Note for 20th-century linguistics historians: in his introduction to this issue of Penguin New Writing John Lehmann remarks on the number of neologisms that have occurred in the tiny lifetime of the magazine. ‘The last ten years have been an express formative period in the English language, new words, new expressions have become acclimatized in … Continue reading Penguin New Writing 36: into 1949
The great English-Australian novelist Elizabeth von Arnim is the star of this Really Like This Book podcast series scripts catch-up. Her real name of Mary Annette Beauchamp was forgotten as soon as she married a Prussian count, and became doubly lost when she had her first best-seller with her first novel, Elizabeth’s German Garden, in 1898. This was … Continue reading Violent objections to the outdoor life: Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Caravaners
I’ve read two biographies of Naomi Mitchison in the past week (working up some conference papers). Both lean very heavily on Mitchison's published memoirs, and note that her record of her interwar life, You May Well Ask (1979), is deliberately vague about some important matters. Jill Benton’s Naomi Mitchison. A Biography (1990) is both rather too personal and unsettlingly … Continue reading The two biographies of Naomi Mitchison
The South African novelist Laurens Van der Post is author V in the Really Like This Book podcast series scripts catch-up, and he is an awkward writer. He used to be very famous, but after his death in 1996, and after a detailed biography that revealed him to have been a liar and a fantasist … Continue reading Laurens Van der Post and A Story Like The Wind
Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series A-Z is I, and I have moved out of fiction, and to the intriguing biography by Molly Izzard, of the Middle Eastern traveller and woman of letters, Freya Stark. Stark made her name in the 1930s as the first western woman to travel in some very remote … Continue reading Unpicking a life of glamour: Molly Izzard’s Freya Stark
The title is the second-best thing about The Other Log of Phileas Fogg. How can you resist the suggestion that Phileas Fogg kept an alternative log of his trip Around the World in Eighty Days? What else could have happened that the world didn’t know? The first best thing about the novel is the answer: … Continue reading Jules Verne meets Conan Doyle with aliens: Philip José Farmer’s The Other Log of Phileas Fogg
This is another repost from the vaults of Why I Really Like This Book, a round-up of three books I reread addictively all through my childhood and early twenties. You can also listen to the original podcast on Susan Coolidge and the What Katy Did books (1872, 1873, 1886) The origins of my love of 19th-century fiction lie in … Continue reading What Katy Did, Next, and At School
