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Sample issue of the HNS Newsletter:
HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY NEWSLETTER
ISSUE 4/2005: 26 February 2005
Editors:
Lucienne Boyce
Sarah Cuthbertson
Sandra Garside-Neville
Email:
HNSNewsletter-owner@yahoogroups.com
IN THIS ISSUE…
Section
1 Welcome
Section 2 Book Reviews Roundup
Section 3 What’s On in the UK
Section 4 Features
Section
5 Competitions and Markets
Section 6 Quiz
Section 1: Welcome
Welcome to this
issue of the Newsletter. We hope you enjoy our usual mix of reviews, events and
news. As ever, if you have any comments or contributions to make please email
the Editors at
HNSNewsletter-owner@yahoogroups.com
A final
reminder for our readers in America - 1 March is the registration deadline for
the Historical Novel Society North American Conference
in Salt Lake City between 15 and 17 April. For details visit our website at
http://www.historicalnovelsociety.org/USA/conference.htm
Section 2: Book Reviews Roundup
Headings give book title, author,
journal, date and name of reviewer. Please note that where we have included
links to on-line reviews, you may be required to register to use the site.
Alternatively, you can visit
www.bugmenot.com which supplies log-in IDs and passwords for sites requiring
registration.
If you
experience difficulties with any of the links, main pages can be found at:-
Guardian
Review:
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/
Independent Reviews:
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/
Observer book reviews:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/
Telegraph Main Books
Page: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?menuId=570&menuItemId=-1&view=SUMMARY&grid=P16&targetRule=1
The HNS takes no
responsibility for the content of any web sites referred to in the Newsletter.
Fiction
A Factory of
Cunning by Philippa Stockley, The Independent, 11 February 2005, D J Taylor
“The thing that one
misses most from the modern historical novel is the presence of real people.
Historical fiction has been tuppence-coloured since the days of Walter Scott,
but the stylisation that now attends most recreations of bygone life - high
jinks, pouting doxies and dialogue plundered from slang dictionaries - can make
the reader yearn for a world in which everyone isn't wearing metaphorical
spangled tights.”
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=609778
A Factory of Cunning by Philippa Stockley, The Times 19 February 2005, Michele
Roberts
"This
postmodern foray into historical fiction spins a fantastical tale of glittering
villains stalking the demi-monde of 18th-century London. But the real, dazzling
star of Philippa Stockley’s book is her language, hectically whipped up as lace
frills on a fop’s wristband, her tartly elegant narrative twisting as
voluptuously as the diamonds on a courtesan’s neck."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1488473,00.html
All for Love by Dan Jacobson, The Sunday Times, 13 February 2005, David Grylls
"Set during
the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dan Jacobson’s ironically entitled
All for Love, his first novel for 12 years, is a fictionalised account of a
royal scandal reminiscent of the tragedy at Mayerling (where the Hapsburg Prince
Rudolph apparently committed suicide with his mistress). Rudolph’s widow,
Stephanie, was the sister of Jacobson’s heroine, Princess Louise of Belgium. Yet
although Louise’s catastrophic involvement with an upstart commoner had echoes
of Mayerling, it becomes, in Jacobson’s sardonic version, more of a black
comedy...Thoroughly researched and vividly imagined, Jacobson’s drama of
transgression and repression is a compulsive page-turner."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1475640,00.html
Boudica:
Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott, The Herald, Monday 31 January 2005, Alastair
Mabbot
“At
the point we join the story, in AD 57, Scott's Amazonian heroine, Breaca, isn't
playing the role of the victorious Boudica. She wears the black feathers of the
vengeance hunter in her hair rather than the braids of a warrior, and has cut
herself off from her tribe, the Eceni, to wage a lone guerrilla war against the
Romans.”
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/32316.html
Boudica:
Dreaming the Hound by Manda Scott, The Independent, 11 February 2005, Jane
Jakeman
“The beauty in Scott's
natural world emphasises the closeness of these early Britons to the animal
kingdom. There is so much about horses, symbols of the tribe, that in lesser
hands the book might have turned into the Countryside Alliance with woad on its
face.”
http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/books/reviews/story.jsp?story=609866
Cloud Atlas by David
Mitchell, The Times, 19 February 2005, Chris Power
"A
19th-century seafarer’s journal; letters written from 1930s Belgium by a
composer’s amanuensis; a 1970s American thriller; a comic account of a cowboy
publisher fleeing contemporary London only to wind up imprisoned in a Hull
nursing home; the final confession of an insurrectionary clone in a dystopic
23rd-century “corpocracy”; a post- apocalyptic fireside tale in which the
“pre-Fall” history of the world is known to a mere handful of human beings.
These are the constituent parts, sheathed one inside the other like matryoshka
dolls, of Mitchell’s brilliant but disappointing third novel. Let it be said
that many will find my complaint cavillous, and Cloud Atlas should indeed be
plunged into; for at least half its length it provided one of my most enjoyable
reading experiences. But the intellectual paydirt promised by Mitchell’s
ingeniously hung web of leitmotivs is never hit, dissolving instead into a fudge
of Mammon, Malthusianism and reincarnation, the resultant gap between
craftsmanship and content akin to finding a Kinder Surprise nestling inside a
Fabergé egg."
Conspirators by Michael Andre Bernstein, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2005,
Sophie Harrison
"An intricate
account of an assassination plot (but not that assassination plot), Conspirators
is set in the Austro-Hungarian empire in the period leading up to the first
world war...The action moves from castle to club, aristocratic household to
working-men’s cafe, convincingly depicting the full social spectrum of Franz
Josef’s crumbling realm. But such compendiousness has a price, which here is
paid by the characters, who struggle to become more than diligently animated
ciphers."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1485672,00.html (scroll down)
Little Scarlet by Walter Mosley, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2005, John
Dugdale
"Walter
Mosley’s excellent new Easy Rawlins novel is set in the aftermath of the 1965
Watts riots in Los Angeles, in which more than 30 people died. A black woman
called Nola Payne, nicknamed Little Scarlet, has been raped and strangled, and
the LAPD ask Rawlins to make discreet efforts to find out who killed her. They
are anxious to keep the murder secret in case reports or rumours of it restart
the violence. Little Scarlet...conveys a sense of Mosley consciously raising his
game. It’s a game still played by the same rules, with no artificial dragging-in
of events in distant places — his characters do not suddenly take to discussing
Martin Luther King or the Vietnam war at the diners and roadside coffee stalls
Rawlins frequents. But the riots affect them directly, wrecking their
neighbourhood and altering every black-white encounter, mostly adding extra
tension."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1485670,00.html
Old School by Tobias Wolff, The Times, 12 February 2005, Chris Power
"At an elite
New England boy’s school in the 1960s Wolff’s narrator, a scholarship boy
plagued by an outsider’s unease, struggles with a story that might win him an
hour’s private conversation with Ernest Hemingway, his literary hero. The ironic
way in which his entry takes shape is one of numerous masterfully realised
thematic counterpoints with which Wolff’s novel, at once a meditation on writing
and on the life well, if messily lived, abounds."
Stevenson Under the Palm Trees by Alberto Manguel, The Times, 12 February 2005,
Chris Power
"I suspect
that Robert Louis Stevenson would have approved of Manguel’s darkly intricate
imagining of the Scot’s last days on Samoa. While struggling with Weir of
Hermiston Stevenson encounters his double, a dour missionary by the name of
Baker. Subsequent meetings and low deeds spawn enthralling ambiguities about
Stevenson’s attitudes and his spats with the Samoan authorities. The briefness
of this novella belies its fecundity."
The Final Solution by Michael Chabon, The Times, 12 February 2005, Jane Shilling
"Pure Grand
Guignol — a romping, grandiose exercise in pastiche, set in the English
countryside during the Second World War, but executed in an orotund style that
harks back to the detective fictions of the 19th century. Chabon’s cast is
composed entirely of exotics: a mute Jewish refugee boy whose constant companion
is a talking parrot, a Church of England vicar, Mr Panicker, who is described as
'a Malayee from Kerala, black as a boot-heel' and his wife, 'a large, plain,
flaxen-aired Oxfordshirewoman', their ne’er-do-well son, Reggie, assorted
lodgers, a policeman, ex-army officers and so on."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1478764,00.html (scroll down)
The Great
Stink by Clare Clark, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005, Rachel Hore
“A novel about Victorian
sewers? Think murder, mayhem and Henry Mayhew and you'll immediately grasp its
appeal - the sounds, sights and above all the stink of ordure so utterly
overwhelming that Parliament was forced to suspend its activities one boiling
summer in 1858 and vote in the multimillion-pound budget required for
engineering supremo Joseph Bazalgette to rebuild the metropolitan sewer system.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410178,00.html (scroll
down)
The Inner Circle by T C Boyle, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2005, Stephen
Amidon
"T C Boyle’s
2003 novel, Drop City, cast a coldly cynical eye on the sexual liberation
movement of the 1960s, suggesting that the era’s free-love ethos was not quite
as emancipating as the flower children might have wished. With The Inner Circle,
he steps back several decades to depict one of the gurus of that revolution, the
zoologist Alfred Kinsey, whose pioneering research forever changed the way
Americans think about sex. But where Boyle’s previous novel was a bit too hard
on his long-haired targets, this time out his satire is spot-on."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1485671,00.html
The Last Crossing by Guy
Vanderhaeghe, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2005, Nick Rennison
"The American
west in 1871 is no place for an English gentleman and Simon Gaunt, would-be
missionary, discovered this the hard way. He has disappeared while taking the
word of God to the Indians and his two brothers enter the wilderness in search
of him. Guided by an enigmatic half-breed and accompanied by a troubled
civil-war veteran, a woman intent on tracking down her sister’s murderers and a
garrulous journalist, the two men stumble towards the astonishing truth. Told
from the viewpoints of several different characters, The Last Crossing is a rich
novel in which traditional themes of the western are given a new vitality and
power."
The Virtues of War by Steven
Pressfield, Flint Journal Review, Sunday 13 February 2005, Tom Powers
“Pressfield has given
Alexander a voice that has the ring of a timeless soldier. It's profane, full of
love for his fellow soldiers and moves men to attempt the impossible.”
http://www.mlive.com/news/fljournal/features/index.ssf?/base/features-0/110831881540410.xml
Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum, The Times, 12 February 2005, Jane Shilling
"It seems
strange to think of someone writing a pleasant novel about the Holocaust, but
this is what Jenna Blum has done...Trudy is a middle-aged professor of German
history, separated from her husband...Clearing her mother’s abandoned house,
Trudy makes a disturbing discovery: a gold case, etched with a swastika,
containing a photograph of Trudy as a toddler, perched on her mother’s lap.
Standing behind them, as though in a family group, is an SS officer in uniform,
his features obscured by a uniform cap. Trudy has always known that her mother’s
American husband, Jack, was not her father, but she has no idea who her real
father was. Is she the daughter of the SS officer?"
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1478764,00.html
Audio Books
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant, read by Jenny Sterlin, Sunday Times, 13
February 2005, Karen Robinson
"There is a vogue for novels that tell the story behind great works of art. But
Dunant’s book, set in Renaissance Florence, is richer and deeper — and more
exciting — than the genre’s more insipid efforts. Kicking off with a nun’s
deathbed scene, it recounts the life of Alessandra, a merchant’s daughter with
an anachronistically modern sensibility and a passion for the art of her native
city. Her arranged marriage to her brother’s boyfriend, and her passion for the
Flemish painter who is decorating the family chapel, are played out as
Savonarola terrorises the pleasure-loving city (a terrible and fascinating
strand of Italian history). Sterlin reads with a voice of strangulated
intensity, but you get used to it."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1475655,00.html
The Shadow
of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon (6hrs 35mins, The Guardian, Saturday 19
February 19 2005, Sue Arnold
“It's set in a postwar
Barcelona inured to the rigours and restrictions of the Franco regime, though
there are still some, like Daniel's father, who can remember happy times before
the civil war.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416872,00.html
Tree of
Angels by Penny Sumner (13hrs 45mins), The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2005,
Sue Arnold
“[A] dynastic marathon
spanning 80 years is the story of Nina, growing up in pre-revolutionary Russia,
who escapes from the increasing tyranny of her father by marrying an
Englishman.”http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416872,00.html
(scroll down)
Children’s
Books
The
Merrybegot by Julie Hearn The Guardian, Saturday 12 February2005, Adèle Geras
Adèle Geras is thrilled
by Julie Hearn's The Merrybegot, a fantastical tale of England's folk religion.
“The story is set in the 17th century. It begins with a confession, written in
1692, by the simple-minded younger daughter of the man who was minister in
Nell's village more than 30 years before. We then move to 1645, and a story
written in the present tense mainly from Nell's point of view.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/childrenandteens/0,6121,1411029,00.html
Non-Fiction
1968: The
Year that Rocked the World by Mark Kurlansky, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February
2005, Nicola Barr
“Mark Kurlansky's
exhaustive study looks for a reason for this intensity of unrest and points to
the sudden rise of TV news reporting, where demos and the resulting police
brutality could instantly be seen around the world, spreading ideas as never
before.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410182,00.html (scroll
down)
Bury the
Chains by Adam Hochschild, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005, Robin White
Adam Hochschild gives the
heroes - and one heroine - of the anti-slavery movement their due in Bury the
Chains. “In Bury the Chains, he [Hochschild] brings us the story of the most
successful episodes of human rights activism, relating how, in just a few years
at the end of the 18th century, a small group of men (and one woman) took on the
vested interests of state, church and big business - and won.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410155,00.html
Dresden by
Frederick Taylor, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005, Vera Rule
“Taylor is sometimes
inclined to foredoomed verb tenses - he doesn't need them given the
inexorability of his careful, intense marshalling of the details of the city
before, during and after the bombing of February 13 1945.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410182,00.html (scroll
down)
Dresden
by Frederick Taylor, The Times, 12 February 2005, Iain Finlayson
"Among the
60th anniversaries of the Second World War this year is Ash Wednesday, February
13, 1945, when Dresden was firebombed by Allied aircraft. The statistics testify
to a hellish inferno which even now sharply divides historical and moral opinion
as to the necessity for the attack. Taylor’s objective, scholarly appraisal of
the event analyses preconceptions and examines long-disputed ambiguities. This
book won’t be the last word on Dresden, but it contributes substantially to the
debate."
Football and
Fascism: The National Game Under Mussolini by Simon Martin, The Guardian,
Saturday 19 February 2005, John Foot
Simon Martin tells how
Mussolini's appropriation of Italian football left its mark. “Mussolini's regime
was always attuned to the power of popular culture and sport was a key part of
its strategy. Fascists took control of the world of football in the mid-1920s
and proceeded to revolutionise the game, building stadiums throughout the
country, creating a national team which was to dominate the international game
for four years, winning two world cups and an Olympic gold medal.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416853,00.html
Jacob's Gift by
Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2005, Anthony Julius
Jonathan Freedland leafs
through the family album as he considers his son's inheritance. “This is not the
book I was expecting. I thought that it would be more discursive, less personal.
It is rather a brave book, in fact - intimate and candid, and quite touching.
Jacob's Gift is a family album, containing portraits of the author's mother and
two remoter relatives, great-uncles.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416843,00.html
Excerpts from the Book
- The Guardian:-
http://www.guardian.co.uk/weekend/story/0,,1410879,00.html
Saturday 12 February 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1412189,00.html
Monday 14 February 2005
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1414637,00.html
Tuesday 15 February 15 2005
Théâtre
D'Amour by Carsten-Peter Warncke, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005,
Veronica Horwell
Veronica Horwell is wooed
by Carsten-Peter Warncke's collection of 17th-century prints, Théâtre D'Amour.
“Over the 150 years that the emblem game was played at all levels of European
society, the fun came from changing challenges. Sometimes these transformations
summarised directly in the words the meaning of the symbol illustrated,
sometimes they used the borrowed familiar as the basis for a fresh twist, as in
modern music sampling.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/artsandentertainment/0,6121,1410901,00.html
The Voynich Manuscript
by Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2005,
John Dugdale
“Voynich's view that its
author was the medieval scientist Roger Bacon competes with other theories: a
Cathar manual; a mystic's vision; an early example of nonsense literature; a
forgery by a dodgy sidekick of John Dee; a forgery by Voynich himself.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416870,00.html
(scroll down)
The Whole Equation: A
History of Hollywood by David Thomson, The Guardian, Saturday 19 February 2005,
Tom Shone
“As a work of
history The Whole Equation is idiosyncratic, imperious, infuriating, full of
lovely writing, and just a little bit mad; but then a bumpy ride is what you get
when you ask a unicorn to pull a cart. Thomson has little time for the crudities
of the silent era, for instance, and judges DW Griffith's The Birth of a Nation
to be no good when stood next to Mahler's Ninth Symphony (‘listen to that music
and you cannot ignore the naiveté, the coarseness, in Griffith’).”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416848,00.html
The Whole Equation: A
History of Hollywood by David Thomson, The Observer, Sunday 20 February 2005, J
G Ballard
David Thomson keeps his
distance as he examines how the myths of Hollywood shape our lives in The Whole
Equation, says J G Ballard. “The appeal of the film, Thomson believes, lies
beyond the sensible and the rational.”
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1418295,00.html
Biographies
Catherine de Medici by Leonie Frieda, The Times, 12 February 2005, Iain
Finlayson
"The tragic
love story of this 16th-century queen, wife of Henry II of France, is well known
to historical romantics but her subsequent career as regent of France is better
known to political cynics. Dynastic ambitions often blinded her to good sense
and she acted decisively, albeit brutally, when religious difficulties
threatened her rule and the throne she intended her sons to inherit. Frieda sets
her in the context of a conspiratorial court and a country seething with
rivalries."
Dick Turpin: The Myth of the English Highwayman by James Sharpe, The Times, 19
February 2005, Iain Finlayson
"It’s
important to set the record straight, but usually historical truth is grim.
Sharpe, an academic and a “historian of crime”, blames the novelist W Harrison
Ainsworth for creating the popular image of Dick Turpin in Rookwood, a novel
that largely invented the image of the dashing English highwayman. Sharpe tries
to portray Turpin as the most famous Essex Man, but he sheds too much light on a
tinselled divinity of the collective imagination."
Reviews of
other new biographies can be found at:-
Bess: The
Life of Lady Ralegh, Wife to Sir Walter by Anna Beer, The Guardian, Saturday 19
February 2005, Ian Pindar -
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1416870,00.html (scroll
down)
Churchill:
The Unexpected Hero by Paul Addison, The Observer, Sunday 13 February 2005,
Sunder Katwala -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1411704,00.html
John the Painter: The First Modern Terrorist by Jessica Warner, The Sunday
Times, 13 February 2005, Andrew Holgate
-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2102-1476331,00.html
Madame de
Staël by Maria Fairweather, The Observer, Sunday 13 February 2005, Geraldine
Bedell -
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1411691,00.html
The Bugatti
Queen by Miranda Seymour, The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005, Nicola Barr
(racing driver Hellé Nice)
-
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410182,00.html
The Knife Man by Wendy Moore, The Times, 12 February 2005, Nigel Hawkes
(anatomist John Hunter) -
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,923-1478728,00.html
Section 3: What’s
On in the UK
Champagne
and canapes
Lucinda Hawksley talks about her book, Lizzie Siddal, The Tragedy of a
Pre-Raphaelite Model, at the Petersham Hotel, Nightingale Lane, Richmond on
February 28, 7pm, £15 (includes champagne and canapes). For details telephone
020 8939 1090.
Down to the sea
Fans of Julian Stockwin’s nautical Kydd series can see the author at various
events in March. Mr Stockwin will be guest of honour at 2 literary lunches - at
Honiton Library on Thursday 17 March and at Okehampton Library on Wednesday 2
March. For information call Okehampton Library on 01837 52805 or Honiton Library
on 01404 42818.
Mr
Stockwin will also be giving his personal tribute to Nelson on World Book Day,
Thursday 3 March at 6pm, at Taunton Library, and will be speaking at
Weston-super-mare Library on Saturday 19 March.
Details of these and other author events can be found on the website -
www.julianstockwincom
Section 4: Features
The Rotters’
Club
John Mullan analyses The
Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe in The Guardian, Saturday 12 February 2005. In
week one, Mullan discusses period detail. “Perhaps there should be an accepted
distinction between a historical novel and a period novel. A historical novel
takes us back to a time discoverable only from research; a period novel revives
an era that many can recall.”
http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1410184,00.html
The Sixth Lamentation
The Times, 19
February 2005, has a feature by Giles Whittell on William Brodrick, whose novel
The Sixth Lamentation is one of Richard and Judy's current book club choices. "William
Brodrick, 45, [is an] ex-monk, ex-barrister and now the internationally
bestselling literary thriller writer of The Sixth Lamentation which tells
the stories of an alleged Nazi war criminal" who seeks sanctuary in an
English monastery where he relives events in Occupied Paris, "and a woman dying
of motor neurone disease who alone can prove his guilt."
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,175-1488628,00.html
Dreaming
with Manda Scott
Libertas Bookshop has
published an interview with Manda Scott, whose four part series on Boudica is
well under way (see above for reviews of Dreaming the Hound). “I
agreed that I'd spend a month doing the research to see if it was possible: a
highly competent writing friend had said there wasn't enough material in Boudica
to make a novel and I was concerned she might be right. She wasn't, and by the
end of the month, that was very clear.“
http://www.libertas.co.uk/interviews.asp?ID=5
Flashman on the
March
Next month sees the
publication of the twelfth in George Macdonald Fraser’s “Flashman papers”,
Flashman on the March, described by David Howard in the March issue of Book and
Magazine Collector as “the most politically incorrect creation on the planet”,
the “fag-roasting rotter” of Tom Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays. The books are
presented as the true memoirs of a soldier who rose through the ranks in spite
of his cowardice. The first novel was apparently written in 90 hours, with only
one draft and no revisions, and after several rejections was published in 1969.
The sequel, Royal Flash, revolves around the Schleswig-Holstein Question, and
for collectors is quite difficult to find, with fine copies fetching between
£75-£100.
Section 6:
Competitions and Markets
Ben Pimlott Prize
The
Fabian Society and The Guardian are launching a political writing prize in
memory of Ben Pimlott, leading Fabian thinker and political historian. A prize
of £3,000 is on offer for a biographical sketch of any figure, past or present,
which best illustrates the political challenges of our age. The closing date is
Friday 18 March 18 2005.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/benpimlottprize/
25th
Anniversary Celebration Short Story Competition, Lancaster University, the
Department of Continuing Education.
The stories can be on any
subject or theme and in any style or form but must not have been previously
published and must not exceed 1500 words. Closing
date: Friday 25th March, 2005. Judges: George Green is
Head of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English Literature and
Creative Writing at Lancaster University and author of Hound (Transworld
2003). His second novel (historical) will be published in August 2005. Carol
Birch has published seven novels, the most recent being Turn Again
Home, which was long-listed for the 2003 Man-Booker. Her next novel, The
Naming of Eliza Quinn, will be published in November 2005.
http://www.lancs.ac.uk/depts/conted/twentyfiveyears/shortstory_competition.htm
Renaissance Magazine
accepts unsolicited (non-fiction) manuscripts related to the Renaissance and
Middle Ages, including but not limited to: historical articles, martial arts,
travel, interviews with artisans, articles on the SCA and related re-enactment
groups, dragons, etc. Before pursuing any article listed, please query first to
make sure that your topic of choice has not already been reserved for another
writer.
http://www.renaissancemagazine.com/
Submission guidelines:
http://www.renaissancemagazine.com/subguide.html
Section 7: Quiz
Answers to last week’s
quiz questions:-
1.
Simon Hawke’s sleuth is William Shakespeare.
2.
Andrew Taylor’s The American Boy is Edgar Allan
Poe.
3.
Stephanie Barron’s sleuth is Jane Austen.
4.
Will Davenport’s The Painter is Rembrandt.
5.
Julian Branston’s aging author in The Eternal Quest
is Miguel Cervantes.
6.
In Robert Nye’s The Voyage of Destiny Sir Walter
Ralegh is writing his journal.
7.
The subject of Christopher Peachment’s fictional
biography The Green and the Gold is Andrew Marvell.
8.
Jeffrey Marks’s detective in A Good Soldier is
Ulysses S Grant.
9.
The Hours by Michael Cunningham features Virginia
Woolf.
10.
Albert A Bell’s sleuth and sidekick in All Roads
Lead to Murder are Pliny the Younger and Tacitus.
So, how well do you
know your famous people? Give yourself a big pat on the back if you got ten out
of ten - and see if you can name the title and author of the book from which the
following memorable speech is taken. (Answer next issue.)
“Lock, chell warndy,”
observed Mrs Prowse. “Tha muxy trash do rabble ma and roily upon ma fra
cockleert till dimmet. But by night mun’s skeered o’ pigsnies i’ the vuzzy-park
and o’ being by-gaged of old Moll, and tha don’t come vort. Aye a vengeance, hey
go, a’ll by-gage mun.”
Look out for…
If you’re
interested in the history of the Second World War visit Beryl Furey-King’s
fascinating website about the women of the Auxiliary Territorial Service. The
site includes personal testimonies of women who served, information on
re-enactment and links to other sites of interest. You can also contact Ms Furey-King
if you would like to aid her in her research into the ATS. Visit http://www.atsremembered.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/
******
The Historical Novel
Society was formed in 1997 and is devoted to historical fiction of all forms.
Members receive our quarterly Historical Novels Review and twice yearly magazine
– you can become a member or sign up for one of our discussion groups via the
HNS Website at
www.historicalnovelsociety.org
Subscription to
the HNS Newsletter is free. To subscribe, send a blank email to
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