“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a little strange.” – Gertrude Abercrombie After Pied Piper and The Thinking, my explorations led me into the byways of British literature of WW2 evacuation and evacuees. On that journey, I made – and continue to make – discoveries: Writers and…
There was a period in the early 1960s when my parents had a television (in those days you rented) and one of the programs I liked to watch was All Our Yesterdays produced by Granada Television. It was a look back in time based on the newsreel footage of that week twenty-five years ago – a week-by-week journey through the…
P.G.Wodehouse and A.A. Milne were the same age and in 1941 they were both close to 60. As young men about town in Edwardian London they had moved in the same social and literary circles, belonged to the same club and played on the same cricket team. They were friends. Bertie Wooster and Christopher Robin are of course fictional characters…
A six-point manifesto from psycholinguist Frank Smith – another of those items found in the basement. I must have prepared it as a hand-out for some long-forgotten purpose or another. I was happy to be reunited. Frank Smith – who died last year – was one of those essential giants in the land of learning, literacy, and reading. I loved…
“Phosphorescence is a process in which energy absorbed by a substance is released relatively slowly in the form of light. … When the stored energy becomes locked in by the spin of the atomic electrons, a triplet state can occur, slowing the emission of light, sometimes by several orders of magnitude.” Phosphorescence is also the title of a book by…
One book leads to another. Six Degrees of Separation comes via Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best. Readers start with the same book and see where their connections take them by the first Saturday of the month. The starting point for January 2021 is Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (2020). Follow the hashtag #6degrees on Twitter to check out…
It’s that time of the month – #6degrees again. Read about it here and join in. Play the animation and the book chain will appear! Our start point is Judy Blume. Her Are you there God? It’s Me Margaret (1970) was a bit of a sensation in the children’s lit world because it shockingly dared to mention the unmentionable (menstruation!…
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…