Great news! Justice Aviation, the flight school that was fighting Santa Monica tooth and nail to keep its lead-fuelled planes flying over our houses from Santa Monica Airport has just agreed to get out! Bravo to our councillors and city staff Rick Cole and Nelson Hernandez for standing up for our safety. Now let's get rid of the wretched private jets and get on with building our Great Park. ...
I was recently asked to write an article about my adaptation of two of Ursula le Guin's wonderful Earthsea fantasy novels for television: and this is my painful confession. https://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2016/04/guest-post-gavin-scott-wrestling-ursula-le-guin/ ...
“Britain in 1945. A land of orderly cues, hat doffing men walking on the outside, seats given up to the elderly, no swearing in front of women and children, censored books, censored films, censored place, infinite repression of desires. Divorce for most an unthinkable social disgrace, marriage too often a lifetime sentence … Marriage is seldom companionable, with husbands and wives living in separate, self-contained spheres, the husband often not telling the wife how much she earned … Children in the street to act off by strangers, children in the...
Here's a link to an article I wrote for the excellent Elizabeth White about book collecting. ...
Just had a very pleasing review of The Age of Treachery on the fascinating Crime Fiction lover Website. Here's the link if you'd like t check it out https://www.crimefictionlover.com/2016/04/the-age-of-treachery/ ...
My beloved mother-in-law was a publisher in New Zealand and I think her greatest delight in the process was when the next book was ready to be launched and she could say " I think it's time we had a party." Well, we had a party this weekend here in Santa Monica to celebrate the official launch of The Age of Treachery and it was terrific. Our house and garden full of a hundred and forty loving and wonderful friends celebrating the first Duncan Forrester adventure and giving me a...
This is the first Punch cartoon Forrester saw in 1946. It depicts, rather movingly I think, Father Time saying farewell to the terrible year of 1945. But it wasn't long before 1946 brought its own tribulations, notably in the form of America's reluctance, now the war was won, to loan Britain the money to keep going. One result was a shortage of consumer goods - exemplified by this cartoon of a shop with not VERY much to sell ...
I'm not saying that Duncan Forrester, who had a fairly busy year in 1946, read all the books here, but at least he might have picked them up in Foyles, Hatchards or even W. H., Smith and considered buying them. Certainly, as a historian of the ancient world, he would have taken notice of this January offering: It was the first of a new series to be known as the Penguin Classics, and was a translation by E. V. Rieu. Over the next ten years it was to become Britain's best-selling book, and...
