14 Saturday Oct 2017
Tags
Or at least Charles Arrowby – the protagonist and narrator of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Sea, The Sea. And Charles, a retired director, playwright, and sometime actor, has a lot to say about the theatre… Continue reading
07 Saturday Oct 2017
Posted in Books
I’ve been thinking, it’s high time I went back to the Saturday Tidbits – as promised by the blackboard here on the left… so, here we go: a Saturday Tidbit.
Did you that know you can go to Paris and stay for free at Shakespeare and Company, the famous Rive Gauche bookshop, in exchange for a few hours of work and reading? Continue reading
17 Thursday Aug 2017
Posted in Books
You know how I’m forever bemoaning the Reading Weeks I never get?
Well, this year, thanks to a longer rehearsals break, I’ve decided that things can take care of themselves for a few days while I read a little for fun and pleasure… Continue reading
15 Saturday Jul 2017
Tags
#Swashathon, Alan Breck Stewart, David McCallum, Iain Glen, Kidnapped, Michael Caine, Movies Silently, Peter Finch, R. L. Stevenson, Robert Cain
Hooray: the #Swashathon, Movies Silently’s “blogathon of swashbuckling adventure“, is back! Four days of cloaks and daggers, swords and sails, fops (or not) and farthingales, derring-do and damsels not-quite-in-distress… Does it get more fun than that?
Let’s get dancing, then – and discuss my favourite swashbuckler of all times: Stevenson’s Alan Breck Stewart. Alan is a wonderful character – the most perfect one in English literature, according to Henry James, no less – but how has he fared on the screen? Ah now, this is a tricky question – so be warned: it’s going to be a long, long post. Continue reading
13 Thursday Jul 2017
Posted in Books
Tags
Great Siege of Malta, historical novel, Mattias Tannhauser, Omnicompetent Hero, Pet peeves, The Religion, Tim Willocks
On the plane to Malta, I began reading Tim Willocks’ The Religion, one of a few Siege-themed novels I’d purchased in view of the journey. I rather liked the prologue, and my first glimpse of Grand Master La Valette and Sir Oliver Starkey, and the preparations for the siege.
If I was tempted to raise an eyebrow at La Valette’s life-or-death insistence that they must have Tannhauser at all costs… well, he is the hero, after all, and he’s been a Janissary for part of his life – so he must be in the thick of things, and there is some sort of reason for it, right? Continue reading
08 Thursday Jun 2017
Tags
christopher marlowe, Doomed characters, Hanno Buddenbrook, Johnny Nolan, Konradin von Hohenfels, names
I remember once shopping for Sicilian wine, and choosing a bottle of Grecale for no better reason than the beautiful name. If I were being written, I thought, this wouldn’t bode well for my life expectancy… Continue reading
20 Thursday Apr 2017
Posted in Books
I’d never read anything by William Palmer – unti I got to review his novel The Devil Is White for the Historical Novel Review, some time ago.
And it was a surprise.
The story begins in 1792 England, with a bunch of entusiasts bent on founding their own colonial utopia on an island off the Western coast of Africa – a free, slaveless and democratic utopia, based on hard work, merit and honest interaction with the coastal tribes.
True, the coastal tribes happily thrive on the slave trade – but only for lack of proper morals, a state of things the settlers’ good example and conversion to Christianism are bound to change… Continue reading
23 Thursday Mar 2017
Once upon a time I came across an interview or an article – I wish I could remember – in which a historical novelist gleefully told about placing in his latest novel’s prologue a handful of elements that could easily pass for anachronisms. He gleefully anticipated the mails, weblogs and reviews pointing out his “blunders”, and the joys of answering back that, in fact, a lack of written record for some thing before a certain date could not be taken as proof that the same thing did not exist… Continue reading
09 Thursday Mar 2017
Posted in Books
I remember reading once that George Eliot wanted everything in Daniel Deronda “to be connected to everything else”.
Well, this is exactly what Titian’s Boatman feels like.
It may not look like it at first, when the reader is introduced to several characters in various places and various times. There is the eponymous boatman, plying his trade in a plague-ridden Venice in 1576, ferrying back and forth Titian’s last surviving son and plucky courtesan Tullia Buffo. Then, in present day London, there are actor Terry Jardine and Italian director Ludovico Zabarella, brought together by Shakespeare and personal loss. Lastly, there’s Cuban maid Aurora, carrying the weight of childhood trauma and widowhood – and finding consolation in a painting… Continue reading
24 Tuesday Jan 2017
You know, I should be in London right now… and I am not.
Tomorrow my friend Victoria Blake launches her new historical novel, Titian’s Boatman, and I should have been there… but the deities of the flu decided otherwise, and I’m moping at home instead, and whining to anyone within earshot that I should be in London, London, London… Continue reading
