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Talks Programme

Special Note

Dear friends of Barter Books –

First, I want to say how much I appreciate your support of our talks series.

All I can say, at a personal level, is how much I like the talks, myself. Just for starters, it gives me a wonderful chance to hear and meet people I might never have heard or met otherwise – and that includes you.

One problem that we do have, however, is with Sell-Outs. That’s a happy problem to have in one sense – one that, by the very nature of things, we don’t always get but that we all devoutly want, including the speakers!

But it’s not happy when, on the night, you see empty seats that had been booked for an event that, on paper, had sold-out. Seats that could so easily have gone to someone else who really wanted to come - someone on the waiting list, or even someone who had just shown up on the night, - had the holders simply let us know, if at all possible, in advance.

What to do?

We decided simply to try to copy the solution of others who have the same problem. And that is to ask those who book in advance to pay in advance (note: we can take payment over the phone!), as well. And if they can’t come, to please let us know as much in advance as possible, and their money will be refunded.

This way, with any luck, any empty seats would be more likely to be empty because the event, itself, was simply geared to more specialised interests.

We do hope the new way of booking seats will make the same sense to you as it does to us. In addition, please know that, for most talks, booking isn’t essential. But as you can never tell when it might be, it is a safeguard. In any case, here’s hoping the new system works out better in future for all of us.

With best wishes and many thanks again for your support,

Mary

-------------------------------------------------------

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.)

FORTHCOMING TALKS ...

Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Prostate Cancer But Jolly Well Should!

 

 

Breast cancer has had, as well it should, huge publicity. The Breast Cancer Screening Programme (mammograms) has saved many thousands of lives. Equally, thousands of articles by women who have had breast cancer inform, encourage, and support other women in their own fight against breast cancer. 

All this to the extent that almost everyone knows the significance of the pink bracelet which symbolizes that fight. 

 

But what about the fight against prostate cancer - the most common (1 in 8) form 

of cancer in men?  Did you know that more men now die of prostate cancer than women of breast cancer? And how particularly vicious prostate cancer can be? And yet what is the equivalent of the Screening Programme for men? Where are the articles for men (nevermind by men) that inform, encourage, and support them in their own fight against the disease? And what can we do to encourage men, notoriously unwilling to get medical advice, to do just that? 

 

The programme for this event includes: brief accounts from Cathie Gascoigne and Gilllies Owens (both of Prostate Cancer UK) and Mark Hobrough (Ambassador for the men's health organization, Movember) about their experience with the disease;  illustrated talks by three prostate cancer specialists: Professor Jim Allan (genetics), Dr Luke Gaughan (research), and Nick Willis (Freeman radiotherapist); and, finally,  a Q/A session. After which everyone is invited for a restorative glass (or two!) of wine and sausages in our Buffet. Men of the North: Die fighting singlehandedly against alien invaders, if you must, but, please, don't die of ignorance. 

 

 

Place:  Barter Books   

Date and Time:  Monday, February 10th, 7.30pm

Entrance:  10GBP (Please book in advance at the shop or telephone 01665 604999. All Proceeds to Prostate Cancer UK.)

David Steel

Bird Life on the Isle of May, the Jewel of The Forth

David Steel was born in Durham and has had a passion for the outdoors and birds, particularly seabirds, from an early age. After studying Ornithology at degree level, he went around the world to see all he could of its remarkable bird life. After David returned to the North East, he lived and worked for fourteen years among the sea birds, themselves, as Head Ranger on the remote Farne Islands. It was here on that rugged archipelago that David studied and worked with some of the UK's most iconic wildlife, including the Atlantic Puffin and one of the largest Grey Seal colonies in the country.

When David finally left the Farnes to get a new experience of bird life, he moved north to become Scottish Natural Heritage's Reserve Manager for the Isle of May - another nationally important seabird colony and a hidden gem at the mouth of the Firth of Forth. Over 285 bird species have been recorded on the island, and at the height of the mating season it can host over 200,000 seabirds. Grey Seals also abound, as well as the third largest Puffin colony in the UK, with visitors allowed on the island between April and September.

David's talk will focus on the stunning wildlife that makes the Isle of May its home; on what it's like to actually live there as he does nine months of the year, as well as the island's long cultural history. David is so well known here after his fourteen years on the Farnes that we'll all be welcoming him back big time and look forward to a talk we know in advance will be enthralling.

Place : Barter Books

Date and Time : Monday, February 17th, 7.30pm; wine and nibbles after.

Entrance : 10GBP (Please book in advance at the shop or call 01665 604999.)

________________________________________________________________

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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 RailwayALN 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.

INDOOR MEETINGS PROGRAMME

Thursday 20th April 2017:

“An evening with Pat Murphy”. Pat is the AVR's Civil Engineer and a noted photographer. He switches from being an audience member to speaker this evening to entertain us with some of his railway pictures.

May 2017: (Date to be confirmed.)

The annual quiz evening when the Aln Valley Railway team competes against the team from Gunnerton Railway Circle for “The Flat Bottomed Trophy”.

 

 

THE BARTER BOOKS BOOKGROUP

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.Waiting Room 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 Monday, another on a Tuesday.

Cost: £36.

For more information about joining the Book Group, please contact: Dan Robinson

Book Group: Spring 2020

 

20th and 21th January 2020 

On Kindness by Barbara Taylor (2009)

A re-imagining of Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor present an elegant, thoughtful and concise analysis of kindness in history, in life and in the modern world. Suggesting that acts of kindness occur when we are at our most open and honest, they ask why it is that our faith in kindness has been shaken - and why we are all too ready to believe that antagonism has taken its place.

 

then:Theme: Green and Black - the Natural World ... 

24st and 25nd February 2020

The Wild Places by Robert McFarnlane (2008) 

This is a journey which 'explores our changing ideas of the wild. From the cliffs of Cape Wrath to the holloways of Dorset, the storm-beaches of Norfolk, the salt marshes and estuaries of Essex and the moors of Rannoch and the Pennines, his journeys become the conductors of people and cultures, past and present, who have had intense relationships with these places. ...At once a wonder voyage, an adventure story, an exercise in visionary cartography, and a work of natural history. 

 

30th and 31th March 2020

Drive your Plow over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk (2009)

272pp. Subversive, entertaining noir novel by the Nobel Literature prize-winner, Olga Tokarczuk. In a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbor, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind . . . A deeply satisfying thriller cum fairy tale, Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead is a provocative exploration of the murky borderland between sanity and madness, justice and tradition, autonomy and fate. Whom do we deem sane? it asks. Who is worthy of a voice?' 'A brilliant literary murder mystery" - Chicago Tribune  

 

27th and 28th April 2020

Harvest by Jim Crace

Independent: 'Sometime in the pre-industrial period, an isolated and self-sufficient English village finds its common fields stolen for enclosure as collective agriculture yields to remotely-owned pasturage: "the sheaf is giving way to sheep". Rich interlopers conspire to ruin a traditional, seasonal - and largely egalitarian - way of life... Around the world, this kind of appropriation still happens in many different accents. Crace's incandescent visit to a near-mythical Deep England - in a style quite as hallucinatory as the effects of the "fairy-caps" his characters munch - results in a story both topical, and global. No recent English novel has deeper roots, yet casts so broad a shade.'

May 2020 - TBA

Book Group Archive ... here

 

THE BARTER BOOKS BOOKGROUP ARCHIVE

Barter Book Group – books read

We began Sept 03.

 

2019

January 2019

Theme:the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

February 2019

Theme:Ulysses, Planning our Voyage

March 2019

Theme: Setting sail. Ulysses, Episode 1 (Telemachus) 2 (Nestor) 3 (Proteus) 4 (Calypso) 5 (Lotus Eaters) 6 (Hades) (150 pages in total)

April 2019

Theme: Mid-Ocean. Episodes 10 ( Wandering Rock) and 11 (Sirens) (100 pages in total) and, if you are up for more, 13 (Nausicaa) (50 pages)

May 2019

Theme: Reaching Port. Episode 17 (Ithaca) and 18 (Penelope) (150 pages in total)

September to December 2019

Theme - Molly's Sisters...

Longbourne by Jo Baker; Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere by Jan Morris; Silence of Girls by Pat Barker; Orlando by Virginia Woolf



2018

September – December 2018

Theme:the Long and the Short of it...

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; Lawrence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman; Raymond Queneau, 2013 and A World of Difference

 

2018

January – May 2018

Theme: Beginnings and Endings

Muriel Spark, The Comforters; George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, A Grain of Wheat, Joseph Roth, The Radetzky March; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

 

2017

September - December 2017

Theme: Great Ideas

Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; Edward Gibbon, The Christians and the Fall of Rome; Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; William Hazlitt, On the Pleasures of Hating



January - May 2017

Theme: Blue

Penelope Fitzgerald,The Blue Flower; Georges Simenon, The Blue Room; William Boyd, The Blue Afternoon; Kay Redfield Jamison, An Unquiet Mind:A memoir of moods and madness; Danielle Steele, Blue

January 2017 – Party Twelth Night Party (at Barter Books)



2016

January - May 2016

Theme: Comings and Goings / Between Two Places

Shaun Tan,The Arrival; Rose Tremaine, The Road Home; Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin; Sunjeer Sahota, The Year of the Runaways; Col Tóibín, Brooklyn

 

2015

September - December 2015

Theme: Rage against the Machine (Rebels with a Cause)

Plato, The Last Days of Socrates: Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: Franz Kafka, The Castle: Loretta Napoleoni, The Islamist Phoenix



June 2015 – Party at The Hoolies, Alnmouth



January - May 2015

Theme: Old and New World Gold

Laurie Lee, As I walked out on a Midsummer Morning;Introduction to Spanish Poetry: A Dual-language Book editor: Eugenio Florit; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 100 years of Solitude; Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist; Laura Esquivel, Like Water for Chocolate



January 2015 – Party - Howick Village hall Circle Dancing; reading that made an early impression on our lives



2014

September - December 2014

Theme: Russia

Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov; Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Victor Pelevin, Babylon; Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine Diaries



June 2014 - Party Chinese takeaway and film Yellow Earth



January - June 2014

Theme: China

Peter Hessler, River Town -  Two Years on the Yangtze; Dai Sijie,Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress; Jung Chang,Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China; 170 Chinese poems translated by Arthur Waley; Leslie Chang, Factory girls



January 2014 -Party - Dinner at Barter Books

 

2013

September-December 2013

Theme: Heroes and Tricksters

The Mahabharata, a shortened  version by R.K. Narayan; and The Bhagavad Gita; Martin Bennett, West African Trickster Tales; Tennyson’s Morte  d’Arthur (part); Anthony Price, Other Paths to Glory.



June 2013 – Party - Ship Inn, Low Newton-by-the-Sea



January-May 2013

Theme: INDEPENDENCE: Who We Are … and What We Can Be?

Fitzroy Maclean (with Magnus Linklater), Scotland: a revised history; Kate Fox, Watching the English - the Hidden Rules of English Behaviour; Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart; Alan Watts, The book on the taboo against knowing who you are; Anne Tyler, Digging to America



January 2013 - Party - Howick Village Hall Dancing with Alistair Sinton



2012

September - December 2012

Theme: REVOLUTIONS and what it's like to live through them


George Eliot, Middlemarch; Mikhail Bulgakov,The White Guard; Ryszard Kapuscinski,Shah of Shahs; Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns



June 2012 – Party - Howick Village Hall Music. Singing with Sarah Gray



January - May 2012

Theme: COMING-OF-AGE (Bildungsroman) novels

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus; Bapsie Sidhwa, Ice-Candy Man; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South; Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea; Selma Lagerlof, The Wonderful Adventures of Nils



January 2012 - Party

 

2011

September - December 2011

Theme: Ways of Seeing

Tim Mackintosh-Smith, Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah; Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle; John Berger, Ways of Seeing; Bill Bryson, A short history of nearly everything 



June 11 – Party



January – May 2011

Theme: Life and Work

Charles Dickens, Hard Times; John Lanchester, Whoops!:Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay; Bernard Shaw, Major Barbara; Polly Toynbee, Hard Work; The Gospel according to St Matthew.



January 2011 – Party - Barter Books – Seven Ages of Man(at Barter Books)



2010

September – December 2010

Theme: Journeys of Discovery

Barack Obama, Dreams from my Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance; Salley Vickers, The Other Side of You; R.K Narayan, The English Teacher; Sara Maitland, A Book of Silence



June 2010 – Party at Poppy's house in Newcastle



January – May 2010

Theme: The Italians

Tim Parks, An Italian Education (1996, Guardian Books2001); March 1, 2: Dante, The Divine Comedy: Hell; Carlo Levi, Christ did not stop at Eboli; Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an author; Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972)



January 2010 – Party - Barter Books – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (at Barter Books)



2009

September - December 2009

Theme: Mystery, or Deception

Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; John Banville, The Untouchables; Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead



June 2009 – Party - Barter Books – exploration/discovery (at Barter Books)



January - May 2009

Theme: Food

Nigel Slater, Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table; Julia Child, My Life in France; Bill Buford, Heat; John Lanchester, My Debt to Pleasure; Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain



January 2009 – Party - Barter Books – trains (at Barter Books)



2008

September - December 2008

Theme: Contemporary world writing

Andrey Kurkov, Death and the Penguin; Uwem Akpan, Say You're One of Them; Yiyun Li, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers; Marina Lewycka,Two Caravans



January - May 2008

Theme: French literature

Marguerite Duras, The Lover; Proust Swann's Way (vol 1 of 'In Search of Lost Time'); St Exupery Le Vol de Nuit (Night Flight)  and Southern Mail;  Albert Camus, The Stranger; Irene Nemirovksy, Suite Francaise (French Suite)



2007

September - December 2007

Theme: Diaries/ memoirs

Simon Garfield, Our Hidden Lives; James Boswell, Boswell's life of Johnson; Isabella Bird, A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains; Simon Wiesenthal, The Sunflower



January - May 07

Theme: Lucky Dip

Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time; Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland; David Malouf, The Great World; Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard; Khalid Hosseini, The Kite Runner



2006

September - December 2006

Theme: The Arab World

Rory Stewart, Occupational Hazard – My Time governing in Iraq ; Amin Ma’alouf, the Crusades through Arab Eyes; 1001 Nights; Karen Armstrong, A short history of Islam



January - May 2006

Theme: American literature

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Henry James, Selected short stories; Chaim Potok, My Name is Asher Lev



2005

September - December 2005

Theme: Travel books

H.V. Morton, Travels through Bible Lands; Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar; Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium; Homer, Odyssey



January - May 2005

Theme: Five women’s books linked to experiences of childhood or adolescence

Julia Darling, The Taxi-Driver’s daughter; Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye; Sally Morgan, My Place; Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse; Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie, Purple Hibiscus

 

2004

September - December 2004

Theme: Light and Dark

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good; Tolstoy, Resurrection; Philip Pulman, His Dark Materials; Gawain and the Green Knight



January - May 2004

Theme: War

Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen; Ivo Andric, The Bridge over the Drina; Jaroslav Hasek, The Good Soldier Svejk; Homer, The Iliad; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

 

2003

September - December 2003

Theme: Colliding Cultures

Graham Greene, The Quiet American; Doris Lessing, The Grass is Singing; Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia; Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red

 

 

Events Programme

Barter Books

invites you to a very special book launch

Herterton House and a New Country Garden

(The collaborative creation of Frank and Marjorie Lawley)

With a talk by the author:  Frank Lawley

and

A slideshow of Herterton photographs by the well-known garden photographer

Val Corbett

morpurgo

For all those who love gardens, Herterton Garden, created by Frank and Marjorie Lawley over a forty-year period on the Wallington estate near Cambo, is one of the truly outstanding gardens in England. Among many brilliant reviews, Robin Lane Fox, writing in the FT, called Herterton Garden quite simply “one of the most influential gardens to be created since the end of World War II”.

This book launch celebrates the new book, Herterton House and a New Country Garden, written by Frank Lawley and beautifully illustrated by Val Corbett. It recounts the story of two young artists who, virtually alone, slowly and meticulously restored over forty years what was basically a 16th century ruin of a house and embellished it with a garden worthy of it. The book is also a fascinating social history of a whole era on the Wallington estate (of which Marjorie Lawley’s father was the head gardener) along with fascinating asides on art and architecture. As important, maybe even more so, Frank and Marjorie did all this on no assurance, beyond the odd empty promise, that their garden would even survive.

For all this and more, the well-known garden writer, Susie White, counts the book as unique among garden books as the life it describes – and a modern classic.

Can you come to the book launch?

We can’t promise you that there will still be seats left in the old Waiting Room, but we can promise you that we will do our best to make up for it with seating outside the Waiting Room, speakers so you can hear all the proceedings, plenty of wine and nibbles, compare garden notes with half the audience (including Frank Lawley, himself!),  see a little exhibition of Frank’s artwork as a young art teacher, and even meet the author, photographer, book designer, as well as two representatives from the book’s publisher, the much-esteemed Pimpernel Press.

Most of all, and the whole point of the evening really, is just to have this chance to cheer on the lives of two people who have contributed so much to our own.

Place: Barter Books
Date & Time:  Monday, July 13th, 7:30pm
Entrance: No charge but any donations appreciated! Advance booking, however, is essential. If you’d like to be there on the night, please let us know so we can arrange the right amount of seating, wine and nibbles! (To book telephone 01665 604888 or call into the shop)

Barter Books

invites you to see

THE BOOKSHOP BAND

Poppy Pitt, Beth Porter, Ben Please

on

Sunday 16 June from 1:00pm to 3:00pm

The Book Shop Band

The Book Shop Band
Photo : Owen Benson

This Bath based trio, the Bookshop Band, will be playing at Barter Books on 16 June as part of their UK Tour, which ends up at the Edinburgh Literary Festival in August.

Their tour will also include Glastonbury Festival, Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, and WOMAD – The World's Festival.

Playing keyboard, guitars, wind and strings, this versatile group specialise in writing and performing songs based on books!

The event is free of charge, but if you like their music, they would greatly appreciate donations to help cover their expenses or even better, buy one of their CDs.

The Book Shop Band

With appearances on both Radio 4 and 6 and three years of touring behind them (Yes, they have done Shakespeare and Company in Paris!) they have built up quite a following, so don't miss this chance to catch them on this tour.

www.thebookshopband.co.uk

Keep Calm and Carry On

Home of the original
'Keep Calm and Carry On'
Poster

Northumbrian Words

AA'd Northumbrian Words

 

Open every day 9:00 - 6:00
incl. Sundays and all Bank Holidays (apart from Christmas Day)
(Buffet hours: 9:00 – 6:00 • Last Orders 5:50•Hot Food 5:00)

Barter Books, Alnwick Station, Northumberland NE66 2NP.
+44 (0) 1665 604888 bb@barterbooks.co.uk
Webdesk 604999; Station Buffet 604444

 

One of the largest secondhand bookshops in Britain