07 Saturday Jul 2018
I first came across Tom o’Bedlam via Kipling – in Stalky & Co., when Beetle (or was it M’Turk?) copies in his notebook the eerie and fantastical last verse:
With a host of furious fancies
Whereof I am commander,
With a burning spear and a horse of air,
To the wilderness I wander.
By a knight of ghosts and shadows
I summoned am to tourney
Ten leagues beyond the wide world’s end:
Methinks it is no journey.
08 Wednesday Feb 2017
Tags
christopher marlowe, George Bernard Shaw, Léon Daudet, Nat Cassidy, Patricia Finney, Robert Brustein, William Shakespeare
It strikes me how often fiction and theatre portray Will Shakespeare in the act of absorbing his materials rather than creating them.
No, really: the average fictional Shakespeare spends half his life jotting down, more or less metaphorically, everything he hears… Continue reading
25 Thursday Jun 2015
Tags
Edward Rutherford, Georgette Heyer, Josephine Tey, Muriel Bradbrook, p. f. chisholm, Patricia Finney, Rafael Sabatini, Reading vacation
Here we go again. Summer is back, and I am thinking about a Reading Week. As usual, I still don’t know whether I’ll manage it: work is rather intense, the revision is only a week away, and I have a short play to write… There is no question of going anywhere – but that’s all right if only I can get myself a week of blissful, uninterrupted reading. Why, at a pinch, even half a week would do very well.
When? No idea. We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’m hoarding books like there is no tomorrow. Let us see… Continue reading
