Kit Whitfield's Blog, page 6

First sentences: Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

This site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of first sentence posts can be found here. 

Somewhere on my shelves there still rests a slim picture-book from my childhood, adorned on the cover with a familiar scene: the giant Gulliver bewilderingly tied down by a regiment of swarming Lilliputians. The story explained itself to me in simple terms: at first they were very afraid of him but then they let him go; they saw themselves as normal and him as a giant; once the palace caught...

First sentences: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

The site is undergoing revision; a temporary archive of the first sentence analyses can be found here. 

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.

Meet the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald: the slow, graceful cadence, the deadpan preparation that leads beguilingly to the sudden, staggering sucker-punch.

The Great Gatsby is one of the top contenders for the elusive title of 'Great American Novel'. It's a rather Gatsb...

First sentences: Middlemarch by George Eliot

This site is undergoing some revision; a temporary archive of the first sentence pieces can be found here. 

Where do we begin on this one? Middlemarch is one of those books that mounts its beginning slowly: two pages of 'Prelude' that set out its central theme - an infinitesimal proportion of the whole massive tome - before drawing the curtain back on the opening chapter. Dorothea Brooke is our central character in a large and closely-studied cast, and when we first see her, she is carefu...

First sentence posts!

A friend of mine called attention to a very nice review from Tor which made mention of the series of first-sentence analyses I've been doing, and it occurs to me that some people may click over in search of them. My blog in its current form is not brilliantly easy to navigate - I've got someone working on that, actually - but I thought it might be a courtesy to any new viewers to make the first sentence posts a bit easier to find. I'm currently working on the next one, which will be Middlemar...

Mikalogue with corpses

Another old Mikalogue with no pictures:


Kit: Good grief, another dead mouse?

Mika: Mika the Merciless strikes again!

Kit: Honey, what's with all the hunting lately? This is the third mouse this week.

Mika: First dead one. You is bad kitten.

Kit: I think you mean 'Kit', honey.

Mika: No, is bad kitten. Mika the Master brings in mousies to show you how to hunt. And what does you do?

Kit: We rescue the live ones and release them in the garden?

Mika: Exactly. You takes Mika's mousies away. Will nev...

I found an old Mikalogue

Written back in 2008, in fact, which I think I didn't post because I couldn't get an appropriate photo. However, if you can imagine a cat scratching a sofa, you will get the picture:


Kit: Mika, stop clawing that sofa at once!

Mika: Ah good, you hears my summons. Mika wants food.

Kit: Mika, did you claw that sofa just to get my attention?

Mika: Food!

Kit: Mika, that's naughty. It's an expensive piece of furniture, not a bell-pull.

Mika: Mika mewed, you did not immediately do biddin. You is poor ser...

Pretty butterfly

Tidying up my draft archives, I came upon this nice memory, a post I never got round to publishing. So I'll put it out there now, because it's a pleasant thought:



I went to London Zoo last Sunday and visited their new butterfly house, where I made a new friend. It was a butterfly, and it really, really liked me.

I didn't notice anything until I felt warm air blowing over my face, fanned by the butterfly's wings, but when I looked up, there was this big, black and white butterfly, hovering above...

Breaking Bad

Heads up: I will be giving away spoilers for everything I talk about here.


Until recently, I'd given up on American TV series.

The Sopranos was probably what kicked the whole fashion off: the revelation that a televised serial could be a serious work of art, combining the visual and dramatic resources of film with the length and consequent possibilities for suspense and structure of a novel. Like a great movie, only lots more of it? Everyone was excited.

What this ran into, though, was the probl...

Hilary Mantel

Earlier this month, the novelist Hilary Mantel gave a lecture subsquently published in the London Review of Books concerning the nature of royalty, physicality and publicity. This lecture began with the controversial comparison of Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, and Marie Antoinette.

Actually, 'controversial' is perhaps the wrong word. The beginning of her speech has attracted massive and disproportionate opprobrium in which even Prime Minister David Cameron has deemed it necessary to declare that...

Author biographies

The other day I was reading a book by an author unfamiliar to me, and enjoying it rather a lot. The writing was picturesque, the atmosphere was enjoyable, and it was an all-round pleasant experience - so pleasant, in fact, that I decided to look up the author on Amazon to see if they'd written anything else.

As it turned out, they hadn't; this was their first novel. But what they had written, evidently, was their own author biography. Now, there's nothing unusual in that; I wrote my own author...