I think we underrate Austen’s wit and irony. However, it’s a good idea to read Pride and Prejudice twice (and perhaps her other novels too) to capture its full flavour, something PD James has done with great flair.
Category: Writing and Publishing
Poetry, poetry everywhere …..
Dedicated to Coleridge: (Tomorrow, October 3rd is National Poetry Day in the United Kingdom.) Why must we have poetry Morning, noon and night? A media game? For shame - Verse to schedule can't be right! Inspiration is expected. True Art shall have its way. Dawn breaks. The Artist wakes, Says "I'll write a poem today!" …
“I never read a book before reviewing it.”
Reflections on books, reviews and the Classics Club Literary historians attribute the quotation in my title to Sydney Smith, an English cleric, writer and humorist who lived around the turn of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries. Known for his many witticisms, Smith, who once described Scotland as the knuckle-end of England, that land of Calvin, …
Confession Time
Readers of my recent blogs may have noticed me dropping a name, nothing really to do with the books I was reviewing. So, just in case you're wondering, I'll drop it again - Alexandre Dumas - one of the greatest storytellers who ever lived. And for me, as a devotee of historical fiction, he is …
Vampires in the Twilight
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 4 What an explosion it has been! In the past, film makers drew their ideas from literature. And of course they still do. However, it appears that, in the 21st Century, cinema and television have also been a trigger for the proliferation of novels in which teeth, blood …
The Vampire Revolution
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 3 While Hollywood was exploiting the talents of Lon Chaney Jr, Boris Karloff and others, the British film business had not been idle. Hammer Film Productions, who branched out into horror movies in the mid-1950s, was giving - if not glamour stardom - at least a successful villainous …
Romancing the Undead
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 2 Like Stoker's Dracula, Sheridan le Fanu's Carmilla was seized upon by the public as new and bold. It helped boost le Fanu's image as a master of the gothic and of the Victorian ghost story. For all that, le Fanu's work, and Carmilla in particular, has not …
One Bite Too Many
The Vampire in Literature and Cinema Part 1 Vampires have long been popular in books and film. So have elves, wizards, witches, werewolves, zombies and Doppelgänger, not to mention gods, demi-gods, devils and angels. They are the elements of which fantasies are made. Long before a fantasy genre existed (or indeed the movie industry), they …
Magda Green Books 