Pic: Tufty club safety sheet, c.1964, (c) Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents
I’m really looking forward to checking out the British Library’s new exhibition, Propaganda: Power and Persuasion, which just opened this weekend.
As well as historical materials it includes ‘everyday’ propaganda: banknotes, social media, and, um, the Tufty Road Safety Club (anyone else remember the board game? It was kind of like Snakes and Ladders in suburbia).
In Japanese, tsundoku means, “the act of buying books and not reading them, leaving them to pile up.”
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
(via booklover)
I’d like to think whoever owned this book before me motored across France for their holidays in St-Trop in a ridiculously glamorous and unpractical open-top car with this Michelin guide stashed in the glove compartment.
Buying out-of-date guide books is, of course, completely pointless behaviour, except when they’re as lovely as this one. It’s packed with gorgeous maps and in-depth listings of hundreds of restaurants and hotels across France, as well as illustrations of that loveable chubster, the Michelin Man.
If you love crime novels and have easy access to Euston Road, the British Library’s current exhibition, Murder in the Library: An A-Z of Crime Fiction, is well worth a look.
It’s a very brief but brilliant overview of the genre, featuring well-known and well-loved crime writers (Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Dashiell Hammett, Henning Mankell) as well as more surprising ones like Pele and Gypsy Rose Lee.
There are some fabulous rare old books on display, plus authors’ manuscripts, notebooks, and a heavily-doodled script from the film version of Murder on the Orient Express. It’s like entering a cabinet full of familiar police Inspectors, from Montalbano to Mr Whicher, and a lovely demonstration of the quirks and diversity of crime fiction.
Murder in the Library is open until 12 May 2013 at the British Library; admission is free.
I adore spy novels, especially if they’re by John Le Carré. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is one of my favourites. Set in London and East Germany, it depicts the spy’s life as one of reluctant ruthlessness, doubt and mundanity, with a ‘hero’ who’s at the mercy of the bureaucrats and is pretty much the opposite of James Bond.
A Rainbow of Penguins (x)
(Source: jammavoy, via thegirlandherbooks)
“In this light, the red stone
is more tender than stubborn:
the castle keep gifted
with the surface of a peach.”
Just over the border from MacDiarmid’s (and apparently Neil Armstrong’s) Langholm is Carlisle, and its sandstone castle, one subject of Jo Shapcott’s poem sequence.
Can’t you just see, in gentle winter light, in late afternoon, the keep walls in all their peachiness? And how about that unusual use of gifted?
“…With bread and margarine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones…”
- George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
I love this book so much. I’ve read and re-read Down and Out loads of times, and I heard an extract being read on the radio the other night, which reminded me to share these two great 1970s covers.
In both books, Orwell explores poverty - in the coal areas of Yorkshire and Lancashire at a time of mass unemployment, where people slept as many as eleven to a room in slum dwellings; and in Paris and London, where Orwell spent weeks scraping by on tiny sums of money from menial jobs, or ‘tramped’ the streets and slept in squalid shelters.
They’re my favourite books by Orwell; vivid, fearsome, full of human detail and a forceful yet intimate prose.
