Author: penwithlit

The hedge towers above me, the moss is thick and bright green, lush ferns give the scene an ancient and almost topical feel. I am standing on Cornwall’s oldest ‘road’.

This route once ran for 10 miles between Lerryn and Looe and was in use around 4000 years old.

The road cuts so deep down into the earth that I am standing on bedrock and that bedrock has a channel worn into it from hundreds of years of rainwater wearing its own path.  The level of the field I have just crossed to get here is high above me, perhaps as much as 9 or ten feet, it is no wonder that these banks that mark the route’s way have become known as the Giant’s Hedge.

In 2013 the newspapers reported that Britain’s oldest pavement had been found in Cornwall.   A cobbled track leading to the Hurler’s stone circle had been uncovered on Bodmin moor during…

Es ist die Zeit des Eislaufens, vom Dreijährigen, der in seinem leuchtend roten Schneeanzug aussieht wie eine Wattewurst und der bei jedem Schritt auf dem Eis liegt, bis zum überkrassen 17-Jährigen, der in rasender Geschwindigkeit, die Beine in einer unablässigen fließenden Bewegung spindelnd in raschen Slaloms zwischen den anderen hindurchschießt, sind alle hier in einem großen Rundtanz vereint. Die Musik ist furchtbar, der kleinste gemeinsame Nenner, Helene Fischer und Co., Deutschpop aus den Achtzigern plus ein paar extra beats per minute, aber sie dringt doch in die Körper, teilt sich den Bewegungen mit, bestimmt den Schwung, mit dem man vom einen aufs andre Bein wechselt. Wir sind seit Stunden unterwegs, immer wieder hingefallen aufs nasse Eis, dann halbwegs getrocknet, Schweiß und Wasser haben sich zu einer zweiten Haut, einer merkwürdigen stinkenden Masse, verbunden. Ich bin schon müde und es fällt mir nicht mehr ganz leicht, meinen Schwerpunkt exakt über den…

The Garden of the Finzi-Continis is considered the best of the series of novels that Bassani produced about the lives of Italian Jews in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. Although the novel focuses on the relationships between the major characters, the shadow of creeping fascism, especially the racial laws that restricted Jews’ participation in Italian society, looms over all the novel’s events. According to Bassani, one hundred and eighty-three Jews living in Ferrara were deported to German concentration camps in 1943.

Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977).

This Very Short Introduction does exactly what a VSI should do.  It introduces the reader to its subject and explains why it is significant, and it’s pitched at a non-academic audience in accessible language and with a coherent organisation of the content.  Ritchie Robertson’s Goethe, a Very Short Introduction made me want to drop what I’m currently reading and find out more about this great German writer.

Goethe (Wikipedia Commons)Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was a celebrity novelist at the age of 25! His debut novel, TheSorrows of Young Werther (see my review) was an early example of the Sturm und Drang literary movement, but today its passionate evocation of hopeless young love would place it on the YA shelves (and the film studios would option it and he’d have a mega advance to set him up for life).  But as Robertson explains in the preface, there…