Thinking critically: #logophile

Brain maze: way out?

It may be a reflection on state education in the UK that I, as a music specialist in a high school, was from the 1980s onwards not only called on to teach European Studies and Special Needs French but also – despite being technologically illiterate – IT skills.

However, I soon discovered that knowing the detailed differences between, say, a bit and a byte, or the CPU and a hard drive, could be safely left up to 14yo geeks, because what I really needed to teach was critical thinking, especially when relatively safe access to the internet was required for research, classwork and homework. And for personal understanding and development too, of course.

Now, several decades later – what with targeted advertising, deliberate disinformation on social media, and, especially, an armada of chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence that potentially could offer misleading or downright false information – critical thinking about how we get our information and how we respond to it is not only more important than ever but vital to future global as well as individual wellbeing.

Bookwise 2025/11

‘Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November …’
Has perchance some family member
Make you chant this to remember?
Soon, the ending of November,
On the cusp of dark December,
Eking out the dying ember
Of this month. What’s to remember?

Well, I’ve joined in several blogging prompts – Novellas in November, German Literature Month, SciFi Month, Nonfiction November and Reading Austen 2025 – thereby tackling, let me see, seven titles: Bainbridge’s Another Part of the Wood and Sachar’s Someday Angeline featured as novellas, Hesse’s Demian and Kafka’s The Trial (review coming soon) qualify as German literature; furthermore the Strugatskys’ Monday Starts on Saturday counts for SF, while Kishimi and Koga’s The Courage to be Happy plus Garton Ash’s We the People are my nonfic offerings.

As well as a post alphabetically listing some speculative fiction titles I’ve read I’ve also added a couple of pieces about Austen‘s Northanger Abbey, listened to a radio dramatisation of Emma, and gabbled a bit more on the art of reviewing. However,.as all bookish bloggers know (and as we frequently bewail!) there were several other possible titles lined up for some of the reading events this month, but there just wasn’t the time to fit them all in. Ho hum, c’est la vie, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, que será, será . . .

Mischief-making: #ReadingAusten2025

Maria Bicknell in 1816, painted by her husband, John Constable.

Emma (1815) by Jane Austen.
Dramatised in two parts by April de Angelis, music by Martin Souter and Sarah Stowe, directed by Jonquil Panting.
Two episodes, ‘The Matchmaker’ and ‘Proposal’, were first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in November 2000, then on Radio 4 Extra and BBC Sounds.

With insufferable vanity had she believed herself in the secret of everybody’s feelings; with unpardonable arrogance proposed to arrange everybody’s destiny. She was proved to have been universally mistaken; and she had not quite done nothing — for she had done mischief.

Determined to experience my least favourite Austen novel without having to re-read it, and having already watched three screen adaptations of Emma in the past, it was more than fortuitous that, in this 250th anniversary of her birth, the 2000 radio dramatisation was made available on BBC Sounds as two hour-long episodes.

Emma Woodhouse was no less irritating than before, I’m afraid, insufferable and arrogant as she herself was to admit by the end of the novel, her attempts at matchmaking ending rather in mischief-making. I did however look forward to hearing again from Jane Fairfax, whom I have long considered the shadow heroine of the novel, and whose story Austen superfan Joan Aiken was to eventually elucidate for us.

Of course all adaptations have to select, truncate or even omit incidents and characters, and this dramatised audio version was no exception, but enough that was critical to an understanding of Emma’s rise, fall and resurrection was retained along with most of the familiar cast.

A witness to history: #NonficNov

Revolutionary flag (photo: Soman).

We the People.
The Revolution of ’89, witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin & Prague
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Granta Books in association with Penguin Books, 1990.

Published in North America as The Magic Lantern (a title originally drawn from one of the chapter headings) We the People deliberately echoes the opening phrase of the US Constitution in proclaiming that the legitimacy of a government comes from – and resides in – its own citizens, but it also encapsulates precisely the claims of the revolutionaries described here in vivid detail.

Though a slim volume, it describes how the author was present at pivotal moments, ripe with significance for Europe’s postwar history as power was, almost bloodlessly, wrested from four countries in the Soviet bloc: Poland, Hungary, the German Democratic Republic, and Czechoslovakia.

More than just a witness, Timothy Garton Ash was on familiar terms with key players such as Adam Michnik in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia. As an account chronicling events in the second half of 1989 and, in January of the next year, attempting a reasoned if premature summary, this document retains a rare immediacy, buttressed by well-informed assessments authored by a respected academic of contemporary European history.

Each a magician at heart: #SciFiMonth

Baba Yaga’s hut (1959) by Vladimir Panov.

Monday Starts on Saturday (1964/5) by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky,
translated by Andrew Bromfield (2002), introduction by Adam Roberts (2016); author’s note (2016) by Boris Strugatsky, translated by James Womack.
SF Masterworks, Gollancz, 2016.

Every man is a magician in his heart, but he only becomes a magician when he starts thinking less about himself and more about others, when his work becomes more interesting to him than simply amusing himself in the old meaning of that word.

First things first: how can we best define this novel? It’s always good to know what might be letting oneself in for! Well, there are a few clues. In his afterword co-author Boris Strugatsky acknowledges key inspirations from two female colleagues, one of whom suggested a spoof Hemingway story for him to seek out – and thus a title for the brothers to later use. ‘Monday Starts on Saturday’ was in fact a satiric comment on how one’s working week is never done, for when the weekend comes you’re already aware it’ll soon start all over again, but it also has a different significance for the novel’s end.

But this novel isn’t just a satire on Soviet-era workplaces, which in this title appears to be scientific academia: the Strugatsys were best known for their science fiction, so when the story opens with a computer programmer driving his car to a rendezvous with friends in the northeast readers may be disconcerted to learn that he soon discovers witchcraft and magic in operation. More than science fiction this, then, can be classed as science fantasy – but, again, is it merely this?

No, for when the novel was first published in 1965 it was subtitled “a fairy tale for young scientists” with illustrations by Yevgeniy Migunov strongly suggesting it was a humorous YA novel, not at all to be taken too seriously. (Apparently all of the Strugatskys’ fiction was published by Detgiz, the state publisher of children’s literature in the USSR.) Satire, science fantasy, burlesque, YA fiction – it’s all these – and maybe more – wrapped up in one narrative, but does it deserve our attention? I think it does.

Life tasks: #NonficNov

© C A Lovegrove.

The Courage to be Happy
(Shiawase Ni Naru Yuuki, 2016)
by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga.
Allen & Unwin, 2019.

The essence of happiness is the feeling of contribution.

The follow-up to The Courage to be Disliked both reiterates the core issues discussed there and, by introducing further ideas, takes them on to notions of how we can be truly happy, all by reference to Alfred Adler’s individual psychology.

‘Individual’ is a key term here: although we are social animals, the only person who can initiate that joy within is oneself – it’s not up to other people to make one happy.

As before, there are so many ideas fizzing around that one has to resist the temptation to merely list and explain them in the authors’ own words; but I shall limit my discussion to what I see as the key points that to me seemed most helpful.

‘The misfortune of knowing’: #ReadingAusten2025

Engraving of Bath and the Abbey.

A woman especially, if she have the misfortune of knowing any thing [sic], should conceal it as well as she can.

After my review and a post speculating on the ‘real’ Northanger Abbey I promised a discussion of the novel’s dramatis personae and Austen’s imagined geography for the novel: this therefore, dear reader, is it.

I’ve titled it with the narrator’s provocative assertion that women should hide from men any evidence of their being well-read and informed on worldly or philosophical matters, because ignorance – of facts in particular – can be an attractive feature for certain men.

Though I think that Austen is being playfully opaque here (and I’ll try to justify that a little later, if justification really is needed) I shall help counter that epigram by reference to how she demonstrates her understanding of human psychology and interpersonal relationships, and then how she creates a credible landscape to people with her characters. Time to strap in – it could be a bumpy ride!

Science-Fiction A-Z #SciFiMonth 2025

At the urging of Emma @ Words & Peace (here), and as a contribution to #SciFiMonth, I have cobbled together a list of science-leaning speculative fiction titles I’ve read over the years to account for all – or nearly all – of the letters of the alphabet. A couple of words to explain my reasoning and choices follows.

Science fiction, under my preferred umbrella label of speculative fiction, is a very broad category, often spreading over from ‘hard’ SF into aspects of science fantasy and CliFi, timeslip and time travel, alternative history and horror, and dystopian and apocalyptic literature.

In my list therefore I’ll include related genres like classic and YA fiction, graphic novels and planetary romance; but you’ll notice that at least one alphabetical category has yet to be filled and that I’ve cheated (*gasp*) with another, but — it’s my party and I’ll twist the rules if I want to!

Camp Misfit: #NovNov25

© C A Lovegrove.

Another Part of the Wood
by Beryl Bainbridge.
Penguin Books, 1992 (1968, revised 1979).

Childe Rowland to the dark tower came.
His word was still “Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.”

—  ‘King Lear’, Act III, scene 4

Flintshire, the late sixties: a poorly integrated group of acquaintances made up of inadequates, fantasists and oddballs make their way to a rudimentary camp consisting of wooden huts among wooded hills and coombes.

There are singletons, mismatched couples, a couple of locals, and even a child. Into this mélange, largely isolated from the world but not from each other, disparate personalities and their idiosyncrasies start to generate friction, exacerbate personal frailties, and widen chasms in relationships.

And meanwhile poor provisioning, unsuitable clothing and primitive conditions underscore how irresponsible pretty much all the self-centred adults are, especially when a child’s wellbeing is at stake. Camp MacFarley acts like the board in a game of Monopoly in which, perversely, all the players are losers.

Fish out of water: #NovNov25

© C A Lovegrove.

Someday Angeline by Louis Sachar.
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2007 (1983).

When a novel’s epigraph claims that it’s “a good story with lots of funny jokes” and that it’s “dedicated to everyone who can tell whether or not a book is any good—by smelling it,” then you know that what you have in your hands could well be something that’s entertaining, and may also be saying something important about the human condition.

Someday Angeline is one of those rare works – emotionally pitch perfect and sensitive, well paced and something that, turning on a sixpence, can make you cry because it makes you happy.

And though it proclaims itself a book for pre-teens it’s also a story for grown-ups who might need reminding what it could’ve been like for them when they were the same age as Angeline, and that surely can’t be a bad thing, can it?

The ‘real’ Northanger Abbey? #ReadingAusten2025

The Sham Castle, Claverton Down, Bath, from an old postcard.

High upon Claverton Down to the east of Bath is positioned the eye-catching façade of the Sham Castle: commissioned in the mid 18th century by Bath’s postmaster, Ralph Allen, it was designed to be viewed from his townhouse just off the city’s Lilliput Alley (now known as North Parade Passage).

It reflected the 18th-century æsthetic for all things Gothic (‘Gothick’ even!) in the arts, architecture, literature and music – an æsthetic that would continue, on and off, right up to the present, along with a predilection for the picturesque. Jane Austen’s comic bildungsroman Northanger Abbey of course played on these tastes, celebrating as well as parodying them.

However, the question I here want to pose is this: What particular model could Austen have drawn on for her heroine’s expectations of the nature of General Tilney’s residence, once she’d left her friends the Allens in Bath for the mysterious Northanger Abbey in Gloucestershire?

Light and dark: #GermanLitMonth #NovNov25

Photo: C A Lovegrove.

Demian by Hermann Hesse.
Demian: Die Geschichte einer Jugen von Emil Sinclair (1919)
translated by W J Strachan (1958).
Penguin Modern Classics, 2017.

“The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird is flying to God. The name of the God is called Abraxas.” — Max Demian to Emil Sinclair.

Demian is a strange first-person novella which I struggled – and continue to struggle – to like. With elements of autofictional and autobiografiction reminiscent of the late 20th-century ‘misery memoir’ genre, its mix of Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman comes across, superficially at least, as bourgeois whinings by an artist manqué as he struggles towards individuation.

But maybe I struggled because it reminded me of my younger self, feeling misunderstood and out of place in the world, which was certainly painful. And in the context of Hesse’s own life up to 1919 when the novella was published I can see how the experiences he’d had – which then led him to consult Jungian psychoanalyst Josef Bernhard Lang – might, for him as a writer, be naturally expressed in fiction.

Demian then is the story of the coming of age of Emil Sinclair, a lad who feels out of kilter with his upbringing in a pious Christian family and is seeking to understand how and why he feels ‘other’. Finding kinship with an older boy in his school, he learns from this Max Demian that he himself is one of those with the ‘mark of Cain’, not a murderer but a freethinker, and that his sense of otherness is real.

A Book to Review

© C A Lovegrove.

A year or so ago I posted ‘The Art of Reviewing’ (here if you missed it), a piece which attempted to answer the question “What are the things to keep in mind when reviewing?”

After a quick discussion of who the review was for, I went on to what I hoped to impart, and how, and why, proceeding to listing six aspects – information, elucidation, entertainment, opinion, courtesy, and balance – as principles I try to keep in mind.

It garnered a fair response, well over fifty comments (including my responses), which I guess indicated how important book reviewing was for the bookish blogosphere. But then I thought, “Are there further aspects to How that I hadn’t previously considered, as well as When and Where?” Behold, then, my starting points for this post!

“Born to be an heroine”: #ReadingAusten2025

William Beckford’s Fonthill Abbey, Wiltshire, 1796 to 1813, demolished 1845.

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen,
in Northanger Abbey & Persuasion,
introduction by R Bromley Johnson.
J M Dent & Sons Ltd / E P Dutton & Co, 1906 (1818).

No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be an heroine.

Possibly begun around 1793-4 when Austen herself was about the age of her heroine Catherine – or, as she would then have been, ‘Susan’ – what was to be posthumously published as Northanger Abbey perfectly expresses the mindset of a young adult, one not fully conversant with the ways of the world but trying to gain an understanding through the reading of novels.

We know that the author was working on it in the late 1790s when the Austen family visited Bath, and – while they were residing there from 1801 to 1806 – revised it before Susan was first offered for publication in 1803. She finally revised it in 1816, changing the protagonist’s name to Catherine, but was well aware that fashions and manners had changed in the intervening sixteen years.

But throughout its convoluted gestation over a score of years the character of the innocent ingénue remained constant and to us readers  instantly recognisable as the kind of person who, unfamiliar with broader social cues and with individuals unconcerned for the wellbeing of others, might unfortunately misinterpret situations and motivations. The issue for us readers then is not just whether her innocence stands in the way of her achieving happiness, but whether she will deserve to be happy.

Bookwise 2025/10

Photo of Notre Dame gargoyle, 1920 by Pierre-Yves Petit, known as ‘Yvon’ (1886–1969).

Autumn. Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness – and days of reading stories not for the fainthearted. Yet Bede wrote that the English called the October month when the winter season began Ƿintirfylliþ [Winterfyllith], a word he says was “composed of ‘winter’ and ‘full moon’, because winter began on the first full moon of that month.” This year Bede’s winter came early because the first supermoon of 2025 – the Harvest Moon – was on 7th October.

Still, this certainly was a month then to be hunkering down with a selection of books on the go for Readers Imbibing Peril: Muriel Spark’s disturbing The Driver’s Seat, Jane Austen’s Gothick-inspired Northanger Abbey and, in the Dark Academia subgenre, Rebecca Kuang’s fantasy Katabasis. I also compared and contrasted short stories with a hint of the supernatural by H P Lovecraft and Angela Carter.

As well as Northanger Abbey (my review will hopefully appear on All Hallows Eve) I earlier posted about Rebecca Vaughan’s one-woman show Austen’s Women: Lady Susan for Reading Austen 2025. And for the 1925Club I successfully reviewed Alfred Watkins’ The Old Straight Track, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and DH Lawrence’s short story The Princess. Finally, I reviewed Walter de la Mare’s poetry anthology Peacock Pie and posted an overview of Robertson Davies’s Cornish Trilogy.

The changeling’s daemon: #1925Club

Phoenix design by Coralie Bickford-Smith (1960) for Penguin.

‘The Princess’ (1925)
by D H Lawrence,
in The Princess and Other Stories edited by Keith Sagar.
Penguin Books, 1971.

“One day Lawrence asked Catherine [Carswell] if she was writing anything, and she told him of a novel she had in mind: ‘The theme had been suggested to me by reading of some savages who took a baby girl, and that they might turn her into a goddess for themselves […]'”— From the introduction by Keith Sagar.

The germ of the idea that his friend Catherine gave Lawrence in London at the end of 1923 became transmogrified by his experiences in New Mexico, was completed in 1924 and published in 1925. By this time it had become a tale of two moods with an ending of sorts, made up of dry history, ravishing descriptions, and genuine suspense.

At the heart of the story – a novelette, really – is the character of the ‘Princess’, Mary Henrietta or ‘Dollie’ Urquhart. Though not the baby girl taken by strangers – who brought her up “on a covered river boat, tending her in all respects, but never letting her mix with her kind and leading her to believe that she was herself no mortal, but a goddess” – it is nevertheless evident that Miss Urquhart preserves an otherworldly quality, leading people to regard her almost as a fairy, elfin in nature, even a changeling.

Included as part of a Penguin collection of a dozen tales composed during the last eight years of his life – he died of TB in 1930 – it partakes, much like many of its companion pieces, somewhat of the quality of a fable, partly due to fairytale elements mixed with its realism.

Fear no more: #1925Club

Virginia Woolf in 1927, aged 45.

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf: 
The Definitive Edition,
edited by G Patton Wright,
introduction by Angelica Garnett.
Vintage Books, 1992 (1925).

Oh! thought Clarissa, in the middle of my party here’s death, she thought.

Is an impressionistic response the best approach to make to an impressionistic novel? I think, in this case, it may be, because in the immediate aftermath of reading Mrs Dalloway the image I’m most reminded of is of a butterfly flitting from flower to flower in a garden.

That garden is central London one hot June day in 1923, when we readers flit from Westminster to the Strand, from Regent’s Park to Victoria, from Bloomsbury back to Westminster, collecting the pollen that constitutes the thoughts of different individuals; but we are also aware of scents originating in Devonshire, Manchester and a spot near the River Severn, the colours of Italy and India, and discussions of Armenia and Canada.

And throughout a novel that opens with Clarissa Dalloway deciding she would buy the flowers for her imminent party herself, and closes with a guest at that party asserting they’re all “surrounded by an enchanted garden” filled with “a few fairy lamps,” we are constantly reminded of Woolf’s own diary entry from early 1922:  “I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.”

The ley of the land: #1925Club

Beech wood © C A Lovegrove.

The Old Straight Track by Alfred Watkins.
Methuen & Co, third edition 1945 (1925).

‘What really matters in this book is whether it is a humanly designed fact, an accidental coincidence, or a “mare’s nest,” that mounds, moats, beacons, and mark stones fall into straight lines throughout Britain, with fragmentary evidence of trackways on the alignments.’ —Preface.

This summary by Alfred Watkins – of three explanations for his theory of ancient alignments – was both accurate and perspicacious, given the various reactions that continue to be expressed a century later. Watkins believed the placement of sites and tracks in lines was part of a deliberate design, one that may have remained in the collective consciousness over generations, thus accounting for the physical markers being of different periods separated by hundreds if not thousands of years.

For many fans – especially during and after New Age ideas proliferated in the 1960s – this theory of deliberate engineering was not only acceptable but extendable into more speculative and mystical notions of geomancy, earth magic, Gaia and the like. However, statisticians have long argued that many of his plotted lines (Watkins purloined the term ‘ley’ for his alignments) are coincidental, their apparent significance purely subjective, though certain supporters have resorted to special pleading.

The last definition he gives – a mare’s nest – is an idiom which can be interpreted in two ways: it either refers to a muddle or other complex, disordered or confused situation, or, in this case, a false or illusory discovery, even a deliberate hoax. It’s from this second definition that most criticisms of Watkins’ leys originate: not only are his alignments imaginary (the critics assert) but his theories deserve disdain and even ridicule because the basis of his hypothesis is patently absurd. However, when certain academics resorted to ad hominem insults, based on the fact that Watkins worked for the family’s Herefordshire brewery, their attacks took on a more spiteful tone. In this centenary year is it possible to say where a consensus now lies, and if we can be both more generous and more pragmatic?

Dreamed cities: #RIPxx

‘Another World’ by M C Escher (1947): Escher Foundation.

‘Celephaïs’ (1922) by H P Lovecraft,
in The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, edited by S T Joshi.
Penguin Twentieth Century Classics, 1999.

‘The Kiss’ (1977) by Angela Carter,
in Black Venus.
Picador / Pan Books, 1986 (1985).

‘There are not many persons who know what wonders are opened to them in the stories and visions of their youth; for when as children we listen and dream, we think but half-formed thoughts, and when as men we try to remember, we are dulled and prosaic with the poison of life.’ — H P Lovecraft, ‘Celephaïs’.

Two tales of two cities – one ostensibly of this world, the other evidently in a dreamworld – but both owing much to the imagination of their writers. One is set in the ancient Uzbek city of Samarkand, partly in the time of Tamburlaine the Great, while the other is focused on the port of Celephaïs, located in a world which one may only visit when asleep or in a trance.

Though both tales are about cities and their inhabitants the two narratives seem very different, for Angela Carter’s brief piece feels like a travelogue with a folktale embedded, while Howard Philip Lovecraft’s short story is founded on the protagonist’s “fancy and illusion”: seeking beauty in place of “the foul thing that is reality,” he finds it instead “on his very doorstep, amid the nebulous memories of childhood tales and dreams.”

And yet the pair of stories have more in common than might be supposed, for both grew out of their tellers’ imagination. For all her vivid descriptions of the place Angela Carter never visited Samarkand in reality, nor did Lovecraft visit either Old England where his protagonist resided or Celephaïs where he went in his dreams. And, weirdly, the writer of ‘The Kiss’, as well as being a fan of Lovecraft’s writing, shared her surname with that of Randolph Carter, a later visitor to Lovecraft’s Dreamlands.

Hell is other scholars: #RIPxx

King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University, circa 1870.

Katabasis by R F Kuang.
HarperVoyager, 2025.

“[It] started as this cute, silly adventure novel about like, ‘Haha, academia is hell.’ And then I was writing it and I was like, ‘Oh, no, academia is hell.'” — From an interview with the author.

Sometimes, when reading a novel, one can simply engage by taking it at face value, as a plot-driven narrative, for example, or a character-led story, a polemic, an escape, or a literary conundrum.

At other times one’s very aware that what is coming through may be deeply personal for the author, a reflection on emotions and dilemmas in their life, perhaps, or a deeply-held vision of the world as they see it.

And occasionally one can recognise that the fiction also works on both these and even on other levels too. Katabasis, its title meaning a descent to the Underworld, is one such fiction, a novel retelling an archetypal myth while drawing deeply on lived experiences and crises: the more levels such novels plumb the richer are the potential rewards for the reader.

Games of Let’s pretend: #ReadingRobertsonDavies

Robertson Davies, 1913–1995.

The Cornish Trilogy
by Robertson Davies.
Penguin Books, 2011 (1991).

‘Be not another, if you can be yourself.’ — Epigram by Paracelsus.

Consisting of three related titles – The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) – the Cornish trilogy joined two other completed series from Robertson Davies. Preceded by the Salterton and Deptford titles, the Cornish series similarly presents three narratives, each of which could theoretically work as a standalone but which work best if read in order.

As with his other trilogies, it’s fascinating to see how Davies, like a literary Wagner, introduces a selection of striking themes and motifs from across the board – from music, drama, literature, art, fakery, prestidigitation and even the occult – all seemingly without batting an eyelid.

Sadly for us the author didn’t live long enough to complete a final trilogy, leaving Murther and Walking Spirits (1991) and The Cunning Man (1994) to give some indication of what a third title might touch on. But at least with the sequence considered here there’s a sense of closure as well as of satisfaction.

Stolen away by magic

Detail from Jan Brueghel the Elder’s ‘The Senses of Hearing, Touch and Taste‘ (1620), Prado Museum.

Peacock Pie: a book of rhymes
by Walter de la Mare,
drawings by Edward Ardizzone (1946).
Faber Children’s Classics, 2001 (1913).

Ere my heart beats too coldly and faintly
   To remember sad things, yet be gay,
I would sing a brief song of the world’s little children
   Magic hath stolen away.

— ‘The Truants’.

Despite surviving into a new Elizabethan age Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) was a true Victorian; unsurprisingly then – as is evident from this anthology of children’s poetry which first appeared just before the Great War, when George V was on the throne – the imagery, vocabulary and lifestyles evoked here may at times belie a recent publisher’s claim that it’s “an essential part of any child’s bookshelf.”

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t much for a young 21st-century reader to glean from the collection; on the contrary, their brevity, their rhythms and the accompanying line illustrations by Edward Ardizzone all make this an ideal treasury for children (of whatever age) to quietly dip into or read aloud to oneself, and from which to choose favourite pieces to learn by heart.

Around ninety-odd poems, many lasting a page or two at most, speak of melancholy and solitude, but also whimsy and nonsense, philosophy and folklore. And though many seem as light as gossamer threads quite a few have an indefinable heft to them.

Fair or fowl? #logophile

Cocquecigrue.

Many mornings, when going for a constitutional which might take us by the local canal, we hear one or two cockerels giving vent in their customary fashion. One is a full-throated adult bird screaming the familiar cry; the other, younger perhaps, produces a wheezier version which never quite achieves the expected Cock-a-doodle-doo.

In Latin this male fowl is gallus, derived from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to call’ – indeed the English word ‘call’ is itself derived from the same root – and it’s particularly popular in France as a national symbol because it resonates with the country’s ancient name, Gallia or Gaul.

Logophile that I am, my mind leaps immediately to related words, some familiar, some more obscure, and many of course literary. Get ready for what may appear to be cock-and-bull stories which, nonetheless, I find fascinating – and I hope you do too!

Inconceivable sorrow: #RIPxx

Muriel Spark.

The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. Penguin Archive, 2025 (1970).

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a café, the last one left.’
‘You’re getting morbid, dear,’ says Bill.

A disturbing story of a disturbed woman, The Driver’s Seat is about a number of things – control I think (as the title seems to suggest), about loneliness for sure, and about a determination to leave an impression on the world. Lise is our protagonist, and it’s her whom we exclusively follow as she leaves her job, her flat and her home country to travel to an Italian city – Rome? Naples? We’re never told.

Nor is it clear why she’s leaving, other than an episode of what we’re told is hysteria at work, after which she’s strongly encouraged to take a summer vacation. A series of bizarre acts, idiosyncratic choices and inconsistent conversations follow, all adding to a very confusing portrait of a woman whose motivations we attempt to understand, resolve and explain.

But Muriel Spark chooses not to make our efforts to comprehend at all easy; in fact I would say she goes out of her way to ensure we’re in the dark until the end despite her giving us a lot of clear indications of where the narrative is heading – for some of us may prefer to believe in other than what will become the inevitable conclusion.

A most accomplished coquette: #ReadingAusten2025

Rebecca Vaughan in the Dyad Production of ‘Austen’s Women: Lady Susan’.

Austen’s Women: Lady Susan.
Performed by Rebecca Vaughan,
directed by Andrew Margerison,
Dyad Productions.
Wednesday 24th September 2025, Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon.

“My dear Sister,
I congratulate you & Mr Vernon on being about to receive into your family the most accomplished Coquette in England. As a very distinguished Flirt, I have always been taught to consider her; but it has lately fallen in my way to hear some particulars of her conduct at Langford, which proves that she does not confine herself to that sort of honest flirtation which satisfies most people, but aspires to the more delicious gratification of making a whole family miserable.”

— Letter 4: Sir Reginald De Courcy to Mrs Catherine Vernon.

Jane Austen’s epistolary novella – a narrative presented as forty-one letters – was mostly written around 1794 when she was 18 or 19, with a prose conclusion very possibly added around 1805.

Presented as missives mostly from five women, namely the newly widowed Lady Susan Vernon, her friend Mrs Alicia Johnson, sister-in-law Mrs Catherine Vernon, Lady De Courcy, and the teenage Miss Frederica Vernon, the shifting viewpoints in Lady Susan allow us to glimpse a group of women who are variously manipulative, wheedling, deceptive and supercilious, an absolute godsend of a story to present as a one-woman show.

This is what Rebecca Vaughan offered during Dyad Productions’ recent tour, the first adaptation where just one actor held the stage, and very entertaining it was too. A previous familiarity with the text helped me follow but, while I wondered how those who hadn’t read Austen’s original coped, the principal letter writers were I thought very entertainingly characterised by changes in tones of voice and mannerisms.

Bookwise 2025/9

© C A Lovegrove.

The end of another month marks that time when I regularly look back, like Epimetheus, at my reading progress over four weeks or so and then forward, like Prometheus, at my Bookwise intentions for the next month or so.

In September I joined in enthusiastically with several reading events – Short Story September (pieces by Washington Irving, Mary Shelley), World KidLit Month (Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Three Twins), Reading Austen 2025 (“Austen’s Bristol” plus Lesley Castle) and Readers Imbibing Peril (Eric Ambler’s Epitaph for a Spy, Mary Shelley of course, and Luke Jennings’ Codename Villanelle).

Plus I managed to finish and review an introduction to Adler’s approach to individual psychology, and made some more headway – albeit judderingly – with Marian (‘George Eliot’) Evans’s Middlemarch. Thus far Epimetheus.