Currently Reading - Time and Place

Time and Place by Alan Sheridan

Mark Sheridan, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan's elder brother, and an ancestor of the author, is 'stage-struck'. Though his theatrical ambitions are thwarted by a slight stammer, he joins Beerbohm Tree's company as an unpaid 'walk-on'. He tells the story of his two years in the company and his relationship with Esmond, a young actor. Interspersed with this narrative are flashbacks to his earlier life: his childhood in China; his schooldays in Paris, visits to London and its theatres, his university days in Cambridge, eighteen months in St Petersburg, where he witnesses the beginning of the 1905 revolution. Famous names appear in these pages: Bernhardt and Duse; Irving and Terry; Mahler and Massenet; Melba and Caruso; Gide and Proust; G.E. Moore and E.M. Forster; Isadora Duncan and Stanislavsky; Lytton Strachey and Maynard Keynes. Sheridan brings back to life a long gone world in this elegant and erudite evocation of the turn of the 20th century.

I am reading this for the next meeting of my reading group where the author will be attending.

Tags: book, books, reading.

Comments

A Short History of the Elephant and Castle and Its Name

Last night I attended a lecture by local historian Stephen Humphrey who discussed the general history of the Elephant & Castle, focussing more particularly on what he called its heyday (between 1850 and 1940). This is part of a week-long art project ( The Elephant Project ) hosted in an empty unit on the first floor of the infamous shopping centre, aiming to chart some of the changes currently happening to the area. When an historian starts talking about the Elephant and Castle, there is one subject he can not possibly avoid, even if he wanted to. Indeed my unsuspecting announcement on Facebook that I was attending such talk prompted a few people to ask the dreaded question: Where does the name of the area come from, for realz? Panoramic view of the Elephant and Castle around 1960/61. Those of us less badly informed than the rest have long discarded the theory that the name comes from the linguistic deformation of "Infanta de Castille", a name which would have become at...

Rev. Peter Mullen's Blog

Rev. Peter Mullen is the chaplain to the London Stock Exchange and the rector of St Michael's Cornhill and St Sepulchre without Newgate in the City. Rev. Peter Mullen was also until recently a blogger. Sadly the result of his cyber labour seem to have been deleted but Google has thankfully cached some of it and I have saved a copy for posterity, just in case. The deletion of Rev. Mullen's writings might just have something to do with the fact that last week, the Evening Standard and then the Daily Mail published an article (the same article actually) about some of those very writings (even though the elements of said writings being quoted had been published in June this year, at the time of the blessing ceremony which took place between two members of the Church of England in St Bartholomew the Great - picture ). In the article, we learned what the Rev. thinks about gay people and what should be done to them: We ["Religious believers"] disapprove of homosexuality ...

pink sauce | life, with a pink seasoning

As of tonight, my blog Aimless Ramblings of Zefrog , that "place where I can vent my frustration, express ideas and generally open my big gob without bothering too many people" which will be 6 in a couple of months, becomes Pink Sauce . While the URLs zefrog.blogspot.com and www.zefrog.eu are still valid to access this page, the main URL now becomes www.pinksauce.co.uk. There is a vague plan to create a proper website for www.zefrog.eu to which the blog would be linked. Why Pink Sauce , you may ask. It is both simple and complicated. For several years, I have grown out of love for the name of the blog. It felt a bit cumbersome and clumsy. That said, I never really looked into changing it, seriously. Tonight, for dinner, I had pasta with a special pink sauce of my concoction ; single cream and ketchup. I know most people while feel nauseous at the very though of the mixture but trust me, it's gorgeous. Don't knock it till you've tried it. After having had my platte...

Pink Sauce

Search This Blog