Well, yay for the British Academy, what: Historian David Olusoga awarded President’s Medal: The writer and broadcaster has brought diverse stories from Britain’s past to a wider audience: Olusoga, a writer, broadcaster and film-maker, best known as the author of Black and British: A Forgotten History, is the 39th person to be given the President’s ( Read more... )

(Dare one wish Emily A Happy Birthday?)
This piece, about Was Charlotte Right to Burn The (quite possibly chimerical) Manuscript of Emily's Second Novel: Emily Brontë’s Lost Second Novel is based on some pretty 'ahem' readings of Wuthering Heights: Emily, being the homebody she was, was also fascinated by ancestral homes, dwellings where several ( Read more... )

While the reports make it seem that no-one knew before how much of a positive response there was to Radclyffe Hall's pioneering novel of 'female inversion' (which has been covered quite extensively in previous studies of her): ‘It has made me want to live’: public support for lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall over banned book revealed , it is ( Read more... )

And okay, things do need saying over and over again, but didn't Virginia Woolf nail this one with the line about 'women in a drawing-room'?
Male authors are always pronouncing their own brilliance - or boasting about not reading books by women. So, after a lifetime of writing and attending literary festivals, John Boyne would like to get something ( Read more... )

The London Review of Books Bookshop Blog: The [Hypothetical] Booker Prize Winners, 1900-1968.
And I think, firstly, that if you are judging by present-day Booker criteria, how often, if ever, have you seen books that are funny, or genre, making the cut even on to the short list? I yield to none in my admiration for works such as The Pursuit of Love ( Read more... )

George Eliot’s sprawling tale of provincial life has triumphed in BBC Culture’s poll of the greatest British novels as voted by the rest of the world.
It's actually a brilliantly structured novel - no 'loose baggy monster' of Jamesian disparagement.
('She wrote it - but it's a sprawling tale, because that's what happens when gurlyz move away from ( Read more... )

Further to the request for categories listing of five things:

( Read more... )

Reading seems to be the new something or other, really, doesn't it my dearios? rather than DED. What with those books that are people writing about their lives + some great author or work, or this person who wrote a book about working his way through one of those lists of Wot Everybody Ort 2 Reed.

Though when the reviewer claims as 'unread Greats: ( Read more... )

Writing novels is not a competitive sport, is it?

Is there any debate whatsoever that invokes The Great British Novel? As in, There Can Only Be One? (even Only One in Every Generation)

Even I, besotted Middlemarch and George Eliot fan than I am, am not going to say MM is The, rather than A, Great British Novel.

So I really rather like the responses ( Read more... )

In an email exchange the other day I was bemoaning the excessive length that seems to be the Done Thing for so many genre books these days.

It was suggested to me that this was because of the rise of ebooks, but it seems to me that the biblio-BMI has been on the rise since well before ebooks were that much of a thing.

I don't know if you could go ( Read more... )