Cornflower Books

Slightly Foxed is celebrating ...

... its 20th birthday with a prize draw in aid of children's reading charity BookTrust.

Tickets - which are available until 16th. September - cost £5 each, and if you follow that link and click on the image on the left side of the page you can scroll through the twenty excellent prizes, some of which are shown above.

    Happy birthday, Slightly Foxed, and belated congratulations to founders Gail and Hazel who earlier this year were awarded MBEs for services to literature.

Oprah meets Abraham

    If you've read or are reading Abraham Verghese's marvellous novel The Covenant of Water (post here) or are familiar with his other books you may like to watch his interview with Oprah. 

    He comes across exactly as I had imagined him from his writing, and the conversation is a lovely one. I believe it's the first in a series.

Friday miscellany: prizes, picnics, rivers...

    Prizes are in the news this week with the winner of the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction announced as Lucy Caldwell's These Days, and Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead winning the Women's Prize for Fiction. Next year will see the first Women's Prize for Non-fiction.

    My friend Sarah Salway has written a lovely essay on literary picnics.

    Oliver Burkeman offers a new way of looking at your TBR pile.

Pineapple Lane

    British publisher Little Toller - whose books have featured often on these pages - is starting a new imprint called Pineapple Lane to publish "dual-language, mother tongue books for children displaced by conflict. Starting with six Ukrainian titles," they say, "our aim is to publish books written, translated and illustrated by authors and artists whose lives have been disrupted by war. Although these titles will be available in bookshops and on our website, our main intention is to distribute copies free to displaced families, to help children stay connected to the language and culture they have left behind. We also want the books to be available free to the communities where displaced families are living within the UK, to enable cultural exchange and understanding in schools, libraries and other grassroots organisations."

    You can read more about it and support the project here.

Happy Christmas!

    Good wishes to all!

Off the Page

    Some time ago I suggested that readers might find interesting episodes from a 1980s/90s television series called Off the Page in which Jenny Brown (the first director of the Edinburgh International Book Festival and now a major literary agent) interviewed well known writers with Scottish connections. The ones I had discovered - and particularly enjoyed - featured Mary Stewart, Rumer Godden, and Dorothy Dunnett, but alas they had vanished from YouTube when I last checked.

    The happy news is that all four series of the programme are available here; you have to sign up (free) to ITV/STV Player, and I don't know whether it's accessible from outwith the UK, but it's worth a try. I shall watch those distinguished ladies again with great pleasure and browse through the other episodes for more gems.

Happy new year!

    Wishing you a happy new year and lots of good reading!

    (Pictured: the books Santa brought me).

Literary stitching

    Such fun to stitch! I changed the bird to a dog and used slightly different blues to those specified but otherwise stuck to the design.

    All materials from Peakside Needleworks.

Inspiration

 

    "Connie visited [artist and designer] Norman Wilkinson at his riverside home Strawberry House, by Chiswick Mall ... As she explored and admired the house, Connie came across something that suddenly jogged her memory: hanging in the sitting-room was a copy of Richard II Holding the Red Rose of Lancaster, the painting that she had seen as a child in The Studio magazine. She explained how she had been so excited by it, the lavish richness combined with austere formality: 'I remember to this day', she wrote, 'the parterre of delicate, exquisite even strange flowers: flaked and ticked pinks, curious foxgloves, panachée roses ...the minute and elaborate detail of the smallest flower.' She told Wilkinson that this painting had inspired in her a creative interest in all kinds of flowers, whether wild, exotic, rare or commonplace. The artist was pleased when he heard that she had liked it so much because, he told her, it was he who had painted it when he was very young. He quoted some lines of Milton from Lycidas which had inspired him:

    Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,

    The tufted crow-toe, and pale jessamine,

    The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,

    The glowing violet,

    The musk rose, and the well-attired woodbine,

    With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,

    And every flower that sad embroidery wears. "

    From The Surprising Life of Constance Spry by Sue Shephard.

    A lovely example of links in the long chain of inspiration, and if you're interested in flowers and the wider social scene in Britain from the 1930s to the '50s I'd recommend the book warmly.

Words and music

   

    Alexandra Harris* is always worth listening to, and recently she was Michael Berkeley's guest on Private Passions, offering a rich and interesting selection of her favourite music.

*Posts on her work are here and here.

Wise words

... from Charlie Mackesy for a new year. Wishing you well!

Wishing you well

    To everyone who is on their own this Christmas, missing family and friends, far from those they love, I send my good wishes.

    Should you need a reminder of the greater web of connections of which you're a part, know that though we may not be with one another in person, our shared love of books and reading brings us together.

    I've been lax in posting of late and I hope I'll find my rhythm again soon, but whether I'm writing here daily or once in a while I appreciate all your visits to these pages, your comments and recommendations, and I especially wanted to say that however you're placed and however you're faring on this and in the coming days, I am thinking of you and wishing you well.

Coming soon ...

    ... a film version of John Preston's novel The Dig (post on it here) about the Sutton Hoo excavation and discoveries in 1939.

    We very much enjoyed the book so shall certainly watch this when it's out next month.

Backgrounds

    The National Trust has made available pictures of some of its interiors specifically for use as Zoom virtual backgrounds. I've plumped for Agatha Christie's library at Greenway (see also) and Vita Sackville-West's tower writing room at Sissinghurst.

    Nothing to do with Zoom now, but if you're in the mood for some soothing background sounds, I've just discovered Mynoise and am enjoying the healing waters of Sunik, a wild day on the Irish coast, and a Japanese garden for starters. What I particularly like about this site is that you can adjust the elements of each soundscape to suit your own taste - for instance, fellow pluviophiles might want to up the rain!

When life gets too fraught ...

... reach for pure romantic escapism.

    So says Dorothy Dunnett, born on this day in 1923 (and thanks to Alice for the reminder). No apologies for again posting this lovely interview by Jenny Brown which puts me in awe of Lady Dunnett's industry, her research skills, and of course her ability as writer and storyteller.

    Should you not know her work there's a short post on The Game of Kings, the first of the Lymond Chronicles, here, but Alice recommends the House of Niccolò series so to mark the writer's birthday I've ordered a copy of Niccolò Rising from Blackwell's.

    For more of the lady herself listen to her Desert Island Discs here.

Overheard

    Two ladies (in a literary festival queue) discussing Jane Austen: "... pages of trivia; I gave up."

Revisiting

 

    I've been listening again to the back catalogue of The Slightly Foxed Podcast, which is always engaging and manages to be both stimulating and restful at the same time.   

      Episodes cover everything from a focus on a particular writer - for example George Mackay Brown, Margaret Drabble, Evelyn Waugh, and Tim Pears* - to more general discussions of reading resolutions, bookshops, travel writing and so on, but whatever the subject they are elegant, eloquent, and entertaining, and I recommend them wholeheartedly.

 

    *His outstanding West Country Trilogy is covered here, here, and here.

Sisters

    See also this post.

An illustrated notebook for dreamers

    I love the look of these new books by Jackie Morris, The Unwinding and its almost wordless pair The Silent Unwinding - "an illustrated notebook for dreamers".

    They will be out tomorrow.

Good advice

    Auction catalogue listing here.