'[Emrys Hughes] read the social history of Macaulay, Froude, and J.R. Green; Thorold Rogers's Six Centuries of Work and Wages particularly appealed to him because it offered "not the history of kings and queens, but of the way ordinary people ha struggled to live throughout the centuries..." Hughes was one of those agitators who found a virtual Marxism in Thomas Carlyle. The French Revolution inspired the hope that a popular revolt somewhere would end the war...'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Emrys Daniel Hughes Print: Book
'The historical classics "came as a revelation"- Macaulay, J.R. Green, Gibbon, Motley's Dutch Republic, Prescott on Peru and Mexico and The French Revolution. Academic critics today might discern ideologies in all of the above, but that was not Lawson's reading of them. "Of politics I knew nothing and cared less", he recalled, yet his purely literary readings had helped him form "some very definite opinions on the right and wrong of things social..."'
Century: 1850-1899 / 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Lawson Print: Book
'[Jack Ashley] was less prepared for Ruskin [College] than most of the students, having read only two books since leaving school: Jack London's The Iron Heel and the regulations of the Widnes Town Council. But principal Lionel Elvin "appreciated the profound dificulties facing working class students": "When I stumbled through the intricacies of the political theories of Marx, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and T.H. Green, he marked my work frankly yet gave encouragement... He was an excellent teacher, genuinely interested in discussing ideas and persuading students to express their own"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Ashley Print: Book
'[In The Saturday Review, 19 November 1904], "A Mother" records the books consumed since July by her sixteen-year-old daughter ... [who is] on the point of going in for the "Senior Cambridge" ... :
"Old Mortality", "The Farringdons", "By Mutual Consent" (L. T. Meade), "To Call Her Mine", "Kathrine Regina", and "Self or Bearer" (Besant); "Christmas Carol", "The Cricket on the Hearth", "Hypatia", "Concerning Isabel Carnaby", "The Virginians", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", "The Head of the House" (E. Everett-Green), "A Double Thread", "The Heir-Presumptive and the Heir-Apparent", "Sesame and Lilies", "A Tale of Two Cities".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: anon Print: Book
'Barber John Paton remembered that the "Boys' Friend" "ran a serial which was an enormously exciting tale of Alba's oppression of the Netherlands, and gave as its source, Motley's 'Rise of the Dutch Republic'". He borrowed it from the public library and, with guidance from a helpful adult, also read J.R. Green, Macaulay, Prescott, Grote, and even Mommsen's multi-volume History of Rome by age fourteen. "There must have been, of course, enormous gaps in my understanding of what I poured into the rag bag that was my mind, particularly from the bigger works," he conceded, "but at least I sensed the important thing, the immense sweep and variety and the continuity of the historical process".'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: John Paton Print: Book
[List of books read in 1945]:
'For Whom the Bell Tolls; Henry Brocken; Doctor Faustus; Life of the Bee; The Screwtape Letters; Modern Short Stories; Letters of People in Love; Men and Women; The Headmistress; The People's Government; The Art of Writing; Speech and Sound; Background to the Life of Christ; The House of Prayer; Eleanor in the Fifth; Adventures of Jig and Co; Rendezvous with Fear; Antony and Cleopatra; Hamlet; The Poetry of James Elroy Flecker; Escape; Hangman's Holiday; The Body Behind the Bar; Strong Poison; The Critic; Magic Lantern; Listening Valley; Emma; Dragon Seed; Crowthers of Bankdam; The Rat Trap; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; The Spanish House; O the Brave Music; The Light that Failed; Ghosts; The Antiquary; The Knightes Tale; Luria; The Best of Hazlitt; Pericles; The Rivals; Hamlet [again]; Antony and Cleopatra [again]; Knightes Tale [again]; Julius Caesar; Merchant of Venice; The Critic; The Rivals; Cymbeline; Adventures of a Young Soldier in Search of a Better World; The Nine Tailors; The Conquered; The Professor; Peter Abelard; Then They Pulled Down the Blind; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Portrait of a Man with Red Hair; Winnie-the-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner; Mrs Parkinson; Adele and Co; Frossia; Cluny Brown; Four Gardens; The World is Square; Being Met Together; Best Sporting Stories; Selected stories by Q; And Five were Foolish; Campaspe; Endimion [by Lyly]; Midas; Dr Faustus [again]; Twelfth Night; Mrs Warrent's Proffession [sic]; The Spanish Tragedy; The Jew of Malta; Galathea; Tambourlaine; Sun is my Undoing; By Greta Bridge; Utopia; England, their England; The Art of Poetry; Old Wives Tale; The Reader is Warned; Long, Long Ago; Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay; James IV of Scotland; The Handsome Langleys; The Dog Beneath the Skin; Death Comes for the Archbishop; The Island of Youth; I'll Say She Does; The Forsyte Saga; In Youth is Pleasure; On Forsyte Change; Genesis to Nehemiah.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
[List of books read in 1945]:
'For Whom the Bell Tolls; Henry Brocken; Doctor Faustus; Life of the Bee; The Screwtape Letters; Modern Short Stories; Letters of People in Love; Men and Women; The Headmistress; The People's Government; The Art of Writing; Speech and Sound; Background to the Life of Christ; The House of Prayer; Eleanor in the Fifth; Adventures of Jig and Co; Rendezvous with Fear; Antony and Cleopatra; Hamlet; The Poetry of James Elroy Flecker; Escape; Hangman's Holiday; The Body Behind the Bar; Strong Poison; The Critic; Magic Lantern; Listening Valley; Emma; Dragon Seed; Crowthers of Bankdam; The Rat Trap; The Vortex; Fallen Angels; The Spanish House; O the Brave Music; The Light that Failed; Ghosts; The Antiquary; The Knightes Tale; Luria; The Best of Hazlitt; Pericles; The Rivals; Hamlet [again]; Antony and Cleopatra [again]; Knightes Tale [again]; Julius Caesar; Merchant of Venice; The Critic; The Rivals; Cymbeline; Adventures of a Young Soldier in Search of a Better World; The Nine Tailors; The Conquered; The Professor; Peter Abelard; Then They Pulled Down the Blind; The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club; Portrait of a Man with Red Hair; Winnie-the-Pooh; The House at Pooh Corner; Mrs Parkinson; Adele and Co; Frossia; Cluny Brown; Four Gardens; The World is Square; Being Met Together; Best Sporting Stories; Selected stories by Q; And Five were Foolish; Campaspe; Endimion [by Lyly]; Midas; Dr Faustus [again]; Twelfth Night; Mrs Warrent's Proffession [sic]; The Spanish Tragedy; The Jew of Malta; Galathea; Tambourlaine; Sun is my Undoing; By Greta Bridge; Utopia; England, their England; The Art of Poetry; Old Wives Tale; The Reader is Warned; Long, Long Ago; Friar Bacon & Friar Bungay; James IV of Scotland; The Handsome Langleys; The Dog Beneath the Skin; Death Comes for the Archbishop; The Island of Youth; I'll Say She Does; The Forsyte Saga; In Youth is Pleasure; On Forsyte Change; Genesis to Nehemiah.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Hilary Spalding Print: Book
'Durrell's studies at the British Museum turned even further towards the Elizabethans. He took in Sidney, Marlowe, Nashe, Greene, Peel and Tourneur, as well as Shakespeare'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Lawrence Durrell Print: Book
'walked to see Sir W. Penn at Deptford, reading by the way a most ridiculous play, a new one call[ed] "The Politician cheated".'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
Sunday 11 January 1936: 'A very fine day [...] I read Borrow's Wild Wales, into which I can plunge head foremost [...] then [...] to tea with Nessa [sister] [...] Home, & dine alone, & sleep over Mr Clarkson's memoirs. He had a sexual kink, & a passion for fish'.
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'I am reading, 'Your Life in 15 Century' Mrs J. R. Green.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Virginia Woolf Print: Book
'In the fog the safest guide is a blind man. This is a [italics] sortes [end italics] from Julien Green to whose journal I turn for some light' [she hopes Green's methods will aid her in her writer's block]
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Antonia White Print: Book
'This "new direction" [in literature], Larkin was beginning to realize, would depend on subtlety as well as candour - the sort of approach he was learning to associate with other writers he now re-read, or read for the first time. With Henry Green and Virginia Woolf (he admired "The Waves"); with Julian Hall, whose novel of public school life "The Senior Commoner" he approved for its "general atmosphere of not shoing one's feelings in public"; and with Katherine Mansfield. "I do admire her a great deal", he told Sutton, "and feel very close to her in some things".'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Philip Larkin Print: Unknown
'I have just read Love on the Dole and His Worship The Mayor, books which were sent me by a friend a short time ago, for the second time, and I feel impelled to tell you that I know you to be, not only a born writer, but a great writer (and I never use that word lightly). I do not know when I have been so deeply, so terribly moved and so strongly impressed as I have been these two superb novels.
How on earth you succeeded in combining the beauty and the unutterable tenderness of these books, their beautiful and inevitable form, with such an apalling indictment of our present damnable civilisation, I don't know. You are such a writer that the terrible tragedies of starvation, the people whose poignant and shining love, love between boy and girl, between husband and wife, love between friends, seem to me to have been known all my life.....'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell Print: Book
'I have just read Love on the Dole and His Worship The Mayor, books which were sent me by a friend a short time ago, for the second time, and I feel impelled to tell you that I know you to be, not only a born writer, but a great writer ( and I never use that word lightly). I do not know when I have been so deeply, so terribly moved and so strongly impressed as I have been these two superb novels.
How on earth you succeeded in combining the beauty and the unutterable tenderness of these books, their beautiful and inevitable form, with such an apalling indictment of our present damnable civilisation, I don't know. You are such a writer that the terrible tragedies of starvation, the people whose poignant and shining love, love between boy and girl, between husband and wife, love between friends, seem to me to have been known all my life.....'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Edith Sitwell Print: Book
'[letter from Mrs Ward to Gladstone, regarding his projected article about "Robert Elsmere"] If you do speak of him [T.H. Green], will you look at his two Lay Sermons, of which I enclose my copy? - particularly the second one, which was written eight years after the first, and to my mind expresses his thought more clearly'.
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Mary Augusta Ward Print: Book
'after I had supped, I reed of grenhame, and se went to bed'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Hoby Print: Book
'and reed of Granhame tell supper time'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Hoby Print: Book
'and then I hard Margaret Rhodes reed of Mr Grenhm'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Rhodes Print: Book
'after, I hard Mr Rhodes Read of Grenhame, and then I praied and so went to bed'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Rhodes Print: Book
'after, I wrought, and hard Mr Rhodes read of Mr Grenhame, and so praied priuatly and then went to bed'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Rhodes Print: Book
'and hard Auerill reed of Grenham, and then praied'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Euerill Aske Print: Book
'and from thence came home and reed of Grenhame, and hard Megg Rhodes read'
Century: 1500-1599 Reader/Listener/Group: Margaret Hoby Print: Book
'then I wrought and hard Mr Rhodes read of Grenhame'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Richard Rhodes Print: Book
'after I Came home I hard Mr Ardington Read of Grenhame vnto me'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Ardington Print: Book
'this day it pleased god to blesse my reading and medetation, and, in the afternone my hearinge of Mr Vrpith: after, I Came home and Caused Mr Stillington to Read of Grenhame, and, after, I went to priuatt readinge and praier'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Mr Stillington Print: Book
'As Charles Schreiber's condition appeared to grow worse instead of better [following voyage to South Africa recommended by doctors, and stay at Wynberg] a move to Ceres was recommended, and just before Christmas they settled there [...] Lady Charlotte read to him a great deal as they sat out in front of the house. The books she chose included the Pickwick Papers, Stanley's Jewish Church, Green's History of England and Junius' Letters.'
Century: 1850-1899 Reader/Listener/Group: Lady Charlotte Schreiber Print: Book
'I said rather dazedly aloud - to Beston - I wonder what time the next train to London goes - & a stranger with a time-table told me. I had just time to catch it. I had a carriage to myself & tried to read the "Triumph of Time" - through tears.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Violet Asquith Print: Book
'Strong breeze and weather agreeable so far from Karachi. Green's "History", Macaulay, Ruskin, "Oxford Book [?of English Verse]" and Horace every day.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Ronald Storrs Print: Book