by Valerie | Jan 9, 2019 | art, childhood, General interest, history, people, reading groups, travel
These fragments I have stored against my ruins’ – T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland (near the end) Still clear in my memory is the sense of freedom I felt as an eight-year-old when, in a class spelling bee, I went to the top of the line for remembering ‘Mississippi’...
by Valerie | Jul 11, 2018 | book reviews, General interest, history, people, reading groups, travel
Not far away is Spurn Head, a wobbly tip of land that sticks out into the North Sea. Much of the land around it is below sea level and prone to flooding. The Greenwich meridian passes through it and whales swim around it. They sometimes are swept on to the beaches and...
by Valerie | Jan 18, 2018 | art, book reviews, General interest, history, people, reading groups
It’s only a coincidence but every year, in the depth of the sad, dark days, I celebrate my birthday, 29 December, as the day when at long last there are a couple more minutes of daylight, increasing daily from then onwards. The winter solstice in the...
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 | 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....
by Valerie | Mar 1, 2014 | book reviews, childhood, General interest, reading groups, travel
Long before Goldfinch was chosen by my book group, I was offered it on Kindle for 99 something – pence or cents, that would hardly break the bank, though my friend in Santa Barbara, California, tells me that Donna Tartt is a millionaire. No wonder, even after such a...
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