Listening to a fascinating interview with David Hockney on radio with Andrew Marr. (On BBC Radio 4). He describes himself as a “picture maker”. It immediately made me think that I am wrong always to say that Rosemary was a ‘story teller’. She was a story maker.
David Hockney the picture maker | Rosemary Sutcliff the story maker
26/12/20112011 by Anthony Lawton
Posted in Autobiography & Biography | 1 Comment
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rosemary sutcliff
"An impish ... irreverent writer of genius" (The Guardian)
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- Sutcliff's Life
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- Illustrators of Rosemary Sutcliff's historical fiction, re-tellings, and children’s stories books (up-dated) | 1950-95
- The Eagle of the Ninth Film | Summary Film and Book Story
- The 1997 Encyclopedia of Fantasy view on eminent award-winnng British writer Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-92) | “An imagination … powerful enough to create startling pictures of what could have been.
past posts
the guardian newspaper in praise of rosemary sutcliff
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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rosemary sutcliff
Given Rosemary Sutcliff’s ability to word-paint (the miniaturist’s eye is so clear in the brush-work of her vividly detailed descriptive passages), maybe we could in fact call her a picture-maker as well?
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