encapsulates much about Tobias’s writing: his instinct for what is worth paying attention to; his inquiring mind that wanted to look beneath the surface of beauty to find something layered and intriguing; his attention to the sorrows and violence of history; and the way in which he wandered the world imaginatively and literally, but almost inevitably returned to London.
