Authors Electric

"I wish, I wish ...." Peter Duck 2014 If I had One Wish and wasn't allowed to use for anything altruistic (eradicating poverty & inequality, enforcing world peace etc) I think I would wish to learn how to write short stories. I've never wanted this before. I'm a very quick and gulpy reader, too impatient (in the past) to savour the subtle pleasures of a good short story. These are the stories that force you to close the book, turn off the e-reader and let them linger in your mind. I've always been over-eager to race on, read more.  Occasionally binge-reading works even for short stories. As a child I read obsessively   MauriceGriffiths 's Ten Small Yachts, his 1933 follow-up to his masterpiece, The Magic of the Swatchways (1932) I read that book too but without the same compulsion. Ten Small Yachts  told me story after story (they were true) of MG's relationships with his successive boats. I would end one story satisfied, momentarily, th...

Herbert Allingham was born in 1867, the year of the Second Reform Bill. Not everyone was happy about this modest extension to the franchise. “The only thing we can do is as far as possible to remedy the evil by the most universal means of education that can be devised. I believe it will be absolutely necessary that you should prevail upon our future masters to learn their letters,” said Robert Lowe MP. The Education Act of 1870 was the vital first step towards compulsory education for all. For the remainder of the nineteenth century young people were more likely to be able to read than older people and males more likely than females. Most of the new readers who wished to continue reading after they had left school wanted fiction. They bought weekly newspapers or magazines, nothing costing more than a penny or, preferably, a halfpenny. These were Allingham’s customers from 1886 when he was 19 years old and his first serial story was published in a penny weekly paper for boys. Over the ...