Category: Literature

The Latest

Newsreaders on the wireless have adopted a new phrase: “now for the latest … “ and there is a clip, and it isn’t necessarily live, from a sports venue, Westminster, Gaza, Kiev etc. Well, you won’t find the latest here.

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Categorised as Literature

White Eagles

Olivia Manning took inspiration from her wartime service with the British Council in Bucharest for her Balkan Trilogy. Lawrence Durrell used his time with the British Council in Belgrade to write authoritatively about Yugoslavia in White Eagles Over Serbia.

The Today Programme

”A diary is an assassin’s cloak which we wear when we stab a comrade in the back with a pen.” (William Soutar, 1898 – 1943, Scottish poet diarist and epigrammatist)

The Secret Annexe

A friend who read my anthology of diary entries in Advent and Epiphany recommends The Secret Annexe. The title references Anne Frank’s, The Secret Annex, a collection of fiction and non-fiction written while she was in hiding during the Nazi occupation of Holland.

Epiphany IV

“Sculpture/Relief. The Adoration of Magi. The figures, dressed in sixteenth century costume, are grouped in an architectural setting with a vault over them. In the centre of the vault is a star surrounded by five cherub’s heads, flanked by groups of a single angel and three angels reading. There are traces of blue paint in… Continue reading Epiphany IV