Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess

We're in the 19th century for the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, in the Victorian era, when the British Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, published an epic poem called The Princess, on the subject of what to do about bizarre ideas about women's education, independence, and silly things like that. The submission of Victorian women … Continue reading Submission and cross-dressing: Tennyson’s The Princess →

The 1947 Club: Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White

I reread this less-known novel by T H White for the #1947Club because I had a Folio Club edition that I’d never read. My paperback copy of Mistress Masham’s Repose fell apart through overuse many years ago, so I was very happy to find this large, illustrated, embossed edition in a fancy cardboard slipcase, lurking under … Continue reading The 1947 Club: Mistress Masham’s Repose by T H White →

Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark

This time in the Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up, I’ve gone west, to Willa Cather’s beautiful novel The Song of the Lark from 1915. If ever there was an advertisement for idyllic American settings, this novel is it. The descriptions evoke desert life near the Mexican border, clean and tidy Scandinavian-immigrant town life in … Continue reading Dogged mid-West endurance: Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark →

The biography of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words

Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words is a weighty illustrated doorstop of a book by Boel Westin and is Jansson's authorised biography. Until a few years ago she was only known in the UK for her children’s books about the Moomins. Moominland Midwinter, Moominsummer Madness and Comet in Moominland (there are five others) are in the class … Continue reading The biography of Tove Jansson: Life, Art, Words →

Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind

Anne Charnock must have been SO ANNOYED when Ali Smith’s prize-winning, multiply lauded novel How to be both hit the bookshelves in 2014. This is because her own novel, Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind, published on 1 December, shares the same central, unusual conceit, of a medieval Italian artist who has to struggle against … Continue reading Sleeping Embers of an Ordinary Mind →

Lindsey Davis, Ancient Rome and Marcus Didius Falco

In 1990 I bought a book to read on the way home on the train, and when I got there I wasn’t in London, but in Londinium, for such was the power of Lindsey Davis’s first Falco novel, The Silver Pigs. I read her novels addictively for years. My favourite is not one of the 20 … Continue reading Lindsey Davis, Ancient Rome and Marcus Didius Falco →

Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods

Last week I got grumpy about failures in historical writing, where we are asked to accept cringe-making historical howlers or listen to medieval characters speaking in awkward modern slang. Sybille Bedford's novel A Favourite of the Gods from 1963, in contrast, was a total joy. It retrieved my faith that fiction set in the past can be written impeccably … Continue reading Sybille Bedford, A Favourite of the Gods →

National Gallery: the film of the art history lecture

I just sat through three hours of Frederick Wiseman's documentary National Gallery (2014), a film about the British national gallery of art in London's Trafalgar Square that needs a damn good editing, marvellous though it is. Stupidly, I did not think to check how long it would be before paying for the ticket. Some way into the … Continue reading National Gallery: the film of the art history lecture →