Victoria Hislop: The Return tackles the civil war and its aftermath … Chris Stewart … Ernest Hemingway: Born in 1899, Hemingway was passionate about Spain … Laurie Lee: A lifelong love affair with this country … J G Ballard: Cocaine Nights. ibid.
What an extraordinary journey from a poor cottage in Dorset to being buried twice: once in Westminster Abbey with his coffin held aloft by Rudyard Kipling, the prime minister and once with his heart being buried in Dorset. Thomas Hardy: Fate, Exclusion & Tragedy, Sky Arts 2021
Hardy is irrevocably associated with his creation of the region of Wessex. ibid.
Dominated by a sense of being between classes, he loved London society but never felt part of it. ibid.
He found the cruelty of the world unbearable … But deep in his inner self, Thomas Hardy remained that raging wounded self who chastised the values of the world he inhabited. ibid.
It is worth mentioning, for future reference, that the creative power which bubbles so pleasantly in beginning a new book quiets down after a time, and one goes on more steadily. Doubts creep in. Then one becomes resigned. Determination not to give in, and the sense of an impending shape keep one at it more than anything. Virginia Woolf
If we are to place Hardy among his fellows, we must call him the greatest tragic writer among English novelists. Virginia Woolf
Thomas Hardy: The Wessex Novels are not one book, but many. They cover an immense stretch; inevitably, they are full of imperfections – some are failures, and others exhibit only the wrong side of the marker’s genius. But undoubtedly, when we have submitted ourselves fully to them, when we come to take stock of our impression of the whole, the effect is commanding and satisfactory. We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness of life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul. Virginia Woolf
‘I think you’re allowed to not always know what it means.’ Arena: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Howard Jacobson
‘Ulysses takes place over just one day and night in Dublin.’ ibid. dude
‘Nothing happens. A man walks around Dublin.’ ibid. Salman Rushdie
‘He paradoxically achieves a kind of heroism.’ ibid. dude
When Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922 it changed modern writing for ever. With its arcane references to Homer’s Odyssey and a bewildering variety of styles, it was anti-Catholic, sexually explicit and banned in Britain and America. ibid.
Possessing and threatening the people she knows and loves. For the terrified young Agatha, evil is an ever-lurking presence waiting to be unveiled. Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen I, BBC 2022
A Pioneering radical writer and woman. ibid.
She was the quintessential English woman. ibid. historian
She taught herself aged 5 … Social status fragile. ibid.
It gave her the material to start writing seriously. In between her social engagements in Cairo, Agatha found the time to write her first full-length novel, Snow Upon the Desert. ibid.
This was the room in which Agatha first set eyes on Archibald Chrisie. ibid.
Also about the deadly simplicity of poisons ibid.
First up, Style Court, a country house. ibid.
For Agatha this ex-pat society was fascinating. ibid. II
Operation Husband continued … Agatha threw herself into the war effort … How did it affect her dreams of becoming a writer? ibid.
Agatha’s opinion of the doctors was gradually sinking. ibid.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles: filled with insights and characters she’d stored up over the years. ibid.
The men at Style are a pretty useless lot … The women of Styles are a much more effective lot. ibid.
Agatha turned out four novels in four years. ibid.
A gossip colomnist reported she had had a nervous breakdown. ibid.
December 1926, Agatha Christie has crashed her car … Then she vanishes. ibid.
As the modern world began to take shape it would be that dark side of Gothic which fed on anxiety and alienation – all the bad stuff – that really came into its own. Andrew Graham-Dixon, The Art of Gothic: Britain’s Midnight Hour 2/3: The City and the Soul, BBC 2014
Mary Shelley: a novel about progress and the dangers that come with it that still sends a shiver up the spine today ... Frankenstein. ibid.
According to Blake art was the tree of life, science was the tree of death. ibid.
They were nicknamed Penny Dreadfuls, and they were popular because they tapped into working class fears about the modern city. ibid.
‘These ruined shelters have bred a crowd of foul existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards and coils itself to sleep in maggot numbers where the rain drips in and comes and goes fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint.’ ibid. Dickens’ Bleak House
Frankenstein, made infamous by the classic Boris Karloff films of the 1930s, was written by a 19-year-old girl nearly 200 years ago. Frankenstein: A Modern Myth, Channel 4 2013
Mary Shelley raised larger questions about our own origins and mankind’s place in the universe. ibid.
Mary and her married lover, Percy Shelley, were a scandalous couple. ibid.
‘Every creature has a mate’. ibid. Monster
It’s taken me seven years and it’s perfect – Edmund: A Butler’s Tale. A giant rollercoaster of a novel in four hundred sizzling chapters. A searing indictment of domestic servitude in the eighteenth century with some hot gypsies thrown in. My magnum opus, Baldrick. Blackadder III: Ink & Incapability, Blackadder, BBC 1987
Walter Scott remains one of the world’s most famous writers. The pioneer of a new literary genre – historical fiction. He changed the way the world views Scotland and how Scots view ourselves. In Search of Sir Walter Scott, BBC 2021
We have learned in recent years to translate almost all of political life in terms of conspiracy. And the spy novel, as never before, really, has come into its own. John le Carré
Possessing and threatening the people she knows and loves. For the terrified young Agatha, evil is an ever-lurking presence waiting to be unveiled. Agatha Christie: Lucy Worsley on the Mystery Queen I, BBC 2022
A Pioneering radical writer and woman. ibid.
She was the quintessential English woman. ibid. historian
She taught herself aged 5 … Social status fragile.
It gave her the material to start writing seriously. In between her social engagements in Cairo, Agatha found the time to write her first full-length novel, Snow Upon the Desert. ibid.
This was the room in which Agatha first set eyes on Archibald Chrisie. ibid.
Also about the deadly simplicity of poisons ibid.
First up, Style Court, a country house. ibid.
For Agatha this ex-pat society was fascinating. ibid. II
Operation Husband continued … Agatha threw herself into the war effort … How did it affect her dreams of becoming a writer? ibid.
Agatha’s opinion of the doctors was gradually sinking. ibid.
The Mysterious Affair at Styles: filled with insights and characters she’d stored up over the years. ibid.