Anna Beer's Blog, page 4
October 9, 2007
Blackadder was only half right about Ralegh
Queen Elizabeth's dandyish pet explorer was also a poet of beautiful, mysterious angst.
A hero with a dark side ... the statue of Sir Walter Ralegh outside the UK's Ministry of Defence. Photograph: Martin Godwin
On Radio 4 this summer, Andrew Marr has been keen to elucidate Englishness by looking at individually famous English people. One week it was Miss Marple, the next it was Sir Walter Ralegh (which, by the way, is the spelling of his surname he eventually plumped for after trying out a...
May 14, 2007
When characters breathe their last
The final words a character speaks are often their most compelling. What are your favourites?
I have been thoroughly enjoying this site's discussion of great opening lines. Thinking about first lines made me think about great closing lines - and then about the great "last words" of fictional characters.
Which got me thinking about tragedy, and reminded me why I left the execrable Stratford production of King Lear at the interval. I don't usually walk out on plays, and I have nothing against
March 28, 2007
Be a book borrower - but beware a lender being
Much as being lent good books is great, you take a big risk when you let your own out of your sight.
Watch out who gets their hands on your library
Mr Heber, a Victorian chap, claimed that a gentleman needs at least three copies of each book: a show copy for one's country house, a copy for one's own use and reference, and a third "at the service of his friends". I am not a gentleman, I don't have a country house, and I don't have triplicate copies of every book I own, but Mr Heber has a...
March 15, 2007
Crying shame: the books that make me weep
Dickens at his most mawkish, Joanne Harris at her purplest - the books that get me blubbing are sad indeed.
God bless us, one and all! The Muppets' take on Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit. Photograph: Kobal
One of the many reasons that I would not last long in a reading group is that I get far too emotionally involved in the books I read. In fact, I am prone to cry at the slightest provocation. I am not just talking about the kind of tears most people would shed on reading, say, King Lear or Toni...
January 15, 2007
West is best
Is Rebecca West's account of her journey through the former Yugoslavia the greatest travel book ever written?
I am rereading Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: a Journey through Yugoslavia. Despite being only up to Macedonia and page 688 (of 1150), I do not want it to end. West may be absolutely of her time (the book was published in 1942, and is a desperate cry for liberal, humanist values at a time when those values were being annihilated), and Black Lamb may be an unashamed love...
January 12, 2007
Read it and weep
Just imagine you are a woman in your 30s, and the father of your three young children decides that he needs some space. Or perhaps you are a woman in your 50s, whose husband feels that he will be better able to face the rigours of middle age with a 25-year-old girl at his side. Or imagine for a moment you are 15, there's this boy you really, really like, but suddenly he has stopped returning your text messages and now he even appears to have blocked you on MSN...
What book does a thinking, feeling (if extremely bitter) woman pick up at this critical moment? I am quite clear about the books one throws into a bag when summoned to hospital - Jane Austen and Douglas Adams remain, for me, the best antidotes to fear, pain and hospital food. And I am also quite clear on the practical steps one can take when one is dumped (for me, a bottle of red wine and, when enough time has passed, rearranging the furniture). But what does a woman read - first, to restore one's faith in oneself, and, second, to restore one's faith in the value of relationships... or better still to make them gloriously irrelevant?
Continue reading...November 27, 2006
Milton amid the canapés
At a loss for something to do on New Year's Eve? Tired of the same old canapés and small talk, as you watch the clock tick down to midnight? How about an all-night reading of Paradise Lost.
Yes, I am serious. John Mullan in Saturday's Guardian may have relished the pleasures of cruising through the annotations to John Milton's great poem, but Paradise Lost is not just for private, cerebral consumption.
Continue reading...
