It’s Women in Translation month, so here is my favourite author in translation: the magnificent, audacious, riotously insouciant Colette. I posted a review of her novella Julie de Carneilhan a year ago. Here are two more. Gigi (1944) is the story of a trainee teenage prostitute in the belle époque who avoids joining this family … Continue reading Women in Translation: Colette’s Gigi, and The Cat
Tag: fast cars
Bad drugs and fast cars: Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise
Getting our knees wet in the sea of this mini-series on great detective classics, this podcast scripts catch-up from Why I Really Like This Book is about that perceptive novel about the advertising industry by Dorothy L Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933). This is a novel about office lives and 1930s high society, with a darkness underneath that comes from … Continue reading Bad drugs and fast cars: Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise
Fast cars and the open road: Reading speed in Dornford Yates
Brief toot on my academic trumpet here: I had another article published, on how the intensely middlebrow and thriller / comedy novelist Dornford Yates used techniques and ideas from avant garde thinking when writing about fast cars, car chases, driving at speed, and the thrill of speed on the open road (clue: it's all from Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto). You … Continue reading Fast cars and the open road: Reading speed in Dornford Yates
Rampaging in the Pyrenees: Dornford Yates’s Adèle and Co.
Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up is Y, and today’s author’s name really begins with M, but his pen-name, by which he was made famous from the 1920s, begins with Y. Dornford Yates was the pseudonym of Cecil William Mercer, and he was famous for two kinds of fiction. The first … Continue reading Rampaging in the Pyrenees: Dornford Yates’s Adèle and Co.
Kate Macdonald 