by Valerie | Nov 29, 2017 | General interest, history, people, poetry, travel
I look out on the grass in front of Beverley Minster and marvel at how green it is. In all these years I have never seen it such a rich shade of green. Have I changed, or has it? Perhaps I am influenced by a book I’m reading set in China after the Communist revolution... by Valerie | Nov 9, 2017 | General interest, history, Italy, people, poetry, travel
No peace for a woman lying on the beach reading a book. Young men were circling. One asked why I was reading Dante’s Divina Commedia. I explained, haltingly, that I was trying to learn Italian and, in reply to one of them holding out his hand, I insisted that I would... by Valerie | Oct 11, 2017 | 1950s, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, poetry, reading groups, travel
Twenty-five years after coming to studynot far away at York University and publishing her bestseller, the Wild Swan was back again, standing in the pulpit of Beverley Minster to promote the same book in the Beverley Literature Festival. A quarter of a century has...
by Valerie | Jul 19, 2017 | General interest, history, poetry
Just Stones When driving through the patchwork of green fields and grazing sheep in North Yorkshire this weekend, I marvelled at the hard simplicity of the stone walls. Once these hillsides and valleys crossed by fast-flowing rivers must have been as strewn with... by Valerie | Feb 9, 2017 | General interest, history, people, poetry, theatre
Next to the Globe theatre in London on the Southbank is the Sam Wannamaker Theatre, or, as I feel it to be, a theatre such as Inigo Jones would have designed in the early decades of the 17th century. Wooden seats, walnut backdrop and candles burning, then as now.... by Valerie | Jan 27, 2016 | book reviews, General interest, history, poetry, reading groups, travel, writing a novel
I’m crocodile green with envy when I learn that my writer friend Steven doesn’t do any revising. He’ a genius! He thinks and thinks about what he’s going to write for days, even weeks, and when he feels it’s ready, he writes the one and only version. The final one....
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