December 2016 Newsletter

MP Peacock in the Bookshop with the Wine Bottle.
Crime Writing: Upcoming free event

An open brainstorming session on 21st Century Detective Fiction

6.00pm, Saturday 3rd December 2016, Rye Bookshop

The Reverend Ronald Knox wrote his famous Ten Commandments of detective fiction in 1929:

"No ghosts, no secret passages, no identical twins and no Chinamen. No hidden clues, no last minute criminal arrivals, no obscure science or poisons. No murderous detectives. No dissembling assistants."

The golden age of detective fiction - Agatha Christie, Josephine Tey, Dorothy L Sayers and Margery Allingham - followed his rules, most of the time, for very good reason.

Do these rules still work almost 90 years later? We live in a different world of DNA testing, mobile phones and the internet.

Should they be updated to reflect modern times? Do they still retain some element of literary merit?

Next Saturday, 3rd December at the Rye Bookshop, Maddy Coelho and Paul Youlten, better known as MP Peacock, author of Murder on the Strike of Five, (for details see September Newsletter below dated 25 August) will be leading the investigation into 'Should we rewrite the rules of detective fiction?' 

Come and help draft the new commandments.

 Former Headmaster in the Art Gallery with the Book 

Smarden Art Gallery on Thursday 15th December, 6-8 p.m. 

Jonty Driver will be reading from and answering questions about his new book, SOME SCHOOLS (available from the Rye Bookshop). There will be drinks and small eats, and a chance to see what is available in the gallery too.

Short Stories:  At its last meeting the Book Group had a lively discussion about the short story genre. We discussed two short stories by Katherine Mansfield, introduced by Gill Southgate. By chance, there was an article by Elizabeth Day on writing short stories, in the Daily Telegraph last week, prompted by the recent death of a master of the short story, William Trevor. Here is a link to the start of the article, and if you want to read the rest I can send you a cutting, kindly provided by Alan McKinna: CLICK HERE

Comic Writing: There's another interesting piece on a different literary topic, namely the work of    P G Wodehouse, in the Daily Telegraph of 29 November. This was prompted by the news that Wodehouse's literary archive has been acquired by the British Library, with the implications for the rehabilitation of this perhaps under-rated and unfairly demonised author. CLICK HERE to read the whole article. 

November Meeting, Friday 18th 7:00 for 7:30, Lower Court Hall.

The Life and Work of E F Benson, by Allan Downend

The talk will look at Fred Benson by; placing him within his family; following his education and early work; discussing his writing career; mentioning some of his friends and circle and finishing with his time in Rye. There will be some readings from his books. 

 

  

Our Speaker 

Most of Allan Downend's career was as Area Librarian for Chiswick and then after a major re-organisation he became a Heritage and Tourism Officer and did the restoration of Hogarth's House for the Tercentenary; exhibited permanently for the first time the local collection of paintings together with the restoration of several rooms at Boston Manor; conserved a local collection of C18th and early C19th books, organised Book Fairs, and began the bid to restore the museum and mansions in Gunnersbury Park. After early retirement he was Curator at Rye castle Museum until 2007. In 1985. together with others, he founded the E.F.Benson Society and ever since has been the Society's Secretary.

November 2016 Newsletter

Events at the Rye Bookshop: Thanks to Lizzie Lee for providing these details:

Our next event is Saturday 12th November at 3.30pm - we'll be welcoming Hugh Fraser (AKA Captain Hastings from TV's Poirot!) and Guy Fraser-Sampson in to sign copies of their books. Then as part of the Rye Christmas Fair on December 10th we'll host Gillian Draper from 11am-2pm, and she'll be signing copies of her book 'Rye: A History of a Sussex Cinque Port'.

The next Winchelsea Literary Society meeting is on Friday 18 November when Allan Downend will be talking about The Life & Work of E F Benson. The venue, as usual, is the Lower Court Hall, and the talk starts at 7:30 pm, with refreshments available from 7:00 pm

Book Group, 16 November Meeting

For those who want to download the two Katherine Mansfield stories ‘At the Bay’ and ‘Prelude’ they are available at:

www.KatherineMansfieldSociety.org/short-stories-by-Katherine-Mansfield

Alternatively you can just click here 

Thanks to Gillian Southgate, who choice this is, for providing this helpful information

Gillian is also our speaker at this Friday's Literary Society meeting.

She has an Honours degree and a Master of Arts in English and American Literature from the University of Kent. She taught the subject at undergraduate level at Canterbury Christ Church University until she retired. A short spell in her youth was spent training as a journalist on Warwickshire and Worcestershire Life magazine in Leamington Spa but she gave it up for the academic life.  She’s been published in academic journals, in magazines, has written literary criticism for students and bookgroups, and regularly wins prizes in The Oldie and The Spectator poetry competitions. Between 2004 and 2008, she was a Fellow of Jane Franklin Hall at the University of Tasmania and gave the Governor’s Lady Hamilton lecture in Hobart in 2005 on  the literature on the USA. Here in Winchelsea she’s spoken three times to the Literary Society on the subjects of Katherine Mansfield, The Bloomsbury Group and Geoffrey Chaucer. This Friday's talk is entitled: ‘How America found its Writing Voice.’

 

Two events at the Rye Festival, reviewed by Gillian Southgate

The Martin Wimbush talk on Betjeman and Larkin took place in the Community Hall last Sunday, 25^th September. He punctuated his dramatic deliveries with readings from Bennett’s book:

Six Poets: Hardy to Larkin, quoting verbatim from Bennett’s linking pieces. It was well done, but reinforced my feeling about performance poetry. I agree with Andrew Motion that the poem and the reader make a private compact, and that a poem will always be understood individually, rather than collectively. That said, I could hear well Larkin’s debt to Hardy, and whilst I know Betjeman was a fine chronicler of his times, I liked the Larkin poetry so much more.  But that’s a personal view.  The audience seemed very pleased, and Martin Wimbush was completely professional in his delivery, and word-perfect.

Joan Bakewell, on Wednesday 27^th, talked about ageing and the up, rather than the downside, of it.  She was enormously engaging, funny, and made sure that what she said would be well received by most of the people attending. Things that got better as one aged were the availability of music, relationships with grandchildren and an awful lot more.  Things she lamented were the dying art of handwriting, the fact of small children being the total focus of family life, rather than the family unit itself, and the increasing if slow loss of hearing and eyesight. She drew in the audience very quickly, and there were a number of questions including one about her status in the BBC, which she responded to seriously and informatively. Everyone enjoyed her talk, and there was a rush to buy her book, being sold at the front by Lizzie from the Rye bookshop, and signed by Joan herself.

Newsletter, October 2016

Rye Festival: This year's festival has included several "Literary" events, including The Oldie's Literary Lunch at the George on 21 September (Speakers: Alison Weir on "Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen"; Ferdinand Mount on "English Voices"; and Wensley Clarkson on "Sexy Beasts: The Real Inside Story of the Hatton Garden Mob"), 

Talks were also given in the course of the Festival by: Bridget Keenan (Full Marks for Trying), Anna Pavord (Landskipping: Painters, Ploughmen and Places), Andreas Prindl (Henry James), David Lough (No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money), Thomas Grant (Jeremy Hutchinson's Case Histories), Anne Sebba (Les Parisiennes), Henry Jeffreys (Empire of Booze), Loyd Grossman (Benjamin West and the Struggle to be Modern), Jane Grant (In the Steps of Exceptional Women), Joan Bakewell (Stop the Clocks), Thomas Mogford (Murder in a Seaside Town).

 Other Rye Festival events with a "literary" flavour included a showing of the film of Stella Gibbons's "Cold Comfort Farm" and Martin Wimbush's celebration of John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Alan Bennett.

If you have enjoyed any of these events, or the books talked about, why not write a short review for the blog?

Jonty Driver will be at the Rye Bookshop on 26 October, 6-8 pm talking about his new book, Some Schools. (See below in August newsletter for more details)

The October meeting of the Winchelsea Literary Society is on Friday 21 October, when Gillian Southgate will be talking about "How America Found its Writing Voice"

Monthly Newsletter; a new feature of the blog: September 2016

In future, I shall include on the blog a monthly newsletter-style post, with announcements about recent and forthcoming meetings, and other topical matters. I'll aim to post each month's issue in the last week of the previous month, so this is the September 2016 inaugural issue.

Contributions are welcome, for example news of forthcoming events or broadcasts. Next month it would be good to have some reviews of literary events at the Rye Arts Festival. Any volunteers?

 Thanks to Hilary Roome for the following announcement:

" Please can you post under events the forthcoming Lit Soc outing to the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury?  This is to see the National Theatre production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time on Thursday 9 March at 2.30pm.  I have block reserved 28 tickets and friends and family are welcome too.

People should let me know if they want a ticket. Cost £26.77, but this will rise a little if fewer people come. At present we are assuming people will make their own way, but a coach could be hired if that is the consensus. Tickets must be paid for by Christmas."

"The Good Terrorist"  On Saturday, 27 August, Channel 4 broadcast a documentary  about John Harris, the subject of Jonty Driver's book "The Man with the Suitcase" reviewed here on the blog last November.

"Murder on the Strike of Five": Recently published, in good time for the centenary of the Russian Revolution next year, this book is by two Winchelsea residents, writing under the pseudonym M P Peacock. Modesty forbids my revealing their true identities, but the book is available from Amazon for £7.99 (paperback) or £2.99 (e-book for Kindle) It is a murder mystery set mostly on a train on the Trans-Siberian Railway, against the background of the political and social upheaval going on in Russia in 1917.

"Some Schools"  Jonty Driver's new book about his experiences as a schoolteacher and headmaster is due out on 1 September, and can be preordered from Amazon. Here is a review by Sir Anthony Seldon, one of Jonty's successors as Master of Wellington College.:

"I followed Jonty's career closely over subsequent years, years he describes with such poignancy in the pages of this book. He writes beautifully about schools, a subject that fascinates all of us, but which is rarely written about well. His range of experience is mind-boggling. After working at Sevenoaks, an independent school, he went to what was then South Humberside to be head of sixth form at a pioneering state school. He subsequently became head of three very different schools: the Island School in Hong Kong, serving predominantly ex-pats, then back to the UK to become Head of Graham Greene's old school, Berkhamsted, and finally, Master of Wellington College. Jonty has written an important book which should be read by all who care about schools. No one else has had such a combined impact on politics, schools and literature. It is a remarkable story."

For further details, click HERE