Catherine Meyrick's Blog, page 41

One Minute Book Review – Shakespeare’s Restless World by Neil MacGregor

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In 2012 Neil MacGregor, then Director of the British Museum, gave a series of fifteen-minute talks on Radio 4 called Shakespeare’s Restless World which took twenty objects from the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period and examined them in detail, setting them not only in their historical setting, but also in that of Shakespeare’s plays.

This book, published in 2015, can be seen as a companion to the radio series. Each chapter looks at an object from one of MacGregor’s talks. He explains th...

Cubism

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grandchild sister
neighbour   aunt
wife  and  friend sempstress tutor cleaner  gardener storyteller    cook protector     guide do this come here do that     don’t go quickly       please hold      me    tight life    sliced diced     cut and  cubed minutes  march in   hours   days weeks    months year   by     year life’s     facets cubes  blocks and polygons in dreaming moments edges melt and blur flowing stretching breathing  deeply humming      singing dancing twirling l...

One Minute Book Review – Into the Water by Paula Hawkins

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Into the Water opens with a disturbing scene – a young woman is bound by two or more men and drowned in icy water. There is no sense given of when this happened or who she is other than her name, Libby. So, from the very beginning there is an undercurrent of danger. The novel proper begins in the town of Beckford in Northumberland where the death of Nel Abbott has just occurred. Nel was a writer researching the women who have, over the centuries, died in the Drowning Pool, a bend in the rive...

One Minute Book Review – The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street by Charles Nicholl

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In 1612 William Shakespeare gave evidence in a case at the Court of Requests brought by Stephen Belott against the tire-maker, Christopher Mountjoy who was his father-in-law and with whom he had served an apprenticeship. Belott was suing Mountjoy for failure to pay in full the dowry promised when Belott had married Mountjoy’s daughter Mary in 1604. During the years 1603 to 1605 Shakespeare had lodged with the Mountjoys and had, at the behest of Mountjoy’s wife Marie, acted as a go-between pr...

2017 – A Year of Reading

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While I have done reasonable well this year, managing to read fifty books, I haven’t yet achieved my goal of a book a week. Once again, the fiction is mainly historical with a few classic works as well as a handful of books of poetry and of non-fiction.

My top reads for the year are
The Muse by Jessie Burton
The Wild Air by Rebecca Mascull
Mothering Sunday : A Romance by Graham Swift
Birdcage Walk by Helen Dunmore
Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant
Wintercombe by Pamela Belle
All are historical a...