Category: General

Trawling the internet, researching libraries and databases, and occasionally from material sent to me, I discover things I did not know much about, or indeed at all! There can be more than one Discovery of the Day.

Children ‘should read 50 books a year’, including Rosemary Sutcliff says Michael Gove

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I have just caught up with the Education Secretary’s proposition that all pupils should read 50 books a year. I am  not sure what I think about the overall proposition. I fear I do not fully read 50 books a year … But at least Michael Gove does include Rosemary Sutcliff on his list of authors to be studied by pupils of all ages ! In addition to Rosemary, he also spoke of :  JK Rowling, CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, Kenneth Grahame,  Alan Garner and Ursula Le Guin. Any views both about the proposition, and about the 50?

At the Rosemary Sutcliff Facebook page Harriet Connides is refreshingly direct and very clear what she thinks of Mr Gove and his suggestion …

Guardian Cartoon on Michael Gove's 50 book proposition

On curating the material for this blog!

Anthony Lawton6 Comments

This is not intended to be a ‘live blog’! But an article today in the MediaGuardian set me thinking about this blog-based website. For when I started it, and especially as I developed it in the last 12 months, I had in mind what in the article is called ‘curating’ material. That is, as I understand it, collecting material from around the web and elsewhere, and organising it into a collection – perhaps on occasion with commentary – that people would find engaging, enthusing, and educational as well as informative.  I also hoped that people who loved Rosemary’s work might in a very loose sense congregate here, and talk of their experiences of her work.

I realise that in recent months I have been increasingly diverted by accumulating material related to the film The Eagle, and also have been merely adding items about Rosemary that I find or am alerted to. Notions of curating have rather gone out the window. When the excitements of the film coming out, first in the US, then here and elsewhere, have died down I have in mind turning to some weeding and curating (Blog as garden? Blog as museum? Blog as art show?). All advice gratefully received …

The Eagle | Review in The Independent on Sunday

Anthony Lawton3 Comments

There have been a few films lately about Roman soldiers caught behind enemy lines in ancient Britain (Centurion, The Last Legion, King Arthur), but none of them comes close to Kevin Macdonald’s The Eagle – for atmosphere and spectacle, at least. Like the same director’s Touching the Void, it’s about two men being battered by nature at its most unforgiving, and, like The Last King of Scotland, it has someone venturing far out of his depth in an exotic foreign land.

Macdonald’s best idea is to show Channing Tatum and his fellow Romans as modern men. Instead of addressing each other with quasi-Shakespearean formality, as movie Romans are wont to do, they chat in American accents (although Tatum sometimes has a stab at an English one), usually complaining about the state of the latrines. They may be the bad guys from a British perspective, but Macdonald lets us see them as homesick infantry stationed in a foggy wilderness surrounded by tattooed hostiles. And as Tatum travels north of Hadrian’s Wall in search of the golden standard his father lost in battle 20 years earlier, both the locals and the terrain get stranger and scarier. The Eagle is inspired by Apocalypse Now as much as it is by Spartacus.

The story, though, isn’t as impressive as the world Macdonald has created. It may be rip-roaring in the source novel, Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth, but on screen the quest becomes a picturesque though hardly urgent montage of hiking and horse-riding through the Highlands. You can see why it’s important to Tatum to retrieve the standard, but the audience is more likely to side with his slave, Jamie Bell, when he remarks that it’s just a hunk of metal, and that slaughtering Britons is nothing to be proud of, anyway. By the same token, it’s hard to accept these two historic enemies as fast friends. Most Roman centurions in this sub-genre tend to go native, but Tatum is a true-blue Pict-butchering imperialist to the end.

Author Ben Kane notes that Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle has landed (finally)

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Hardback cover of Ben Kane's The Silver EagleBen Kane could not resist commenting on his website on Friday 25th March, with apologies to Jack Higgins, that “The Eagle had landed”.

Well, today’s the day, folks, when the film version of our dearly beloved book, recently renamed The Eagle, hits cinema screens all over the UK. Directed by Kevin McDonald of The Last King of Scotland, it was filmed in the Scottish Highlands and parts of eastern Europe.  The reviews are flooding in thick and fast on Rosemary Sutcliff’s site, and they mostly seem good. One reader has posted here (on my site)  that it’s really great too. I find my hopes rising… Sadly, I won’t get to see it until next week. I can’t wait!

I  am intrigued to learn what Ben, as well as all who visit this site, think of the film as well as Rosemary’s many different books. Meanwhile, I note that actually The Eagle of the Ninth has not been “renamed The Eagle”; it is just that the version of the paperback designed to ‘tie-in’ with the film cleverly uses both titles!

Ben Kane’s own novel The Silver Eagle was named in homage to Rosemary, referring to both The Eagle of the Ninth and to The Silver Branch. Ben is an acclaimed author of Roman novels, who recently  posted on his own website an homage to Rosemary Sutcliff which concludes:

I wasn’t made aware of quite how deep The Eagle of the Ninth had sent roots into my mind until, at the age of 31 and more than twenty years after I’d read the book, I first set my eyes on the incredible structure that is Hadrian’s Wall.

Seeing the wall silhouetted along the skyline sent an electric shock down my spine. Almost at the same time, my love of Rome was rekindled, and I decided on the spot to write a novel about Roman soldiers serving on the wall. While that novel didn’t quite make the cut, my next one did. Since then I haven’t stopped writing, or spreading the word about the wonderfully written masterpiece that is The Eagle of the Ninth.
Source: A homage to Rosemary Sutcliff – Ben Kane.

SEE IT! says MaryAnn Johanson’s review of The Eagle

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One US reviewer, MaryAnn Johanson, was “not looking forward with a great deal of anticipation to seeing lunkhead Channing Tatum as a soldier in Roman-era Britain”. However she writes at the start of her review “Color me surprised and impressed”! She writes that The Eagle film from Rosemary Sutcliff‘s novel The Eagle of the Ninth is

… a film that clearly intends to ensure Hollywood cheese is the last thing that comes to mind … and it succeeds admirably, too. Working from the young-adult novel by Rosemary Sutcliff,  director Kevin Macdonald and screenwriter Jeremy Brock have crafted an earnest period action drama that stubbornly clings to old-fashioned craftsmanship in character and storytelling … a radical notion at the moment

MaryAnn Johanson thinks “Channing Tatum acquits himself admirably ” as Marcus, a “newly minted Roman soldier”, and that:

.. it’s not with any cruelty or spite that we are presented with the subtle lessons as Marcus gets in perspective: that even an enemy can be honourable, that civilisation is in the eye of the beholder. For as Marcus journeys into darkest Scotland in search of the eagle, and his family’s reputation – accompanied by Esca, a native slave who despises everything Marcus stands for – he gets a smackdown to his arrogance and his ignorance. Vital to the film’s own sense of honour, however, is that Marcus, though he gets a taste of humility and a slightly wider worldview, is never required to be a traitor to his own ideals. It’s a nicely nuanced outlook for a deceptively simple story to take.

Source: The Eagle (review) | MaryAnn Johanson’s FlickFilosopher.com.