As of last week, the only thing I knew about Agnes Smedley was that The Feminist Press had reissued her most famous book and that the poet Robert Lowell had objected that she – a known communist sympathizer – was allowed to stay at Yaddo – the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs. Getting to know her a little better has…
The November #6degrees is freestyle. Instead of everyone starting in the same place with the same book, each participant starts with the last book on a previous chain or – if a newcomer – with the last book they read. #6degrees is the book version of Six Degrees of Separation. It usually starts with a book suggested by Kate at…
This is not really a book review, although I did re-read, and enjoy The Lonely Londoners as part of the #1956club. It is rather an excuse to pull out some quotations, share some research and images, and post a quite remarkable documentary. Along the way my journey took me deep into the North Kensington of the novel – a part…
And the #1956Club is open for business and this time I’m joining and you can too.. I’m old enough to actually remember quite a bit about 1956 and it’s technically possible that I read some of these books in the year they were published. I was an avid three books plus a week reader as a child and at eight…
As a starting point for a chain of connections #sixdegrees The Turn of the Screw has everything. Is it a mystery story or a study in overwrought and morbid psychology? There’s gothic horror, ghosts and governesses. Jane Eyre and Murdoch’s The Unicorn come to mind. It starts on Christmas Eve; there are strange children, one of whom has, for some…
Long before the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, bookish teens had Iris Murdoch. As the poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) explained in Annus Mirabilis, sex was invented in 1963 Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban And the Beatles’ first…
I’ve just read Back To My Beginnings by Paddy Staplehurst. It’s a memoir of growing up in St. Etheldreda’s in Bedford – a home for girls that was run by Anglican nuns. Paddy and her younger sister Bille arrive in 1944 to join an older sister, Dawn, after being taken into care by Norfolk County Council because of persistent abuse.…
A friend is reading Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map: The Story of London’s Most Terrifying Epidemic–and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World – and she’s been regaling me with stories of toshers, pure-finders, mudlarks and the sewers of Victorian London. Here’s how the book begins: It is August 1854, and London is a city of scavengers. Just…
There I was I was minding my own business drinking an early morning cuppa in isolation, socially distanced and hunkered when there was a flash of lightning and a tremendous thunderclap right overhead. Just one, followed a quick pelt of rain. And because I was deep in The Black Death – the way one is in the novelty phase of…
So many parallels between our current pandemic and the plague that swept through London in 1665, at least as described by Daniel Defoe in Journal of the Plague Year. It’s a novel, written many years later in – 1722 – by a remarkably talented fabulator. So always good to take it with a shovel of salt. But here’s one big…
They say the war is over. But water still Comes bloody from the taps. from ‘Redeployment,’ Howard Nemerov In April 1961 the BBC Light program broadcast the first episode of a new radio drama: The Avenue Goes to War. It was based on the R. F. Delderfield novel of the same name. It’s the story of one suburban street in…
This is actually a story about books but somehow the schools took over. It does start with the books – four old books from a library of a defunct school and each with this lovely bookplate. Beneath the tree is the line “And some of the blossoms shall turn to fruit” And some of the blossoms of the Lincoln School…
Always fun to find half-remembered books. One bonus of this decluttering lark is that you find so many of them. What to do? Choices: Keep: The book has an enduring value. While there is no more room you just have to hold on to this one. It’s either irreplaceable or just a core component of your identity and emotional furniture. …
Scooterons-nous vite. It’s Back to School with Angela Brazil Long before Harry Potter – and indeed long before all those school story authors who gave us Malory Towers and St. Clare’s and the Chalet School and the Abbey School and Jennings and Billy Bunter – there was Angela Brazil. Brazil – rhymes with dazzle – didn’t invent the school story…
It’s always fun when someone you know – a friend – has a book published. Here’s Three Sheets to the Wind by Cynthia Barrett about the nautical origins of everyday expressions. This is not a compendium of sailing idioms – all that tacking, luffing, jibing and heeling language of the business of sailing. This is rather the expressions we use…