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

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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 ...

Barter Books

invites you to a talk by

Professor Philip Dixon

Durham Cathedral
“Half Church of God, Half Castle 'Gainst the Scot”

If ever a building was better recognised than known, that building is Durham Cathedral. Its iconic towers have marked the true beginning of The North since its completion in the 12th century and inspired generations of awed onlookers ever since. For Sir Walter Scott, this “half church, half castle” was a combined bulwark of God and man. For John Ruskin, it was “the eighth wonder of the world”. For Bill Bryson, the former chancellor of Durham University, it was, as it is for so many of us, 'The best cathedral on Planet Earth'.

Yet how much do we really know about this extraordinary compound of monastery and fortress, where thousand years of devotion and strife are manifested in its very stonework? Our speaker’s talk will explore the building we all thought we knew – and with a fair few surprises along the way.

Our speaker, Philip Dixon, is both an archaeologist and historian with many letters after his name – the perfect quide to this great cathedral. As an historian, Professor Dixon was Lecturer in Architectural History at the London School of Architecture, and research associate at the University of Nottingham. As an archaeologist, director of excavations at Newark Castle, Ely Cathedral, Southwell Minster, and Holme Cultram Abbey. In both fields, he has written over 170 books and articles. In short, we’re in safe hands.

Do join us in our Buffet for wine and nibbles after the talk.

Monday, February 12th, 7.30pm

Entrance: £5 (Please book in advance at the shop or Tel: 01665 604888.)

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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 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 Monday, another on a Tuesday.

Cost: £35.

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

Book Group: Spring 2018

Theme: Beginnings and Endings

January 15 / 16 The Comforters (Muriel Spark, 1957)

To celebrate the centenary of Muriel Spark’s birth, here’s the first of her 22 novels.  Published at a time when angry young men were all the  rage in literary Britain, she imagined  ‘a postmodern metafiction before those things had been invented. One character is a writer who knows she’s also a character in the book we’re reading. Another is a cipher with no interior life: literally, when she goes into a dark room, she disappears entirely. There’s an old lady who runs a smuggling racket and a would-be Satanist, and those are the boring characters.’ (Philip Chapman)

‘As vibrant as ever, more than 50 years after its first appearance, it still knocks the stuffing out of the realist tradition, and probably always will.’  (Ali Smith)

February 19 / 20 Lincoln in the Bardo (George Saunders, 2017, Booker Prize Winner)

Focusses on a single night in the life of Abraham Lincoln: an actual moment in 1862 when the body of his 11-year-old son was laid to rest in a Washington cemetery. Saunders activates this graveyard with the spirits of its dead. ‘Completely beguiling, a narrative like no other: a magical, mystery tour of the bardo – the “intermediate” or transitional state between one’s death and one’s next birth, according to Tibetan Buddhism. (The Independent).

March 19 / 20 A Grain of Wheat (Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 1967) 

When Africa is often being squeezed out of the news, time to read another fine African novel, by a writer nominated for the Nobel Prize. Set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion and on the cusp of Kenya’s independence from Britain, it follows a group of villagers whose lives have been transformed by the 1952–1960 Emergency. In a narrative interwoven with myth and peppered with allusions to real-life leaders, including Jomo Kenyatta, compromises are forced, friendships are betrayed, and loves tested. The end of an empire, and the beginning of a new country.

April 16 / 17 The Radetzky March (Joseph Roth 1932)

Chronicling some of the complex backstory of today’s Europe: the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire via the story of the Trotta family.  'Roth is Austria's Chekhov. The same amused contemplation of the follies and absurdities of the human condition, the same stoic resignation and refusal to judge. A great, wise, droll, European novel set in Austro-Hungary just before the debacle of the First World War.'  'Best Books' chosen by William Boyd, The Week

May 21 / 22 The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes 2011, Booker Prize Winner)

Narrated by the now-retired protagonist, Tony Webster, the story follows his memories of how he and his sixth-form friends met a boy called Adrian Finn. Having vowed to be friends for life, Webster’s past begins to catch up with him, culminating in a thriller-like ending that leads Webster to question the accuracy of his own memories, and how could he have been oblivious to so much…

Book Group Archive ... here

Barter Book Group – books read

We began Sept 03.

September - December 2003: 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

January - May 2004: 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

September - December 2004: Light and Dark
Nick Hornby, How to Be Good; Tolstoy, Resurrection; Philip Pulman, His Dark Materials; Gawain and the Green Knight

January - May 2005: 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

September - December 2005: Travel books
H.V. Morton, Travels through Bible Lands; Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar; Ryszard Kapuscinski, Imperium; Homer, Odyssey

January - May 06: 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

September - December 06: 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 07: 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

September - December 07: 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 08: 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)

September - December 08: 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

Party January 09 - Barter Books – trains (at Barter Books)

January - May 09: 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

Party June 09 - Barter Books – exploration/discovery (at Barter Books)

September - December 09: Mystery, or Deception
Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman; Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; John Banville, The Untouchables; Ian Rankin, The Naming of the Dead

Party January 10 - Barter Books – Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (at Barter Books)

January – May 10: The Italians
Tim Parks,  An Italian Education (1996, Guardian Books  2001); 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)

Party June 10 - at Poppy's house in Newcastle

September – December 10: 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

Party January 11 - Barter Books – Seven Ages of Man(at Barter Books)

January – May 2011: 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.

Party June 11

September - December 2011: 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 

Party January 12

January - May 2012: 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

Party June 12 - Howick Village Hall Music. Singing with Sarah Gray

September - December 2012: REVOLUTIONS and what it's like to live through them
George Eliot, Middlemarch; Mikhail Bulgakov,The White Guard; Ryszard Kapuściński,Shah of Shahs; Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns

Party January 13 - Howick Village Hall Dancing with Alistair Sinton

January-May 2013 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

Party June 13 - Ship Inn, Low Newton-by-the-Sea

September-December 2013 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.

Party January 14 - Dinner at Barter Books

January - June 2014: 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

Party June 14 - Chinese takeaway and film Yellow Earth

September - December 2014: Russia
Forty Stories by Anton Chekhov; Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita; Victor Pelevin, Babylon; Andrey Kurkov, Ukraine Diaries

Party January 15 - Howick Village hall Circle Dancing; reading that made an early impression on our lives

January - May 2015: 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

Party June 14 - The Hoolies, Alnmouth

September - December 2015: 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

January - May 2016: 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

Party January 17 - Twelth Night Party (at Barter Books)

January - May 2017 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

September - December 2017 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

 

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

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)