Tag: http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post
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A Right Royal Knit-Wit (Saturday Snapshot)
And now for something completely different for this week’s Saturday Snapshot… a Not The Jubilee Knitted Queen! I spotted the pattern in Fiona Goble’s Knit Your Own Royal Wedding (published last year by Ivy Press) and decided she would be perfect as Alan Bennett’s book-loving monarch in The Uncommon Reader, but I altered her a…
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Do You Clean Vegetables With Soap?
Today’s novel was described as ‘a real oddity’ and ‘a book unlike any other’ when it was discussed on the Radio 4’s ‘A Good Read’. House-Bound, by Winifred Peck, (published by Persephone), is the second in my loosely-themed ‘housework’ quartet. The time is 1941, the place is Edinburgh, and middle-class, middle-aged Rose Fairlaw, unable to…
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Discovering Miss Read
Following the death of Miss Read (the nom de plume of Dora Saint) earlier this year, I realised I had never read any of her work so, deciding to remedy the situation, I headed for the library where I found Changes at Fairacre and The Year at Thrush Green. And what did I think? Well,…
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Do You Have An Odd Book Shelf? (Ex Libris, Anne Fadiman)
The late-great Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan, aka Myles na Gopaleen) would, I feel have approved wholeheartedly of Anne Fadiman and her family. The idiosyncratic exponent of the art of Professional Book Handling (http://chriscross-thebooktrunk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/i-want-to-be-book-handler.html) would have been delighted by their belief that books are there to be read and enjoyed, and that it is quite…
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What a Blessing it is to Love Books – and Gardens
The cover on my 1992 Virago editionbears a detail from Vase aux Anemones, 1942, by Marevn (Maria Morobieff) This week I have been busy in the garden, trying to restore some kind of order by pulling up weeds, which always reminds me of Persephone, because in the version of the myth I read as a…
The Book Trunk 