In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new short history of literacy and reading by Belinda Jack
For Rene Descartes, ‘Reading all the great books is like a conversation with the most honourable people of earlier centuries who were their authors’, while for John Ruskin, ‘Reading is precisely a conversation with men who are both wiser and more interesting than those we might have occasion to meet ourselves.’
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads a rare but revealing extended interview with one of fantasy fiction’s greatest writers
When John Steinbeck was once asked how he went about writing, he replied, ‘With a pencil.’ Some writers are reluctant to give away too much about their inspiration, their influences, their thinking and writing and editing processes, as if wanting to perpetuate the Romantic fallacy that genius and inspiration just strike and that the lucky, ‘gifted’ individual is driven to pick up a pen and write down what the Muse dictates.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a lesser-known Allan Quatermain novella
Maiwa’s Revenge is not a major novel in the H. Rider Haggard canon. Indeed, it’s a ‘minor’ novel even in terms of size and scale, running to just over 120 pages in the wonderful Macdonald illustrated edition from the 1960s which I own. And yet despite its status as a minor work in his oeuvre, Maiwa’s Revenge is worth reading, and worth a review (of sorts) here, not least because it features Rider Haggard’s most enduringly popular character, Allan Quatermain, ‘the Indiana Jones of Victorian literature’.
Maiwa’s Revenge, first published in 1888 shortly after Rider Haggard had enjoyed runaway successes with King Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain, and She within the space of just a couple of years, seems to have been churned out at speed. Set in South Africa, it’s really two loosely linked stories in one, which Quatermain relates to his friends as they have a story-sharing evening.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a classic fantasy novel that responds to the epic poem Beowulf
History, they say, is written by the victors. Although this isn’t universally true – there are many testaments and narratives by those who were on the losing side, or who were victim to tyrannies or empires which overran or subjugated them – it’s certainly broadly true of literature. If we think of Anglo-Saxon literature, for every ‘Battle of Maldon’ – the poem telling of the Saxons’ defeat at the hands of the Vikings in Essex in 991 – there are many examples of triumph, victory, and glory, of which Beowulf is the supreme example.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Tom Burnam’s little-known dictionary of misinformation
Joan of Arc wasn’t French. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone. Winston Churchill didn’t coin the phrase ‘iron curtain’. The ‘grey’ in ‘greyhound’ has nothing to do with the colour. The Wright Brothers weren’t the first aviators to build a heavier-than-air flying craft. Contrary to the title of a famous film, Krakatoa is actually west of Java.