Category: Literature

Love, Cecil

Love, Cecil is a bio-pic about Cecil Beaton. I have read his diaries from 1965 until his death in 1980 so it covers much familiar ground.

Box of Delights

In Salad Days a magic piano is entrusted  to Jane and Timothy by a passing tramp. Frodo Baggins inherits the Ring from his cousin Bilbo and is told by Gandalf to take care of it. For Bertie Wooster in The Code of the Woosters the MacGuffin is an 18th century silver cow-creamer. It is an… Continue reading Box of Delights

Elizabeth Bowen

My goddaughter, Sophia, was at Downe House. She was confirmed by the then Bishop of Oxford who delivered such a good sermon that I remembered every word when he repeated it at a subsequent Confirmation.

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Categorised as Literature

Amis’s Oxford Marmalade

In 1874 Mrs Frank Cooper made 76 lbs of marmalade to her own receipt for sale in her husband’s grocery in Oxford High Street. Its distinctive bitter flavour permeates Kingsley Amis’s Memoirs.

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Categorised as Literature

The Homan Touch

Who Do I Think I Am? Having read Homan’s memoir I am not sure I can answer his question but I can say what a rollicking good story it makes.

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Classic Detective Stories

The Golden Age of the classic detective novel was the middle of the 20th century. Wilkie Collins is often cited as founder of the genre when he wrote The Moonstone in 1868 which was developed by Conan Doyle and his contemporaries but we treat today with the mid 20th century.

Chelsea Quiz

The link between investment manager McInroy & Wood and one of the greatest letter writers of the 19th century may not be immediately obvious. There is also a tenuous link to the greatest diarist of the 20th century. This sounds like a question on the venerable (started in 1947) radio programme Round Britain Quiz.

Quiz Answers

When you open this website sometimes you must think “I don’t want this. This is just what I don’t want. What I want is Wodehouse and I want Wodehouse now.”

Quiz

Put on your thinking cap. Mark Mason has written Question Time – A Journey Round Britain’s Quizzes. I know this because he has an article about it in the October edition of The Oldie.

Gardening

Victoria Summerley (writer) and Hugo Rittson Thomas (photographer) had an original idea in 2015. They would write a coffee table book about gardens in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The outcome was Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds and it was successful enough for them to venture a sequel this month.

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Categorised as Literature