Mostrando resultados por narrador "Richard Mitchley" en Todas las categorías

In the war a great volume of poetry was written, produced and published in books, periodicals, newspapers or letters back to home. We often think of war as a necessity. We fight for a more just and better world. We often fail. But in our poets we gain a truth and a morality that shocks us, consoles us and holds our values to the light. In this volume we hear poems from the front, from home, from soldiers, from auxiliaries, from friend and from foe.

Wilkie Collins was born on 8th January 1824 in Marylebone, London. He pursued his education at Mr Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury, Islington. Here, he began his literary career under unusual circumstances: the school bully would give him no peace until he had been told a bedtime story. This ‘little brute’ helped create one of England’s greatest writers.

The beautiful island of Ireland has endured a history that is pock-marked with struggle and oppression, with religious division and self-serving administrations. It has sacrificed its youth in wars, its generations in famines and emigration, but it has never forsaken its calling that Ireland is a beacon of dignity, humanity and a home for words and literature of every description. Across the centuries, whatever its joys or torments, its poets have assembled verse that speaks from its soul.

Love. Perhaps the one word solution for everything. An emotion, a state of mind that we strive for, search for. A wondrous force that binds, inspires, and a force that can spin out of control; unbalanced and fragile. Love reflects, changes and embraces us all. The capture of love in this life is a very special happening, it may only strike us once, and for some perhaps never. But what if those on the ‘other side’ have designs on us? What if their desire is just so strong that we can’t resist? Can true love survive?

Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that are difficult to achieve elsewhere. The City of Lights may be one of the glories of the world but for those whose three score and ten have passed it is the final resting place for some of the very finest of literary talents.

Poetry can sometimes be elusive, the real meaning layered beneath another. In this volume American poets give voice to their nation, their hopes, and their aspirations. Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson are joined by Poe, Holmes, Dunbar, and others to pleasure our ears and minds with a rambling stroll through their works. It doesn’t define America, but it captures her mood and the flavours of her soul in the early days of the American dream.

The sun has descended below the far horizon. The inky blackness of night begins to envelop the land. Day has gone, and the nocturnal times reveal themselves. But above the dark blanket the moon, whether waxing or waning, stands sentry, and around it vast clouds and swirls of stars regiment themselves. We look up in awe and wonder, frail beneath their vista. Our gloried poets are on hand, though, to capture word and deed, emotion and feeling, friend and foe.

Strictly speaking The Lake Poets were not a movement or school of poetry. They were only so named as such by The Edinburgh Review so that they could be disparaged. It was a spectacular backfire! The three main figures would be rightly seen as among the most monumental figures in English poetry - William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the underrated but immense Robert Southey, himself a 30-year poet laureate.

The name H H Munro is obscured beneath the literary mantle of his nom de plume; Saki. A writer of his times, the stories perfectly portray society’s whims and tastes in a delicate yet at times, barbed humour. A divine wit who conjured words into quite extraordinary works. Short stories have always been a sort of instant access into an author’s brain, their soul and heart. They can lift our lives into locations, people and experiences with a sweep of landscape, narration, feelings and emotions that is difficult to achieve elsewhere.

Wilkie Collins was born on 8th January 1824 in Marylebone, London. He pursued his education at Mr Cole’s private boarding school in Highbury, Islington. Here, he began his literary career under unusual circumstances: the school bully would give him no peace until he had been told a bedtime story. This ‘little brute’ helped create one of England’s greatest writers.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was born on May 12th, 1828 in London, England. Together with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, they developed and founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. It’s mission: to reform English art and return to the detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. The brotherhood's magazine, The Germ, was first published in 1850, with Rossetti contributing a poem, 'The Blessed Damozel', and a story about a fictional Italian artist inspired by a vision of a woman.

Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born on 29th January 1860 in Taganrog, on the south coast of Russia. His family life was difficult; his father was strict and overbearing, but his mother was a passionate story-teller, a subject Chekhov warmed to. As he later said; ‘our talents we got from our father, but our soul from our mother’. Chekhov wrote over 500 short stories which included many, many classics including ‘The Kiss’ and ‘The Lady with a Dog’. His collection ‘At Dusk’ won him the coveted Pushkin Prize when was only 26.

The vast varieties of flowers that exist provide an exceptional burst of vivid and subtle shades of colours, inspiring a smooth transition from petal to paper for so many of our greatest poets including Wordsworth, Tennyson, Burns, Swinburne and Coleridge....

In 1667, Dryden published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. This work established him as the pre-eminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate in 1668 and a couple of years later, historiographer royal (1670), as his talent encompassed many forms; from poetry to plays to translations. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697).

Born in 1797, her mother died when she was only 11 days old. Mary was then raised by her father, who remarried when she was four, with a liberal but informal upbringing. At 17 she began a relationship with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which was the bedrock of her life, although society viewed the unmarrieds somewhat differently. It was in this relationship that she nurtured and edited Shelley’s verse and wrote, at 21, her signature work, Frankenstein, for which she is so well known.

Whilst writer Charles Dickens needs no introduction, his Haunted House anthology might, not least because in his role as editor he introduces a formidable array of known and lesser-known literary talents.

Andrew Marvell was born in Winestead-in-Holderness, in the East Riding of Yorkshire on March 31st, 1621. He was educated at Hull Grammar School, and at the age of 13 he attended Trinity College, Cambridge, and eventually received his BA degree. It is thought that in 1642 Marvell travelled in Europe and, while England was embroiled in its civil war, remained there until 1647, mastering several languages including French, Italian and Spanish.

AD 1294. Caernarfon has fallen to Madog, and the Welsh uprising spreads like a wildfire. The four main warlords of Wales join forces to wreak havoc amongst the English settlers and rampage across the country in a frenzy of aggression born of a lifetime of servitude. One by one, Edward’s castles fall before the Welsh onslaught, but though there seems to be little reaction from the king, across the border, he musters his armies and plans the re-taking of his famed Ring of Steel.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5th, 1850 near Dieppe in France. Maupassant’s early life was badly torn when at age 11 (his younger brother Hervé was then five) his mother, Laure, a headstrong and independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace in order to obtain a legal separation from her husband. After the separation, Laure kept custody of her two boys. With the father now forcibly absent, Laure became the most influential and important figure in the young boy's life.

Dictionaries summon up many words, but none fulfill. Love itself is often ethereal, felt but only seen in a glance, a look, a fleeting touch. Part of love’s beauty is perhaps in the fact that the question never can be adequately answered; it's ephemeral, a chimera of the heart and only felt. Our own experiences are unique and personal to ourselves and of little help defining it for another.