Telling Stories With Words and Pictures
How literature and the arts can bring the past to life
What does the experience of a relatively obscure French nobleman and soldier have to do with our reaction to the Covid 19 crisis? As we all begin to feel the effects of lockdown and social distancing, the answer is more than you think. In 1790, Xavier de Maistre (1763-1852), an exiled French aristocrat, was in …
Working class boy makes good, whilst struggling with his emotional development, could be a good way of describing the novels written by Stan Barstow about Vic Brown. The three books in the trilogy are A Kind of Loving (1960), The Watchers on the Shore (1966), and The Right True End (1976). Vic was the child of working-class …
This week’s book review is of British 1950’s sci-fi novel The Midwich Cuckoos. I came across a battered 1970’s edition of John Wyndham’s novel in the Ryedale Dog Rescue charity shop in March. I don’t usually read sci-fi, but I thought I’d give The Midwich Cuckoos a go. Sometimes the best reads happen by chance. The premise of the …
The Stone Book Quartet are four separate but linked short stories, written by Alan Garner. The stories are a fictionalised account of four generations of the author’s family, including Garner himself. They are set in North East Cheshire, particularly the area round Alderley Edge, where Garner and his family originate from. Each of the stories …