William Gibson’s new book Zero History came out a few days ago. It’s a taut thriller about information and the power of design, and fetishises a designer who uses deadstock fabric, of a quality impossible to find new, to make clothing with shapes inspired by the golden age of workwear. The designer doesn’t release in [...]
Entries Tagged as 'books'
Writing East Anglia
March 5th, 2010 No Comments
If you enjoy this blog, you may well be interested in a Writing East Anglia workshop at Writers’ Centre Norwich, with Jeremy Page, an author steeped in the local landscape. He writes sad, soulful books about loss, which seems to be the only appropriate form for the hardness of the fens. But perhaps other, more [...]
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PD James
December 27th, 2009 3 Comments
“East Anglia has a particular attraction for detective novelists; the remoteness of the east coast, the dangerous encroaching North Sea, the bird-loud marshes, the emptiness, the great skies, the magnificent churches and the sense of being in a place alien, mysterious and slightly sinister, where it is possible to stand under friable cliffs eaten away [...]
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Cambridge Festival of Ideas
October 21st, 2009 No Comments
Just a quick note to say that the Cambridge Festival of Ideas starts today. Their programme is hugely wide, from a plant orchestra at the Botanic Gardens to curators at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology sharing their favourite pieces from the museum, to an Intaglio printmaking workshop, plus talks, performances, hands on workshops. It’s [...]
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East Anglian Herbal
October 18th, 2009 No Comments
I’ve written before about East Anglian illuminated manuscripts – the area was a byword for particular beauty in Medieval times. Bibliodyssey (a great book illustration blog) has a wonderful post on lovely pattern book – Tudor rather than earlier, part bestiary, part herbal, a collection of interesting things that caught the artist’s eye.
The animals range [...]
Tags: illuminated manuscripts
Akenfield
July 9th, 2009 No Comments
It’s forty years away since the publication of Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, but it still has an unmistakeable air of truth about it. For the uninitiated, it is a documentary book by Ronald Blythe who describes it as “this statement about living in an East Anglian village at the beginning of the second [...]
Tags: akenfield · books about east anglia · documentary · east anglia · farming · history · oral history · suffolk · village life
When a monkey is set to diagnose a bear
June 20th, 2009 1 Comment
Who knew that East Anglia was a noted producer of illuminated manuscripts back in the fourteenth century? Some of the best psalters now known of were painted at Gorleston, near Great Yarmouth. One of the most famous, the Macclesfield Psalter, was bought for the nation and is now at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
There is [...]
Tags: animals dressed up · cambridge · east anglia · fitzwilliam museum · gorleston · illuminated manuscripts · illustration · macclesfield psalter · psalter
Cambridge Wordfest
April 21st, 2009 No Comments
Cambridge Wordfest starts in earnest on Friday, with a whole roster of writers converging on the city for talks, workshops, interactive thingummies and more. Highlights include Andrew Motion in his last week as poet laureate reflecting on what he has learnt, Michael Morpurgo, David Starkey, Joanne Harris – the list goes on. There are practical [...]
Tags: authors · books · cambridge · lectures · literary festival · wordfest · writers · writing workshops