Saturday, October 31, 2009

My hero / Ted Hughes by Michael Morpurgo

Ted Hughes


My hero Ted Hughes

Michael Morpurgo
Saturday 31 Octuber 2009


I
first met Ted Hughes down by the River Torridge in Devon where he was fishing. He was already by this time a huge literary hero of mine. As a teacher in junior schools I had listened to his Poetry in the Making with many classes of children, and been inspired with them to turn my hand to writing. There is no better invitation to write than this book. He simply says: we can all do this. We are all storytellers, all poets, it is a question of keeping your eyes and ears open, and your heart too. And listening hard to the music of the words we use.

That meeting down by the river was to change my life profoundly. He was a near neighbour, a great friend, and a huge supporter of Farms for City Children, the educational charity Clare, my wife, and I began over 30 years ago. He believed, as we did, that for a city child the experience of living and working in the countryside could be as life-changing as a great book or a great poem.
We collaborated on a book about the farm, All Around the Year, and from then on regularly showed each other work in progress. Can you imagine how encouraging that was for a young writer still finding his voice? When my children's novel War Horse failed to win the Whitbread prize, he took me out for the day, not to console me, but to tell me that I had written a fine book, and that I would write a finer one.
Shortly before his early death, he and I worked together to create the post of children's laureate, because he believed, as I did, that someone should be out banging the drum and blowing the trumpet for the best of children's literature.
He may be gone, but he and his work remain unforgettable.

Saturday, October 24, 2009

My Hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser


Antonia Fraser


My Hero: Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM


Antonia Fraser
Saturday 24 October 2009 00.05 BST


W
hat fires up a love of history in a young person? I have come to the conclusion that for every celebrated historian who sets the youthful imagination ablaze, there are quite as many quirky individuals, in my case a Catholic nun at a convent school to which I was sent, initially as a Protestant, at the age of 14. It is true that I had already discovered history for myself. I regarded it as a private, even secret pleasure; my parents had both been classicists at university. As a romantic eldest child, I dreamed of castles and queens – and of course knights and princes, princes charming. But oddly enough no history was officially taught at the Dragon School, Oxford, which I had attended for four years, something I have recently checked from the printed reports, in case I had, in that useful modern phrase, misremembered.


It was not until I reached St Mary's Convent, Ascot, that I encountered an inspired teacher of history who was as entranced by the subject as I was. Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM had educational qualifications summed up in the official history of the school as follows: she "sort of blew in from Ireland". But she had the supreme qualification of enthusiasm: suddenly history was no longer private but an exciting public topic on which we were all entitled – no, encouraged – to have views. I can still see her now, her cheerful, slightly rubicund face (the stiff white coifs and black habits of the 1940s tended to exaggerate the colours of the complexion) and soft Irish accent as she began with the words she pronounced as often as possible: "The Empress Maria Theresa . . ." Many years later, writing about Marie Antoinette, I criticised the empress quite strongly as a mother. For Marie Antoinette, unlike me, was 15th out of a family of 16, and also unlike me had a mother who paid little attention to her education. Suddenly I could hear Mother Mercedes's reproachful words in my ear and for a moment it seemed ungrateful to criticise the woman she admired, when she herself had done so much for me.


THE GUARDIAN





2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016





Wednesday, October 21, 2009

Francesca Simon / Top 10 Antiheroes



Francesca Simon's top 10 antiheroes

From Just William to Scarlett O'Hara, Tom Ripley to Molesworth, the author of the Horrid Henry books picks out her favourite suspects in a line-up of classic bad behaviour

Francesca Simon
The Guardian
Wednesday 21 Octubre 2009


Antiheroes (Molesworth, Scarlett O'Hara, Just William and Tom Ripley)
Bad examples ... Molesworth, Scarlett O'Hara, Just William and Tom Ripley. Photographs: Corbis/PR/AllStar

Francesca Simon was born in St Louis, Missouri, grew up in California, and attended both Yale and Oxford universities, where she specialised in Medieval Studies. Having worked as a freelance journalist, after her son Joshua was born in 1989 she started writing children's books full-time.
              Among the 50-plus books that have followed are the immensely popular Horrid Henry series, which has now sold more than 12m copies in 24 countries. The 17th book in the series, Horrid Henry Wakes the Dead, was published on October 1.

             "I have always loved books about rebels and non-conformists, people who swagger through life with a fierce edge and a stubborn refusal to behave themselves. No one in these books would ever win Miss Congeniality or Mr Nice Guy. Their faults definitely exceed their virtues.
              "I'm also partial to selfish, and self-obsessed characters (no surprises there), so I've picked some favourite anti-heroes and heroines. Let's face it, we all need to let our inner imp out sometimes."

 


1. The Amulet of Samarkand by Jonathan Stroud

I read book one of the Bartimaeus trilogy lying on a sofa, and did not get up until I'd finished. Jonathan Stroud has had a brilliant idea, that Britain is secretly run by a cabal of magicians who get power by summoning and enslaving "djinnies". These djinns hate their masters, and of course will do anything to break free. Our young anti-hero, Nathaniel, summons the sarcastic, powerful Bartimaeus, whom he orders to steal the Amulet from Nathaniel's nemesis. The witty, sarcastic Bartimaeus is a wonderful creation, and I loved the tense relationship he has with the arrogant, immature and somewhat amoral Nathaniel.

 

2. Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren

One of my all time favourite heroines, the outrageous Pippi does exactly as she pleases, because she's rich, strong enough to lift a horse, parent-free, and completely indifferent to what anyone else thinks about her. I loved the idea of a girl who tricked grown-ups and was a brilliant liar – or should I say storyteller?

 

3. Just William by Richmal Crompton

I never read Just William as a child and had to wait until I'd written several Horrid Henrys before I dared, as I was quite nervous that the two characters would be very similar. I was relieved to discover that William is actually much nicer than Henry, though they share a similar yearning for freedom and a love of plotting. I adore William's laziness, his disobedience, his refusal to be civilised. It's no accident his gang is called the Outlaws.

 

4. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer

Artemis is a swashbuckling anti-hero, a teenage criminal mastermind who devotes his ruthless intelligence to amassing loot and fighting fairies. Great fun, and a great example of the anti-hero as protagonist.

 

5. Molesworth by Geoffrey Willans

My friend the writer Eleanor Updale was horrified that I'd never read Molesworth, and insisted I buy the books last year, which I did. Molesworth, "the curse of St Custards" is an irredeemably lazy and sardonic schoolboy, trapped at a boarding prep school, where he battles the gruesome head boy, Grabber, (winner of the mrs joyful prize for raffia work), assorted mad masters, and the soppy Fotherington-Thomas. The books are unbelievably funny, and the illustrations by Ronald Searle have an irresistible gothic creepiness.

 

6. Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson

Calvin is a stroppy, imaginative six-year-old at war with the world, Hobbes is his stuffed tiger who comes to life when no one else is around. Our whole family adores Calvin and cheers him on. The funniest, and most delightful modern comic.

 

7. Struwwelpeter by Heinrich Hoffman

These 10 rhymed stories feature disobedient, truculent children who come to horrible ends. My favourite has always been Kaspar, the strong healthy boy who won't eat his soup, until he wastes away and dies on the fifth day. My siblings and I recited this story endlessly.

 

8. The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith

I discovered this book by accident while on holiday in France and staying with friends of my parents. I remember lying out in the Provence sun quite unable to believe what I was reading, as I'd never encountered an amoral psychopath as a novel's "hero". Utterly gripping and creepy, one of the books that you never forget. I also got sun stroke from lying outside reading for too long, but that's another story.

 

9. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Who could fail to be captivated by Scarlett O'Hara and her single-minded determination to have her own way and do whatever needs to be done, whether it's stealing her sister's fiance, or marrying yet another man just to spite Ashley Wilkes? What's fantastic about Scarlett is her incredible determination and bravery. She's also a rotten mother, two-faced, selfish, and a force of nature. I've read this book many, many times; I don't mean to, but Scarlett grabs me and I get swept away.

 

10. Paradise Lost by John Milton

I was stuck for a 10th choice, until my son Joshua reminded me about Paradise Lost. Milton's tormented and arrogant Satan, the fallen angel, is a great anti-hero, and demonstrates all too vividly the seductive attractiveness of the rebel who refuses to obey, despite the cost. You can feel Milton struggling to resist him.





Sunday, October 18, 2009

Edward Goldsmith / Environmentalist who founded 'Ecology' magazine and championed the green movement

Edward Goldsmith



Edward Goldsmith: Environmentalist who founded 'Ecology' magazine and championed the green movement


David McKittrick
Sunday 18 October 2009 23:00 BST


Edward Goldsmith devoted a lifetime to "green" causes and the promotion of ecology, spending decades preaching that industrialisation was endangering mankind and that major change was essential if the planet was to survive.
In one sense his approach was radical in that he tackled head-on many of the barely questioned tenets of western society. In another it was conservative in that his remedy was a return to old-fashioned, even primitive forms of political and social life.
The presence of both of these elements in his philosophy, together with the vigour he put into his campaigning, antagonised many and made him many enemies in the course of his long career. But he revelled in the combative. As an ecological pioneer he was often dismissed as cranky. Yet he lived long enough to see much which was initially derided as silly enter the political mainstream, both nationally and internationally.
His home page lists some of his diverse concerns, including biotech, climate, farming, forests, global governance, health, trade and globalisation, technology, waste and pollution. He listed, with what appeared suspiciously like pride, various criticisms that had been levelled at him over the years. "For some of my critics I am now a racist, fascist, neo-Nazi, and extreme right-wing ideologue," he wrote. "But in the past I have been referred to as a Bolshevik, a whacko-communist-liberal, an anarchist, a Jacobin, an omnivorous pseudo-ecological tribalist, a madman and a Palaeolithic counter-revolutionary."
As these epithets suggest, he was too much of an individualist to be slotted into any particular pigeon-hole. He did, however, regard himself as one of the founding fathers of what in time became the Green Party.
He could dish it out as well as take it. He regarded James Lovelock, who formulated the Gaia hypothesis that the earth constituted a superorganism, as an important figure. Yet he variously described some of his views as absurd, ridiculous and crazy.
Goldsmith cheerfully admitted that in his early days as an eco-warrior many people thought he too was touched, especially those who visited his home. "I had a compost toilet that cost me all my friends. They were sick from the smell of it," he remembered. "Quite a lot of people thought I was mad." Mad or not, he certainly had staying power in the ecological world, publishing and often editing a key magazine, The Ecologist, from the late 1960s until the late 1990s.
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Paris in 1928, Edward Réné David Goldsmith was the son of Frank Goldsmith, a well-off landowner and one-time Conservative MP. In his early years Teddy Goldsmith stayed in family hotels around France, before moving to London, where he initially lived in Claridges. Much of it was "one long holiday," he said, though there was a darker side: "Many of my relations died in Hitler's gas chambers," he later related.
A spell at Millfield School was followed by a move to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied politics, philosophy and economics. He completed his course but, he was to recall, "I realised while I was at Oxford that everything I was being taught was nonsense. It became quite clear that these people didn't know what they were talking about. Everything was compartmentalised. It was impossible to see the whole picture, so I determined to find out why this was the case, and what the whole picture might be."
The family money gave him the opportunity to travel widely. Anthropology "grabbed me," he remembered, and he traversed the Third World studying tribal life. This was not in itself unusual but what was different with Goldsmith was his belief that advanced societies had much to learn from people they regarded as primitive, backward and unenlightened.
"I spent a lot of time in Africa, in tribal societies," he explained. "One thing I became convinced of was that these were the only truly 'sustainable' societies I had ever seen. That word is used a lot nowadays, but then it meant nothing. It seemed extremely important to me, and here were people putting it into practice. Yet their very existence was threatened by the remorseless expansion of industrial society."
His experience left him with an indelible belief that commercialisation, industrialisation, and indeed modern finance structures, were all radically and dangerously wrong. He accused the World Bank, for example, of "financing the destruction of the tropical world, the extermination of its wildlife and the impoverishment and starvation of its human inhabitants."
He simultaneously believed that small was beautiful but also that the key lay in the bigger picture. This came out in his criticism of scientists, who, he argued, "cannot understand each other. They are looking at little bits of reality – that is why they cannot perceive the whole. They are victims of their own specialised disciplines."
It quickly became clear that he would be taking a practical as well as a theoretical approach. In the general election of February 1974 he stood in Suffolk as a "People Party" candidate, riding on a borrowed camel with the slogan "No Deserts in Suffolk. Vote Goldsmith." He lost his deposit but none of his campaigning zeal. This was fully deployed when the authorities thought of siting a nuclear power close to his home: he moved his desk to the site entrance and sat there, preventing diggers from starting work. It worked.
In 1969 he established The Ecologist, which would for decades provide a platform for his views. Funded by his brother, the late billionaire financier Sir James Goldsmith, it sent out the green message to a small but growing band of enthusiasts.
An early issue was a huge success when it was published as a book entitled A Blueprint for Survival. This is regarded as the most important of Goldsmith's many works, Jonathon Porritt describing it as "a get-real summons like no other."
Over the decades more and more people began to subscribe, at least in part, to the messages Goldsmith tirelessly emitted via The Ecologist and in speeches, books and other writings. Inevitably, fissures appeared. When he was described as right wing he responded: "If by right wing you mean conservative then I totally accept this criticism. I am a true conservative in the sense that I believe in the family, in the community, in religion and in tradition."
He could by no stretch of the imagination be described as any sort of conventional right-winger, but many green adherents moved away from him as their movement tended towards the left. Goldsmith did not regard this as a tragedy, perhaps because he relished argument so much. Anger and an element of polarisation were in fact part of his personal mission: "Why aren't more people angry?" he asked.
As Jonathan Porritt summed him up: "He could be withering about every political persuasion, and seriously loved getting people worked up as he challenged their complacent orthodoxies."
Asked in later life about his contribution, Goldsmith replied: "I hope I've helped. If in some small way I've helped to slow the runaway juggernaut that we've created, or make people aware of it, that has to be a good thing. I hope I have done that."

Edward Réné David Goldsmith, environmentalist: born 8 November 1928; married 1953 Gillian Pretty (one son, two daughters), 1981 Katherine James (two sons); died 21 August 2009. 



Saturday, October 17, 2009

My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler

Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen


My hero Fridtjof Nansen



Sara Wheeler
Saturday 17 October 2009 00.07 BST


P
olar exploration tends to attract more testosterone than talent, and in the Arctic department expeditions have generally concluded with an inglorious bout of shoe-eating. One man towers over the other ice-encrusted sledgers: Fridtjof Nansen, colossus of the glaciers. In August 1895, he and stoker Hjalmar Johansen battled to 86 degrees north on maple-wood skis, just 230 miles short of the pole. Theirs was the biggest single advance in polar travel for four centuries.

A long-faced Norseman with a touch of the archetypal brooding Scandinavian (as well as a hint of the Sphinx), Nansen was born near Christiania, the former name of Oslo, in 1861, and in the course of a tumultuous life became an outstanding scientist, diplomat and humanitarian as well as an explorer. He was a founder of neurology, discovering that nerve fibres, on entering the spinal cord, bifurcate into ascending and descending branches. They are still known as Nansen's fibres. A Nobel peace prize was among many laurels bestowed for his work as a League of Nations high commissioner, in the course of which he had originated the Nansen passport for refugees.


Following independence in 1905, he became his country's first ambassador to the Court of St James's, and at one point almost rose to the position of Norwegian prime minister. Perhaps that is why he was a better explorer (and writer) than the rest: he did other things – a man for all seasons. Nansen sensed at a profound level the "yearning after light and knowledge", and, almost uniquely, was able to marry that understanding to physical capability and snowcraft.
When I camped on the Greenland icecap, I sensed the ghostly presence of Nansen. (It was he, along with five companions, who made the first crossing of that huge country). Of all the frozen beards who had been there before me, only Nansen communicated a sense of the true subjugation of the ego that endeavour can bring. Failure, he acknowledged, would mean "only disappointed human hopes, nothing more". This great poet of northern latitudes concluded: "If we perish, what will it matter in the endless cycle of eternity?"

THE GUARDIAN



2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser

007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville

011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016