Authors Electric

                                               Seventy-Five Years     “TWENTY-FOUR YEARS remind the tears of my eyes.” So wrote Dylan Thomas in 1938. He was, although he didn’t know it, only to live another fifteen years longer, before dying from acute alcohol poisoning in New York during a reading tour of his poems.   I first came to his poetry in 1966 when I was in Broadgreen Hospital in Liverpool, recovering from a cartilage operation. There, as chance would have it, I fell in with a fellow patient, Alan, who spoke enthusiastically of Dylan Thomas and recommended that I read his poems. I duly did so, and my edition of his  Collected Poems 1934-1952  which I have beside me now is inscribed Peter Leyland Liverpool. 1967.   Now, as I begin my seventy sixth year it occurs to me reflexively that five of them have passed since the beginning o...

                                                       Reading for Peace during a War           In Goya's greatest  scenes  we seem to see                                                                               the people of the world                   exactly  at the moment when                            they first attained the title of                                               ...

A book I love so much that I not only have a precious battered paper version but digital and audio editions too. (Incidentally, Neville Jason narrates it brilliantly) Listening to Desert Island Discs recently, I thought about what my own choices would be. And as I’ve mentioned in one of my previous blogs, my desert island book would definitely be TH White’s Once and Future King. Except that nowadays, the advent of e readers means that you don’t have to stop at just one book. Instead of a single volume, before the ship sank, I’d snatch up my Kindle instead – preloaded, naturally, with a selection of 3000 books, and complete with a cover incorporating a light so I could read at night. Maybe I might finally get around to tackling War and Peace, as well as working my way through some of the backlog of reading that has built up. The desert island experience might actually turn out to be rather pleasant. For my luxury I was considering asking for Ray Mears, as his survival exper...