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.

The gift of a good story from Rosemary Sutcliff | The Eagle of the Ninth | The Boston Globe

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Carlo Rotella writes in the Boston Globe about buying for her children for Christmas “generations-tested” books, including Rosemary Sutcliff’s classic historical novel The Eagle of the Ninth:

… my daughters, being kids, are into Christmas, and I have some other gift-giving obligations, so every year on the Saturday morning before Christmas I come down off the mountain and make a trip downtown to buy presents. My main destination is a bookstore, and as soon as I get there I start feeling better about things. The place is always packed during the days before Christmas with a crowd that radiates excitement and contentment, and that itself is encouraging. People still read, and still regard the giving and receiving of books as something special.

And the old long-haul reliables I remember from childhood, generations-tested books you can read to your kids when they’re little and they can then read for themselves and go on rereading into adolescence and beyond, are still for sale, often in fine new editions: books like Scott O’Dell’s “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, John Dennis Fitzgerald’s Great Brain books, Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn,” J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman adventure “The Eagle of the Ninth,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Charles Portis’s great comic Western “True Grit.”

via The gift of good stories – The Boston Globe.

Illustrator C. Walter Hodges illustrated Rosemary Sutcliff books

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A while back I noted that English illustrator Cyril Walter Hodges, known as C. Walter Hodges (1909-2004),  worked on Rosemary Sutcliff’s early books. Born in Beckenham and educated at Dulwich College and Goldsmiths’ College, he spent most of his career as a freelance illustrator. He wrote:

Rosemary Sutcliff I also liked very much. Her work was very good, though rather sweet, but that was because she was very crippled. As soon as I met her I realised where this romantic sweetness came from. . . . When illustrating her books one realised that one was responsible to her for what one was doing in her name. After I’d illustrated some Sutcliff novels, other artists like Charles Keeping illustrated her work and to my mind, did a much better job. I was very envious of Keeping—I thought he did marvellous drawings. I knew I could never do it like that!

Source:  Mathew Eve’s article  ‘C. Walter Hodges: A Life Illustrating History Children’s Literature’ in the journal Education (Vol. 35, No. 2, June 2004)

A Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide?

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Rosemary Sutcliff was my personal ‘style guide’ when she was alive. (She would have been 90 years old last week). I remember her berating me frequently for a far too ready use of commas, let alone for contorted sentences like this …

For many years since her death in 1992  I have used The Guardian Style Guide. I started to read it today at ‘A’, thinking about entries that might have overlapped with a Rosemary Sutcliff Style Guide. Thus, extracted from many entries under the letter ‘A’ in the Guardian guide:

  • abbeys are, like cathedrals, with capitals: Westminster Abbey, Canterbury Cathedral, etc
  • abscess
  • achilles heel
  • AD, BC: AD goes before the date (AD64), BC goes after (300BC); both go after the century, eg second century AD, fourth century BC
  • adviser not advisor
  • affect/effect: exhortations in the style guide had no effect (noun) on the number of mistakes; the level of mistakes was not affected (verb) by exhortations in the style guide; we hope to effect (verb) a change in this
  • aide-de-camp , plural aides-de-camp (aide is a noun)
  • Read More »

Rosemary Sutcliff Spelling Watch continues!

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I am still trying at every opportunity to nudge people who mis-spell Rosemary Sutcliff (sic) with an E as Sutcliffe (wrong!) to get it right and put it right. Hence today on Twitter:

And hence also I have been in touch today with the producer of the new The Eagle film to alert the film financiers Focus Features that they too have got it wrong on this page about the film!

Rosemary Sutcliff (1920 – 1992) | “Historical writer of genius ” | Born today December 14th

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From the cover of Rosemary Sutcliff's autobiography The Blue Remembered Hills