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. Sometimes a consultant.

Oscar-winning cinematographer Anthony Don Mantle speaks of his work on The Eagle film | Sutcliff Discovery of the Day

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One of the many exciting things about the film The Eagle from Rosemary Sutcliff’s historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth is that oscar-winning Anthony Dod Mantle is the cinematographer/director of photography. I have been fortunate to see the film at a preview for cast and crew, and the photography is indeed stunning. (The film will be released in mid-February in the USA and mid-March in the UK – and throughout the world during February and March).

My enthusiasm and confidence in the film is rooted also in the knowledge that The Eagle is directed by Kevin MacDonald (who also directed State of Play, 2009; The Last King of Scotland, 2006; Touching the Void, 2003), and produced by Duncan Kenworthy (who also produced Love Actually, 2003; Notting Hill,199; Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994). Both of them are passionate about Rosemary’s work.

Anthony Dod Mantle has given an interview to VisonARRI, the biannual international magazine of ARRI Rental and Post-production Enterprises who, with partners, supplied key camera equipment for the location filming in Hungary and Scotland. It is an intriguing article, and I am sure very informative for film specialists who understand, but I am struggling:

Interview with cinematographer on The Eagle film

Source: 2010 06 VisionARRI Issue 9

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Warrior Scarlet in critic Julia Eccleshare’s Top Ten Children’s Books

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Rosemary Sutcliff's Warrior Scarlet hardback coverWarrior Scarlet by Rosemary Sutcliff is recommended by Julia Eccleshare, children’s books editor of the Guardian newspaper, as one of her  Top Ten Children’s Books in Babyccino Kids, ‘an international lifestyle website for modern mums’:

… true burning Warrior Scarlet … was the very colour of courage itself. No woman might wear the colour, nor might the Half People who came and went at the Tribe’s call. It was for the Men’s side.

Warrior Scarlet, published in 1957,  is indeed  a wonderful historical novel, illustrated by Charles Keeping. Of the story, Julia Eccleshare writes:

Rosemary Sutcliff had an exceptional ability to bring the past to life; in Warrior Scarlet it is the Bronze Age. Drem needs to kill a wolf to become a man of the tribe. How he first fails and then succeeds in doing so despite his withered arm is a moving story about overcoming adversity.

Julia Eccleshare compiled  1001 Children’s Books: You Must Read Before You Grow Up,

Legacy of Rosemary Sutcliff and The Eagle of the Ninth | Sandcastle or Temple to Mithras?

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Rosemary Sutcliff relished the imagination and creativity of children, as well as readers’ responses to her novels. Writing in Books for Keeps, Brian Alderson, former Children’s Books Editor of The Times, recalled an anecdote which dates from some time after the publication of The Eagle of the Ninth in 1954. Rosemary recounted to a ‘bevy of librarians’:

‘That’s not a sand-castle,’ said the busy child on the beach, ‘I’m building a temple to Mithras’!

He commented that

In all probability the temple-builder’s enthusiasm for the work came from hearing its famed serialisation on ‘Children’s Hour’ but (perhaps unlike television serials) the wireless version sent listeners straight back to the book to get the author’s full-dress narrative to go with the spoken one.

Source: Classics in Short No.80

Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff

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Blue Remembered Hills is Rosemary Sutcliff’s autobiography, covering the period until she was first published. Avid reader Lyn commented on her blog earlier this year:

It’s a beautifully written story of a lonely child crippled by juvenile arthritis who nevertheless didn’t feel she had had a deprived life. The tone of the book is one of gratitude for life’s blessings & joy at the natural world, her friends, her dogs & her love for her parents.

A customer and Amazon reviewer – intriguingly at one of the Universities in the town where I write this – wrote over ten years ago:  Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff favourite Rudyard Kipling born 30th December

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Rosemary Sutcliff loved the work of Rudyard Kipling. Indeed, she wrote a monograph about him. Today (30th December) was his birthday (in 1865). She herself wrote in 1965 (I now realise perhaps to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth) in The Kipling Journal of the Kipling Society:

… other people write about things from the outside in, but Kipling writes about them from the inside out … I was something under six when my mother first read The Jungle Books to me. They were my first introduction to Kipling, and perhaps for that reason, they have an especial potency for me. From the first, I had an extraordinary sense of familiarity in the jungle; I was not discovering a new world but returning to a world I knew; and the closest contact I ever made with a ‘Story book Character’, I made with Bagheera, the black panther with the voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree and the little bald spot that told of a collar, under his chin.