angelayoung's reviews
334 reviews

This is a beautiful story (and by such a young author). It is spellbinding as all the best stories are and there is a story, an intriguing story, within the story which always binds me to a book.

This collection of poetry - bought after reading a review in the TLS that captured my imagination although I can't now remember what it was that did it! - is remarkable for the way each poem stays in my memory not so much for the exact words MR Peacocke uses but for the mysterious way her poems create an atmosphere in my mind (and in my heart) that makes me wonder what happened next, or what happened before, or what it is between the lines of the poems that she means and that I've only half-grasped. I have taken to reading a poem aloud to myself every day (a wise piece of advice gleaned from Maggie Hamand's Creative Writing for Dummies, http://www.goodreads.com/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=creative+writing+for+dummies) but I'm sure the poems from this collection will resonate in my mind and in my heart long after I've stopped reading one of them each day.

I never knew I could become so lost in a book that wasn't a novel (I read more fiction than any other kind of book). But then this is a book about the man who invented the novel and what a book it is. Subtly Burge shows how Dante's life informed his greatest work, the Divine Comedy; how little he really knew Beatrice and how little time he spent with his actual wife; how the former haunted him and the latter apparently did not. And there is gentle humour in this book, for instance, when Burge describes how there is only one passage in all the works of Dante 'Which bring us close to the woman whom he calls Beatrice. It does not supply details about her: we will never know the colour of her eyes or hair, let alone anything about the way she wore her hat or the way she sang off key ... .' Read on, I urge you.

This is a brave brave book. Angela Douglas writes about her life and work and her helpless love for a 'very married man'. When she suggested to Kenneth More (the 'very married man', and one of Britain's best-loved actors) that she might write it, he said, 'Go for it darling! Go for it!' He also suggested the opening sentence: 'There were twenty-six years and two world wars between us.' He agreed that she should write about finding her feet as an actress, 'About us meeting and falling in love,' and about, 'Our life together, the good and the bad bits.' And, most poignantly, 'About the illness, and how it is for us now.' All brave subjects to write about for a woman whose life with her man was led, for much of their time together, in public.

Douglas writes with such honesty, humour and passion that I read the book in two days. Not only is she full of insight, and witty self-deprecation, about love and its joys and difficulties, she's also full of kindness about More's final illness and funny, wise and brave about the whole business of living both with another human being, and with ourselves.

It's a supremely human book.

This edition (the book was first published in 1983), brings Angela's story up to date and includes poignant descriptions of her grief when More died.

I urge you to read it.

I read about this extraordinarily beautiful, touching, poignant, funny, sad, life-affirming, illuminating, comforting and grief-understanding collection of poems by Gina Claye http://www.writersservices.com/wbs/books/ginaclaye.htm on dovegreyreader’s blog here, some time ago http://dovegreyreader.typepad.com/dovegreyreader_scribbles/2008/04/dont-let-them-t.html but this book will never age.

I ordered myself a couple of copies so that I could give one to a grieving friend ... and I know we all talk about essential books, but this one is quintessential. Buy it for yourself, for those you love, for those you don’t know well, for anyone who’s grieving who you’d like to tell that they’re not alone. Gina Claye's own traumatic experiences inform the poems: they come from straight from her heart.

I also wrote about it here: http://www.angela-young.co.uk/grieving/dont-let-them-tell-you-how-to-grieve/

This wonderful anonymous book, first published by Frederick Warne & Co http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Warne_%26_Co#Beatrix_Potter_Books (who later published Beatrix Potter) is invaluable for anyone whose subject matter might include late Victorian etiquette. It was first published in 1870 and reprinted several times including in 1900 (my edition).

It includes such wonderful things as, from page 38, under DRESS:

The creed of some persons in respect to dress may be expressed as consisting in a conviction of the necessity of "following the fashion" (shades of Ray Davis?). But this is not the gentleman's view of the question. He, indeed, "follows the fashion" to an extent, because it is an affectation and a vulgarism to outrage it; but he follows it "with a difference". That is to say, he does not hasten to seize on every caprice, and to identify himself with every extravagance. He concedes only to the limits of good taste, and always with an eye to his age, position, and individual peculiarities.

And, from page 7, on the subject of morning calls (which happen between 3 and 5 pm ...):

Take pains to acquire the habit of "small talk" for such occasions, which must not, however, degenerate into gossip; and never let the conversation sink into an awkward silence. Inquiries as to the well-being of your visitor's family or relatives; the public topics of the day; even "the weather" will always furnish matter for chit-chat without discussing the characters of other people. Nothing is more under-bred than scandal.

It's evocative, entertaining and erudite. Burge wears his learning so lightly but it's very clear that he's a writer who's researched mediaeval Paris thoroughly and knows his philosophy well. But he shows us, for instance, what the Theory of Universals is through a joke about universes and a conversation. The usually serious business of philosophy is turned on its head in terms of how it's dealt with: it's never laboured nor didactic, and the very idea of philosophical debate deteriorating into a fateful physical encounter is darkly funny.

The names Burge has given his characters, especially Woalt, give the story an otherness, a not-of-our-timeness and his evocation of dirty, smelly crowded Paris took me there and kept me there. And humour and vividly-imaged scenes kept me happily reading: a philosopher nearly loses track of his gestures when he sees a beautiful flame-haired woman kiss Absolom, his rival philosopher. We discover that flocks of sheep gave their lives for books in those days, not trees; a cleric's curled-toe shoes nod as he walks as if agreeing with him, and another character worries that pictures in a book ‘Might have some magic attached to them that made them disappear if they were stolen’.

And Absolom is beautifully characterised, for example, at one point he feels that ‘Miserable feeling he had had so frequently as a boy: the despair that there were things in the world which were completely beyond his comprehension.’

And we discover the Latin from which the word modern came. And so much more. Head immediately to your nearest Kindle store and buy yourself a copy.

This is the extraordinary story of Byron, the Shelleys, Percy Bysshe and Mary, Clare Clairmont, Mary's half-sister and Byron's doctor Polidori. Apart from Polidori's letters to his sister Florence, which Marlowe invented, all quotations and much of the dialogue are taken from the letters and journals of the people involved, or from contemporary sources (contemporary being 1969, when this book was first published by Jonathan Cape).

Clare falls pregnant by Byron but leaves Italy before the birth of the daughter who, although christened Alba, became known as Allegra; Shelley drowns in the lake and Byron, when not writing poetry, getting to know the Shelleys or impregnating Clare, undermines his doctor horribly. But the point of the story for me is that one night (at the end of Chapter 6, page 100 of my Penguin edition) this happens:

That evening, the thunder returned to Lake Leman. All five members of the circle gathered once again in the darkened drawing-room, but this time the subject of conversation was far different from any other so far discussed. A book had been taken from the shelves and been read merely to pass the time. It was called Fantasmagoriana, ou Recueil d'Histoires d'apparitions, de spectres, revenans etc., translated into French from the original German, and the moment it was read all past quarrels, squabbles, philosophies, polemics were put aside as a new theme took over their thoughts. It was a subject that had fascinated others for centuries and which now, in this ill-lit room battered by rain and storm, was to enthral the occupants for days, even weeks, and was to make one of them instantaneously and surprisingly famous. It was to cause nightmares and hallucinations and much screaming in the night, and yet was to produce one of the most original novels of the century. The subject, of course, was Ghosts.

And the book that emerged, of course, was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.