Programme on BBC2 last night about Stephen Poliakoff's film on the European royal families in the period leading up to and during WW1. A wonderful clip at the end showing soldiers celebrating the armistice - including one of uniformed men dancing/waltzing together with huge grins on their faces. The sort of thing you file in your mind for future use (can't think when!)
posted by Lesley Telford at 8:53 AM

 
Changed the template - I was getting script errors on the old one. Still getting errors with this one.
posted by Lesley Telford at 8:54 PM

 
Faced with the eternal problem of sorting out books, I enjoyed Bookslut's How to weed your bookshelves. A lot of the books I find hard to part with are ones handed down from my mother. Many of these date from the 1930s and 1940s, and some are among my all time favourites - often re-read, guilty pleasures, now probably out of print.

Rowan Pelling's story (12 January) on Dodie Smith's 'I Capture the Castle' (now there's one I have never read) looks at this area of writing. The authors are almost all women: Stella Gibbons, Dorothy Whipple, Margery Sharp, Betty McDonald, early Monica Dickens. I recently found some of them mentioned on the Persephone Books site - see this on Gender Differences in Fiction (Ferdinand Mount). Some of my all time best: 'High Wages', Dorothy Whipple, 1930 (would make a wonderful TV drama; years ago I think I did check and it was made into a film back in the 40s or 50s); 'I lost my girlish laughter', Jane Allen, 1938; 'Britannia Mews', Margery Sharp.

This made me think of other favourite books - most recently William Boyd's Any Human Heart. Perhaps I should put a list together; they have to be books I would happily re-read (that is another issue - why do some people re-read books and others not?) NB - searched for Peter Vansittart's 'The Game and the Ground' but came up with nothing, sadly.

posted by Lesley Telford at 4:32 PM