Category: Radio, TV, Film, Video, Internet

Hunting interactive online sites about Romans and Roman Britain | Anyone know any good ones?

Anthony Lawton5 Comments

Over at the Rosemary Sutcliff page on Facebook which is connected with this site, Danielle Vaughan writes:

I am reading The Silver Branch to my 12 year old. We read The Eagle (of the Ninth) last September  and he said it was his fave read of the year. However, I fear his sudden hormonal growth is preventing his full attention for this book … we are persevering, however, at the moment

She wonders (as I do now)  if if there are supplementary online roman interactive sites they could also “look at to ‘set the scene’ as it were “. Are there? Can anyone help? Please share this elsewhere so we can see if the much vaunted collective of the cloud can help!

Freaked out for years by ghost legionaries in Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Eagle of the Ninth

Anthony Lawton1 Comment

James Dunlop has commented on another post:

My 1977 copy of The Eagle of the Ninth (by Rosemary Sutcliff) still has the entry from the Radio Times (with a photo of Anthony Higgins as Marcus … ) glued inside the front cover. I’ve also got a page torn out of the Radio Times lurking somewhere – I was nine at the time and it made a really big impression on me. I’m now an archaeologist who really doesn’t have much time for Romans, but when I re-read The Eagle of the Ninth last year, I still found Marcus a really lovely – and yet at the same time convincingly Roman – character.

Oh, and I remember there was that bit with the dream where the ghost legionaries turned round and had skulls instead of faces. That stayed with me for YEARS!! I was freaked out by skeletons for decades afterwards (though I’ve grown out of that little foible now, thank goodness!)

Wonderful! Rosemary Sutcliff’s Desert Island Discs programme from 1983 now on BBC website

Anthony Lawton4 Comments

Do you want to hear what Rosemary Sutcliff sounded like, as well as some of her observations about her life and writing?The BBC has now made available the original recording of Rosemary Sutcliff on Desert Island Discs with Roy Plumley  from October 1st, 1983. She talks about her career, about the difficulties caused by arthritis since she was a child and she chooses the eight records that she would take to the mythical island. They were:

  • Antonin Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 in E minor ‘From the New World’
  • Dykes/Whiting: Eternal Father Strong To Save
  • Claude Debussy: Prélude à l’après midi d’un faune
  • Richard Tauber: We’ll Gather Lilacs
  • John D. Burgess: The Flowers Of The Forest
  • Dylan Thomas: Under Milk Wood
  • Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending
  • Johann Sebastian Bach: Cantata No. 147: Herz und mund und Tat und Leben

Mind you, Charlotte Higgins, Chief Arts Writer of The Guardian, commented in a tweet: