Rosemary Sutcliff, Alistair Campbell, bagpipes and National Libraries Day fail to connect

Some would say I have been idling away this early Saturday morning in Leicester (UK), by chance finding myself using Twitter to try to connect up Rosemary Sutcliff‘s favourite instrument, a national radio programme transmitting from Leicester at the moment, former Prime Minister’s press spokesperson Alistair Campbell and National Libraries Day. To absolutely no effect at all … read from the bottom to follow the (one way!) conversation.

Author: Anthony Lawton

Chair, Sussex Dolphin, family company which looks after the work of eminent children’s & historical fiction author Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92). Formerly CEO, chair & trustee of various charity, cultural & educational enterprises in UK. View all posts by Anthony Lawton

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twitter @rsutcliff

RT @HeaneyDaily: Then I found a two faced stone On burial ground, God-eyed, sex-mouthed, it’s brain A watery wound. In the wet gap of the y… | 3 hours ago

So @HallieRubenhold & @TweetingPeter I wish we could get more & more people not just #ReadingRosemarySutcliff (plen… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… | 4 hours ago

RT @TrimontiumTrust: A delicate cast bronze bust of #Minerva, Roman goddess of wisdom, poetry, strategic warfare, medicine & music. In Brit… | 9 hours ago

British award-winning best-selling historical/crime novelist Lindsey Davies, is a self-confessed “fan” of Rosemary… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… | 15 hours ago

Fine discovery “amongst the private papers of Thomas” Clarke, budding writer, by London University history Professo… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… | 2 days ago

Spot on! twitter.com/neilphilipmyth… | 2 days ago

Lucy McCaul @LucyMcCaul & Deborah Schauffler @schauffd22 have answered <Rosemary Sutcliff>. But there are many man… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… | 2 days ago

Sobbing, so moving can #ReadingRosemarySutcliff be … at any age maybe but here for the young @annie_fitt. The Mark… twitter.com/i/web/status/1… | 2 days ago

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the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff‘s 1954 children’s classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – “a place where two worlds met without mingling” as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel’s central character, is posted.

Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of “other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling”. This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.

The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff’s unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff’s finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.

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Author: Anthony Lawton

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