There are many reasons to celebrate the Dr Who of the BBC TV science fiction series fame – although in the context of this blog I cannot recall what Rosemary Sutcliff thought of it. However, she thought very highly of books and of libraries, from whom she often accepted invitations to talk with young and old alike, writing as she did for “children aged 8 to 88”. Her research depended upon the many books she borrowed from the London Library. This challenging picture from a library was tweeted by the admirable, lively Seven Stories, Britain’s gallery and archive that celebrates the wonderful world of children’s literature.
Posts Tagged ‘Doctor Who’
“Books – the best weapons in the world!” | Dr Who
Posted in Sutcliff Discovery of the Day, tagged books, Doctor Who, libraries, science fiction on 30/06/2012 | 2 Comments »
rosemary sutcliff

"An impish ... irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
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rosemary sutcliff

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in praise of rosemary sutcliff
Guardian newspaper editorial 'in praise of' Rosemary Sutcliff, published in 2011,
Rosemary Sutcliff's 1954 children's classic The Eagle of the Ninth (still in print more than 50 years on) is the first of a series of novels in which Sutcliff, who died in 1992, explored the cultural borderlands between the Roman and the British worlds – "a place where two worlds met without mingling" as she describes the British town to which Marcus, the novel's central character, is posted.Marcus is a typical Sutcliff hero, a dutiful Roman who is increasingly drawn to the British world of "other scents and sights and sounds; pale and changeful northern skies and the green plover calling". This existential cultural conflict gets even stronger in later books like The Lantern Bearers and Dawn Wind, set after the fall of Rome, and has modern resonance. But Sutcliff was not just a one-trick writer.
The range of her novels spans from the Bronze Age and Norman England to the Napoleonic wars. Two of her best, The Rider of the White Horse and Simon, are set in the 17th century and are marked by Sutcliff's unusually sympathetic (for English historical novelists of her era) treatment of Cromwell and the parliamentary cause. Sutcliff's finest books find liberal-minded members of elites wrestling with uncomfortable epochal changes. From Marcus Aquila to Simon Carey, one senses, they might even have been Guardian readers.
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