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BBC Radio 3's Drama On Three aired a stunning production last Sunday, 18 November, of George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession; it's available for listening on-line until 2000 GMT (that's 1500 EST, I believe) this Sunday, 25 November. The production is a little under two hours long, and features the marvelous Claire Skinner (who previously ( Read more... )

...to steal an old David Letterman punchline. ("How can we offer such great rates on our comedy book reviews ( Read more... )

I began this year firmly intending to do better at the "read 50 books in a year" thing than I did last year, but now, at a little over the halfway point, I have to ruefully admit that I will in all likelihood fall short -- again. Yeah, I joined up with that 50bookchallenge group, but the mad influx of new blood ever since it was featured on LJ Spotlight this ( Read more... )

From Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867), the sixth and last (ah-ha!) book in The Barsetshire Chronicles:

"'When a man goes about in a purple velvet coat of course he is vain.'"

-- p. 398 (Oxford World's Classics edition)

Gee, y'think?

I'm reading the fifth book in The Chronicles of Barsetshire series by Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington (1864), and am happy to report that I'm continuing to find evidence to support my liking of Trollope's auctorial prowess more than Dickens'. While I've yet to read any zippity-pow flourishes in Trollope of the kind that Dickens ( Read more... )

One of the plots of Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1861), which takes place in the late 1850s, concerns an election in West Barsetshire for the House of Commons; a couple of passages jumped out at me:

"It was to be a contest between the powers of aristocracy and the powers of oligarchy, as those powers existed in West Barsetshire, -- and ( Read more... )

Found this pause-inducing passage about the fine line between harmless flirtations and serious courtships in Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage (1861), the fourth book (of six) in the Barsetshire Chronicles:

"Young men in such matters are so often without any fixed thoughts! They are such absolute moths. They amuse themselves with the light ( Read more... )

I'm up to p. 750 of the Oxford World's Classics edition of David Copperfield, which means I'm at the start of Chapter LIV ("Mr. Micawber's Transactions") and the start of No. XVIII.

Only 105 pages to go in the novel itself, though I'll most likely read the 14-paged autobiographical fragment from John Forster's 1872-74 The Life of Charles Dickens, ( Read more... )

I'm up to p. 617 in David Copperfield (the Oxford World's Classics edition), which means I'm at the start of Chapter XLIV ("Our Housekeeping") and the start of Number XV; only 238 pages to go (of the novel itself).

If any novel should be washed down with a goodly mug of some sort of restorative beverage, it is David Copperfield.

*BlinksSince my ( Read more... )