I suspect like many people around the world this week, I have been shocked and horrified at the ordeal of Jaycee Lee Dugard, the child abducted at the age of eleven and kept as a virtual prisoner for eighteen years. While the tabloids have had a field...
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The redoubtable Irene Handle John Fortune was once in a TV show with Irene Handl. It involved color separation, a technique then in its infancy, and the enthusiastic young director thought he should explain the process to Miss Handl at the outset. Swathed...
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Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, I must have been 10 or 11 when I was first introduced to this poem by Robert Browning. Rather young maybe, but in those days, we were often treated to such literary gems at the primary school level, and amazingly,...
I was reflecting the other day on the rise and fall of literary reputations. Apart from a bit of vicarious fame via Nicole Kidman and her fabulous prosthetic nose in The Hours, the current standing of Virginia Woolf is by no means as high as it was when...
If I were ever put on the spot and asked to name my favorite books, I would have to say novels. Although as a literature student, I had to study poetry, drama and a variety of literary criticism as well, it was to novels that I returned as a first love....
Please forgive a rather bad pun as my title. I want to draw your attention to the use of serials in literature rather than the merits of Rice Krispies, and how what at first appears to be an outmoded genre in fiction, is in fact, alive and well today....
Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him. Aldous Huxley, Texts and Pretexts , 1932 My father used to say: "The school of experience is the finest school in the world, but its fees are the most expensive."...
"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and the unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward...
No one knows for certain when Shakespeare was born. The fact that he was baptised in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-Upon-Avon during late April, has suggested to many authors that his actual birth day was April 23rd, which is, coincidentally of course,...
Delays on my e-ticket to Saudi Arabia have meant something of a stay of execution, so I'm still here in Cyprus, happily blogging away. In view of news items about religion, most notably the atheist bus in the UK, and the increasingly worrisome polarisation...
