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A Literary Christmas: An Anthology
0£13.00If then, there is to be a festival, why should it not be the festival of Christmas?’, asked Arnold Bennett. For as long as Christmas has been celebrated poets and writers have sought to explore every aspect of it, whether the story of the nativity, or the festive traditions that have grown up over the centuries. A Literary Christmas is a seasonal compendium that collects together poems, short stories and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’s ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new – from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Benjamin Zephaniah’s ‘Talking Turkeys’, from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to P G Wodehouse’s wry short story about Christmas on a diet. Enjoy a convivial Christmas Day as described by Samuel Pepys, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot or Nancy Mitford. Venture out into the snow in the company of Jane Austen, Henry James and Dickens’s ever-popular Mr Pickwick. Entertain the children with the seasonal tales of Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Grahame and Oscar Wilde.
For any lover of great literature, A Literary Christmas is the perfect gift. As a companion to the book, ‘A literary Christmas’ is also being released as a 2CD set at the same time. The audio recordings on the two discs feature readings of many of the same poems and prose extracts from the book. -
Aeneid Book VI
0£12.98In a momentous publication, Seamus Heaney’s translation of Book VI of the Aeneid, Virgil’s epic poem composed sometime between 29 and 19 BC, follows the hero, Aeneas, on his descent into the underworld. In Stepping Stones, a book of interviews conducted by Dennis O’Driscoll, Heaney acknowledged the importance of the poem to his writing, noting that ‘there’s one Virgilian journey that has indeed been a constant presence, and that is Aeneas’s venture into the underworld. The motifs in Book VI have been in my head for years – the golden bough, Charon’s barge, the quest to meet the shade of the father.’
In this new translation, Heaney employs the same deft handling of the original combined with the immediacy of language and flawless poetic voice as was on show in his translation of Beowulf, a reimagining which, in the words of Bernard O’Donoghue, brought the ancient poem back to life in ‘a miraculous mix of the poem’s original spirit and Heaney’s voice’.
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Alan Bennett: Triple Bill
0£10.00A collection of three BBC Radio dramas from award-winning author Alan Bennett. A Visit from Miss Prothero features Mr Dodsworth, a retiree who has all the time in the world. Then he has a visitor from his old firm – Miss Prothero, who is eager to tell him all the news… In Say Something Happened, a naive, inexperienced social worker calls on an elderly couple – but does she need more help than they do? And in Two in Torquay, a middle-aged man and a middle-aged woman engage in polite conversation in a hotel on the Cornish Riviera. But neither is quite who they appear to be. Who is deceiving whom? Amusing, ironic and affectionate, these three adaptations feature Hugh Lloyd, Patricia Routledge, Judi Dench, Thora Hird, Brian Wilde, Imelda Staunton and Alan Bennett himself.
1 CD. 1 hr 15 mins.
