November 4, 2009 – 9:30 am
There’s an article in today’s Guardian about the excellent news that the National Heritage Memorial Fund has allocated £550,000 to ensure that Siegfried Sassoon’s archive stays in this country.
The only downside to this is that the Guardian has appealed to the usual suspects for quotations, and some of these are a bit off-target. Andrew Motion, [...]
November 3, 2009 – 12:17 pm
The Pretty Lady (Churnet Valley Books, £14.95. ISBN 1904546689)
John Shapcott’s excellent new edition of The Pretty Lady raises the question why this extraordinary book has not been generally recognised as one of the most original and penetrating twentieth-century novels. Even Bennett enthusiasts like John Carey and John Lucas have been a bit sniffy about it. [...]
October 31, 2009 – 10:56 pm
If you’re interested in theatre history, there’s a promising new website showing some of the holdings of the East London Theatre Archive.
It aims to give a picture of the flourishing theatrical culture of the East End, from 1820 to the present day, though it seems a bit patchy at the moment – I couldn’t find [...]
October 26, 2009 – 10:01 am
There’s a nice little piece by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian about that 1929 competition to predict the living novelists who would still be remembered and read in 2029.
I blogged about the competition a couple of weeks ago, having come upon it in the Manchester Guardian archive by chance. (I was looking for references to [...]
October 25, 2009 – 11:33 am
I’ve been looking at the 1925 House of Commons debate about military executions, which gives some good insights into how the war was seen at the time. The Labour M.P. Ernest Thurtle moved the amendment, making some very strong arguments, and citing some persuasive cases in evidence:
Case No. 1 is that of a private soldier [...]
October 24, 2009 – 5:03 pm
At the recent Utopian Spaces conference in Oxford, it cheered my heart to note that there were two papers on that most unjustly neglected writer, C.E.Montague. In particular, there was a paper on Montague’s 1927 novel, Right Off the Map, by Amy Cutler, who has posted it in full on her very promising new blog. [...]
October 21, 2009 – 11:24 am
I’ve a letter printed in this week’s Times Literary Supplement, adding to Bernard Bergonzi’s article last week about the D.H.Lawrence’s use of the Meynell family in England, My England (a subject that I have written about in this blog).
My letter (which you can read by clicking here) is about the way readers might have read [...]
October 20, 2009 – 8:52 am
A week or so back I wrote about the 1929 Manchester Guardian competition in which readers were asked to predict which living novelists would still be read in 2029. (Galsworthy came top with 1180 votes.)
The top six on readers’ lists were all men, and the highest-scoring woman writer was Sheila Kaye-Smith, with 198 votes. As [...]
October 19, 2009 – 6:22 am
It’s good to see a hefty selection of Sexton Blake stories back in print. I don’t know whether the new collection has any of the wartime stories – as soon as hostilities began, Blake was on the case, dealing with secret German arms dumps in Epping Forest. When his usual enemies, such as Ezra Q. [...]
October 17, 2009 – 5:26 pm
A new recording of Elgar’s Kipling settings, The Fringes of the Fleet, will soon be generally available, but can be pre-ordered from the Elgar Foundation, who are also offering a hefty discount if you also buy the book Oh My Poor Horses: Elgar and the Great War , an excellent compilation of essays that investigate [...]
