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'Her touch is sure, her description admirable. The reader gets a
whiff of crushed thyme and of dew on dust as the author tells of
Pindar's poetic adventure into Thessaly' TimesKeywords: Pindar
Thessaly Whiff Thyme Admirable
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The Fourth Pig (Paperback)
Naomi Mitchison; Introduction by Marina Warner
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R443
R381
Discovery Miles 3 810
Save R62 (14%)
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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An enchanting collection that introduces the author and activist
Naomi Mitchison to a new generation of readers The Fourth Pig,
originally published in 1936, is a wide-ranging collection of fairy
tales, poems, and ballads that reflect the hopes and forebodings of
their era but also resonate with those of today. From a retelling
of "Hansel and Gretel" to the experimental title story, a dark
departure from "The Three Little Pigs," this book is a testament to
the talents of Naomi Mitchison (1897-1999), who was an
irrepressible phenomenon-a prominent Scottish political activist as
well as a prolific author. Mitchison's work, exemplified by the
tales in this superb new edition, is stamped with her
characteristic sharp wit, magical invention, and vivid political
and social consciousness. Marina Warner, the celebrated scholar of
myths and fairy tales and writer of fiction, provides an insightful
introduction to Mitchison as a remarkable writer and personality.
'As in a good novel, the people, their feelings and reactions are
instantly recognisable and as fresh and immediate today as they
were then' GUARDIAN 'She writes vividly and movingly' DAILY
TELEGRAPH 26th September 1939. I am beginning to wonder whether the
point of a place like this may be that it will keep alive certain
ideas of freedom which might easily be destroyed in the course of
this totalitarian war... Born in Edinburgh, Naomi Mitchison spent
most of the Second World War in the fishing village of Carradale on
Kintyre, her home until her death aged 101. Her life was crowded
with incident, and her attitudes to events predictably forceful,
original and honest. Throughout the war she kept a diary at the
request of the research organisation Mass Observation, in which she
recorded both the momentous events of the time, and also how one
(albeit extraordinary) family and their friends lived, what they
hoped for and what actually happened. Her diaries developed far
beyond the confines of a social document. Written with the passion
of a poet combined with the intellectual curiosity of a radial
thinker, they provide a unique and valuable document of the period.
Introduced by Donald Smith. Set in Rome during Nero's reign of
terror, The Blood of the Martyrs is a disciplined historical novel
tracing the destruction of one cell of the early church. With a
cast of slaves, ordinary Roman people, exiles and entertainers, it
is thorough in its historical interpretation and in its
determination to make the past accessible and readable. Written in
1938-9, the novel contains many symbolic parallels to the rise of
European fascism in the 1930s and the desperate plight of
persecuted minorities such as the Jews and the left-wing activists
with whom Naomi Mitchison personally campaigned at the time. With
the invasion of Britain a real possibility, she felt compelled to
write a testament to the power of human solidarity which, even
faced with death, can overcome the worst that human evil can
achieve. The Blood of the Martyrs is the least autobiographical of
Mitchison's major works of fiction, yet, with its implicit credo,
is her most passionately self-revealing.
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To the Chapel Perilous (Paperback)
Naomi Mitchison; Introduction by Michael D. Amey; Interview of Raymond H. Thompson
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R538
Discovery Miles 5 380
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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In his 1999 Introduction to the first reprint of this novel from
1955 - a year of the Cold War that began with the Baghdad Pact and
ended with the official start of the Vietnam War - Raymond H.
Thompson described Naomi Mitchison's contribution to the Arthurian
tradition as 'not only a comic masterpiece, but a guidebook into
spiritual growth'. She achieves this by drawing on her own
experience as a journalist to explore the fantastic events
surrounding King Arthur and the Holy Grail through the eyes of two
young reporters - on competing newspapers, with mid-twentieth
century values and skills - as they follow the breaking stories and
conflicting accounts of the grail quest. Michael Amey, who writes
the Introduction to this new edition, points out that her approach
was not universally liked by her fellow writers. Tolkien for one
objected to her introduction of 'a curious and disturbing blend' of
journalists and 'dwarfs with photographic apparatus'. Amey himself
argues that To the Chapel Perilous is in name and fact a 'call to
adventure' in which Mitchison sets out 'to tell a story of how
stories are told'.
Ancient Greek history and politics fascinated Naomi Mitchison, and
in particular the long antagonism or rivalry of Athens and Sparta.
In this, her second novel, she investigates the two city states
through Alxenor, a young man from the tiny island of Poieessa,
which changes hands as the balance of power changes. He does not
choose his loyalty in a theoretical way, but as he experiences
rough treatment from both. By Alxenor's day, Athens had declined
from the golden age of Perikles, and the city was prone to bully
smaller entities, but he is forced to recognise the much worse
reality of Spartan civilisation, with iron discipline, cruelty and
loss of individuality. Eventually, Mitchison came to see even the
twentieth century in terms of struggles between Athens and Sparta,
democracy and totalitarianism. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor
of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
Naomi Mitchison, daughter of a distinguished scientist, sister of
geneticist J B S Haldane, was always interested in the sciences,
especially genetics. Her novels did not tend to demonstrate this,
and she did not publish a Science Fiction novel until almost forty
years into her fiction-writing career. Isobel Murray's Introduction
here argues that it is by no means 'pure' Science Fiction: the
success of the novel depends not only on the extraordinarily
variety of life forms its heroine encounters and attempts to
communicate with on different worlds: she is also a very credible
human, or Terran, with recognisibly human emotions and a dramatic
emotional life. This novel works effectively for readers who
usually eschew the genre and prefer more traditional narratives.
Explorers like Mary are an elite class who consider curiosity to be
Terrans' supreme gift, and in the novel she more than once takes
risks that may destroy her life. Her voice, as she records her
adventures and experiments, is individual, attractive and
memorable. Isobel Murray is Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish
Literature at the University of Aberdeen.
Small Talk... avoids the temptation of a full-blown 'My Life and
Times' type of autobiography and presents instead a recreation of
childhood years in Oxford before the First World War - a
child's-eye view of the family, the friends, the servants, the pets
and the holidays in Scotland and Cornwall that made up that
childhood. It is as much concerned with her own development as an
amateur field botanist as with the occasions when the adult world
intruded, when 'Uncle Richard' (Lord Haldane) might lead the
younger members of the family out to the wash-house to watch the
messy business of heating wax to take the impression of the Great
Seal of England. If Lord Baden-Powell and Andrew Lang appear
briefly, it is less as famous figures of the period, but rather as
irritating visitors with passions either for tying knots or talking
about fairies who interrupted the pleasures of raiding the kitchen
garden for fruit, or reading at night behind the curtains of the
drawing-room. There are glimpses of her reactions to scientific
theories, as they reached her in repercussions from her father's
work, and to the High Tory politics of her formidable mother. Small
Talk... is a precise, vivid picture of the people and manners of a
world which has receded so rapidly that it is now further from the
experience of people today as the other side of the moon. In
another sense, though, it is a timeless picture of childhood
itself. The introductory essay by Ali Smith "The Woman From The Big
House" was first first published in Chapman 50.
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The Conquered (Paperback)
Naomi Mitchison; Introduction by Isobel Murray
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R623
Discovery Miles 6 230
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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The Conquered was young Naomi Mitchison's first novel, published in
1923, just five years after the end of the First World War, in
1918. Mitchison chose to write about wars, but about historic ones,
Julius Caesar's bloody and gradual conquest of Gaul. Instead of
Caesar's serene lists of victories and setbacks, we have the impact
of these wars on her Gallic hero Meromic. Profound and traumatic.
From being heir to a proud tribe, the Veneti, he becomes by turns a
slave, a revenge killer, a wanted man - and a slave again, with a
severed right hand, a man looking to end it all. But his life was
remediably complicated by his loyalty to and affection for Titus
Barrus, the Roman who bought him, and treated him as man, not
brute. His conflicts of loyalties are powerfully central. Mitchison
was conscious that after the Great War there was still fighting in
Ireland. Just as her natural and immediate sympathies were for the
Gauls under Vercingetorix fighting the Roman giant, we are shown
her own contemporary sympathies were with the Irish against the
might of the British Empire. With an Introduction by Isobel Murray.
Introduced by Naomi Mitchison. Set over two thousand years ago on
the calm and fertile shores of the Black Sea, Naomi Mitchison's The
Corn King and the Spring Queen tells of ancient civilisations where
tenderness, beauty and love vie with brutality and dark magic. Erif
Der, a young witch, is compelled by her father to marry his
powerful rival, Tarrik the Corn King, so becoming the Spring Queen.
Forced by her father, she uses her magic spells to try and break
Tarrik's power. But one night Tarrik rescues Sphaeros, an Hellenic
philosopher, from a shipwreck. Sphaeros in turn rescues Tarrik from
near death and so breaks the enchantment that has bound him. And so
begins for Tarrik a Quest - a fabulous voyage of discovery which
will bring him new knowledge and which will reunite him with his
beautiful Spring Queen.
Naomi Mitchison published her first novel, The Conquered, in 1923.
In her more than seventy succeeding books she has produced an
extraordinary out-put, especially in the novel and the short story.
This selection of the shorter fiction is intended to illustrate her
range and achievement over more than fifty years. Beyond This Limit
was the result of a unique co-operative partnership with
illustrator Wyndham Lewis, and story and pictures are here first
reproduced from the limited edition of 1935. The other contents
range from a story of the cave painters of Lascaux, through
Mitchison's major fictional preoccupations, ancient Greece,
Scotland, Africa, to a story of post-holocaust Scotland first
published in 1982. Central to all of them is a very individual
intelligence constantly examining the politics of power in human
relationships, including sexual ones. Edited with an Introduction
by Isobel Murray, Emeritus Professor of Modern Scottish Literature
at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland.
This collection, which Naomi Mitchison published in 1957, is
recognisably a 'Carradale book', containing as it does vivid and
realistic stories and poems of the landscape and the people.
Mitchison had moved to the village in Kintyre, on the west coast of
Scotland, some twenty years before and was still much involved in
its affairs, supporting the fishing fleet and running her own small
farm. Yet, as Moira Burgess suggests in her Introduction to this
new edition, these thirteen stories and fourteen interspersed short
poems and songs do not make a straightforward, celebratory,
collection. The first five stories have historical settings in
Caithness and Orkney, with the rest set in the contemporary West
Highlands - some drawing on Highland myth and legend. And then, as
Burgess writes, 'tucked modestly and apparently at random' is 'Five
Men and a Swan' - 'a fine story, probably her best, a classic of
Scottish literature'. Mitchison's years of intense involvement with
the community were in fact drawing to an end. From the early 1960s
onwards, she applied her energy and enthusiasm to the cause of the
Bakgatla tribe in the newly independent country of Botswana. Her
writing would turn to African themes, and, in 'a marvellous late
flourish', to science fiction. Seen in this light, the book may be
not so much a celebration as a coda to Mitchison's Carradale years.
In 1957, Naomi Mitchison enjoyed two months 'of observation and
thought' as she travelled in parts of postcolonial West Africa. She
was the guest of friends new and old and, in Ghana, stayed at the
Press Hotel, in her then role as a correspondent with The
Manchester Guardian. Her reflections are presented in chapters - on
social bars and classes, language, words, history, religion,
morals, education, politics, clothes, art and music - as she pulls
together her view of the ways in which 'Other People's Worlds', at
different stages of development, impact on one another. 'Perhaps',
she concludes, 'it is really everyone's world'. Fasten your seat
belts, for the delights of Naomi Mitchison's 1981 overview of her
travel writing from the 1920s onwards. Drawn from her writings as
an author, journalist, letter writer and diarist 'Mucking Around.
Five Continents over Fifty Years' is the memoir of an enthusiastic
traveller and outspoken observer of 'other countries' - that is,
countries across the world as visited from Scotland. The accounts
are divided into four sections or bearings: South-West-by-North,
West-by-East, East-by-South-East and South.
'We story-tellers have a delightful time playing with history,
perhaps finding something fascinating, perhaps making dreadful
mistakes.' Here, in The Oath-Takers, the 'central maypole round
which the people ... must swing and fall' is Charlemagne, and one
of 'the people' a young man who makes his journey to manhood in a
world of feudalism and a powerful Church. In the second short
novel, Sea-Green Ribbons, the reader enters the political,
religious and social tumult of the English Civil War through the
story and choices of a young woman, Sarah, from a radical Leveller
family in London.
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