One of the perks I value most about having a bookshop is that our talks series, such as it is (roughly a speaker a month between September – June) enables me to meet professionals in every field (the arts, sciences, even sports) who I would otherwise never have had the opportunity to meet. Some few are well-known to the public – hey! It´s a long way up here, the fee is risible, and the Old Waiting Room wherein the talks take place only holds 50 people tops (60 if they´re skinny).
Still, some serious names (serious names with big hearts) have been willing to make the perilous journey above Watford, eg, Joanna Trollope, David Aaronovitch, Richard Ingrams, Anne Stevenson, James Fleming, Tony Harrison, and the late (loved) (missed!) Miles Kington.
But forget famous; all our speakers are well-known within their field and have given some of the most spell-binding talks of all, enough to have created their very own fan club. (Just try dropping the name ‘Richard Lomas’ around these parts Dick´s the Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Durham and wait for the absolutely slavering response.) Anyway, all the talks begin at 7.30 and cost £5 (and that includes a glass of plonk no less.)
Barter Books
invites you to an evening with
FIONA SHAW ON LOVE POETRY
With Katrina Porteous
One of our finest classical actors, Fiona Shaw talks about her personal relationship with poetry, and introduces the most romantic project in the Cultural Festival for the Olympics, Peace Camp.
Created by Fiona Shaw and theatre and opera director Deborah Warner, Peace Camp is both an exploration of love poetry and a celebration of the extraordinary variety and beauty of our coastline.The project will take the form of a series of eight installations at locations encircling the coast of the UK from July 19th – 22nd, with one of the locations being Dunstanburgh Castle.
Award-winning Fiona Shaw is one of our best-known actors, with numerous stage credits at the National Theatre, Barbican, West End and on Broadway. She is also an accomplished film and TV actress, featuring as Aunt Petunia in the Harry Potter films and most recently in the TV series True Blood.
Now Shaw invites you to bring along your favourite love poems and join her in a conversation about love poetry in all its many forms. Your nomination may even be included in the soundscape being specially created for the installations within Peace Camp.
Fiona will be joined at this special event by the poet, historian and broadcaster Katrina Porteous – “one of the most exciting talents of the North East” (Alan Franks, The Times).
Time: 7.30 pm
Date: Thursday, April 19th, 2012
If you wish to receive mailshots regarding talks at Barter Books please send us your email address.
If you wish to continue receiving mailshots regarding talks at Barter Books I will continue to send them. If your email address changes, please let me know.
If you no longer wish to receive mailshots, please let me know and I will remove your name from our list of subscribers.
ALN VALLEY RAILWAY SOCIETY
The most recent programme is shown below. If you require further information, please contact Roger Jermy on 01665 606168.
Meetings of the society are held in the Waiting Room, Alnwick Station at 7.00 pm for 7.30pm. They are open to members, their guests and visitors for a small donation towards costs. Refreshments will be available from 7.00 pm.
Thursday 16 February 2012
We are delighted to welcome back to Alnwick our member Gordon Hall who will give a slide show entitled ‘Carlisle: Railway Border City: 1980s to the present day’. Lots of diesel, steam and electric trains in view!
Thursday 15 March 2012
Did you enjoy Professor Iain Moffat´s 2010 talk on the Tay Bridge Disaster? He returns to Alnwick to give us another talk and powerpoint presentation: ‘How they built the Railways’. Another evening to look forward to!
The Barter Books Book Group meets once a month, 7-9, at the bookshop, and has actually grown into two groups, the Monday and Tuesday night groups, both of which read the same material.
Its year is divided into two sessions, the Autumn session (September to December) and the Spring session (January to the end of May), with the reading for both sessions ranging over a wide range of choices, both classic and modern, fiction and nonfiction.
The specific books to be read within that range are chosen by the leader (with an ear to suggestions from the group) according to a theme.
The Book Club is led by Rosemary Hartill, a former BBC correspondent, who has reported from some thirty countries (including BBC World Service broadcasts). Among the radio series Rosemary has presented for the BBC are: Meridian Books (World Service books programme), Writers Revealed (fourteen interviews on Radio 4 with authors ranging from Iris Murdoch to Anthony Burgess), and Immortal Diamonds (a Radio 4 series about poets). The recipient of two honorary doctorates in literature, Rosemary has also written for the Guardian and the Times Educational Supplement and is the author of several books.
Two separate groups meet once a month in Barter Books, 7-9 pm – one group meets on a Tuesday, another on a Monday.
Cost: £25 autumn term (4 books); £30 spring term (5 books).
For more information about joining the Book Group, please contact: John Walsh
Current paperbacks being read and discussed, January – May 2012:
1. January: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus (1818) 224pp
"It seems to me that in what I have hitherto written I have done nothing but prophecy what has arrived."
She began the novel at 18 and published when 21. The nightmare that she had at the Villa Diodati has become a universal myth, and the name of her earnest seeker after truth a shorthand for science gone mad. This coming-of-age story with a radical twist(!) has had an influence across literature and popular culture and spawned a complete genre of horror stories and films. Some claim that it is the very first science fiction novel.
2. February: Bapsie Sidhwa: The Ice-Candy Man (1988) >288pp (available from Amazon, also published as Cracking India)
The story of the upheaval of the 1974 partition of India seen through the eyes of a Parsee girl growing up in Lahore. Through her relationships with her Hindu Ayah, the Muslim cook, the Sikh zoo attendant and the ice candy man, she shows how ordinary people reacted to the turmoil. Wonderful touches of everyday detail about these neighbour friends. Or not friends.
3. March: Elizabeth Gaskell North and South 496p (1855) Penguin
If you liked Hard Times, you might even like this better! The story of how, when her father leaves the Church, Margaret Hale is uprooted from her comfortable home in Hampshire to move with her family to the North of England. Initially repulsed by the ugliness of her new surroundings in the industrial town of Milton, Margaret becomes aware of the poverty and suffering of local mill workers and develops a passionate sense of social justice.
4. April: The Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys (1966) 192 pp
Inspired by Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and set in the lush, beguiling landscape of Jamaica in the 1830s. Born into an oppressive, colonialist society, Creole heiress Antoinette Cosway meets a young Englishman who is drawn to her innocent sensuality and beauty. But who is the victim? And is the author a perpetrator of proto-feminist Marxist plot?!
5. May: Selma Lagerlof The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) 360 pp Wilder Publications
Some people wanted to read more Nobel prizewinners, so here we go with something completely different! One of Sweden’s greatest writers, Selma Lagerlof was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1909. This children’s novel is her most famous book. It’s about a young lad, whose "chief delight was to eat and sleep, and after that he liked best to make mischief". He takes off with the wild geese he has been tormenting on his family’s farm. A nature book, a travelogue, a collection of local folklore, and a coming-of-age story.
Home of the original
'Keep Calm and Carry On'
Poster
AA'd Northumbrian Words
Open every day incl. Sundays: Summer 9 – 7 • Winter 9 – 5 (Thursday 9 – 7)
(Buffet hours: Summer 10 – 5 • Winter 10 – 4:30)
Barter Books, Alnwick Station, Northumberland NE66 2NP.
+44 (0) 1665 604888 bb@barterbooks.co.uk
