I have just returned from Australia … and this is good to see today on Amazon.
… And a testament to the pleasure as well as usefulness of using the web, blogs and social networking sites is that I already now have a tweet from someone who has read above, and is pleased too – and thus have found an intriguing and enjoyable blog, Fantastic Reads.
I have been in Australia for part two of the wedding of my-coeditor (and son!). SO we have gone quiet here..but will start posting again over Easter. Indeed Easter Greetings to all who read this blog …
On being awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature a few days ago, Julian Barnes said:
It seems to me that the practice of reading is currently more under threat than the practice of writing. There will always be young writers; will there always be young readers? Our literacy levels are falling, and – disgracefully – public libraries are threatened with closure.
Rosemary Sutcliff‘s The Flower of Adonis reviewed in The Times of London in 1969 (before it was behind an electronic paywall!).Read More »
Rosemary Sutcliff was the subject of a fascinating article entitled ‘Of The Minstrel Kind’ in the excellent Books for Keeps – the children’s book magazine. Margaret Meek was paying tribute to Rosemary as she reached seventy. I was reminded of it when I read The Guardian editorial in praise of Rosemary the other day.
I met Rosemary Sutcliff for the first time thirty years ago in a London hospital where she was recovering from an operation. She was already famous; The Eagle of the Ninth had seen to that. Published in 1954 it had been reprinted four times. It’s probably still the book by which she is best known: an historical novel about the Romans in Britain, the first of a group of stories including The Lantern Bearers which won for her the Carnegie Medal.
Although I was nervous at that first encounter I was much more worried about seeming impertinent. I’d agreed to write about the novels for a Bodley Head Monograph, one of a series of essays about well-known writers for children, to which Rosemary Sutcliff had already contributed a fine example about Rudyard Kipling. It wasn’t so easy in those days to be curious about a famous author, especially one who had had a long childhood illness, who went to school for the first time at nine and learned to read even later, and who finished her compulsory education ‘mercifully early’ at fourteen. Read More »
ROSEMARY SUTCLIFF (1920-92) 