What Scotsman was caught up in a civil war before the age of twenty? Wrote a book that became the inspiration for an Oscar-winning film? Met a runaway teenager in Paris and married her against the wishes of his family? Lost his ranch to raiding Apaches?
Poor Things, Rich Adaptation? Alasdair Gray’s 1992 novel & Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2023 film
28 May, 6–7:30pm CEST (5–6:30 BST)
Free online
Dietmar Böhnke will assess what is arguably the highest-profile #adaptation of a #Scottish novel since TRAINSPOTTING (1996) – & will touch on Gray’s works & reputation more generally, including a #film script he wrote for #PoorThings in 1993…
According to the Guinness Book of Records, Sherlock Holmes has been portrayed on screen more than any other literary character. Olivia Rutigliano ranks the 100 best, worst, & strangest screen portrayals of the great detective…
“Holmes’s stories […] have a surprisingly grounded view of crime, & one that arguably fits better into the hardboiled tradition of Hammett & Chandler than the cozy tradition of Christie.”
Doyle didn’t just write #CrimeFiction … Alan Brown looks at Arthur Conan Doyle’s “vain, volatile, & brilliant” Scottish adventurer-scientist-explorer & dinosaur hunter Professor George Edward Challenger
After THE LOST WORLD, Challenger’s other adventures include the novels THE POISON BELT and THE LAND OF MIST, & the short stories “The World Screamed” & “The Disintegration Machine”. Alan Brown digs deeper into Doyle’s #sciencefiction
(Conan Doyle personally preferred Professor Challenger over Sherlock Holmes – even dressing up as the Professor for a photograph of Challenger’s Amazonian expedition)
When Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, “20,000 people cancelled their subscriptions to the Strand”. Public pressure – & a huge fee – brought Holmes back from the dead; did this fictional immortality influence Doyle’s spiritualism?
In 1912, “Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the world’s most celebrated fictional detective, had turned detective himself in an actual murder case – in the process liberating a man who had spent nearly twenty years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit.”
In March 1927, Arthur Conan Doyle put together a list of his own top 12 Sherlock Holmes stories, sealed it in an envelope, & left it with the editor of the Strand magazine…
“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”
Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life
#BBCLauraK just stated that there are terrible problems with the #Scottish#NHS. What's she on about - of course there are problems after 14 years of Tory mismanagement and corruption but we haven't even had strikes here unlike the rest of UK.
18 May 1640: Archibald Adair #Scottish Church of #Ireland bishop of Killala found guilty of uttering seditious words, appearing to favour the Covenanters #otd
—“Mr. Johnson, (said I) I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it.”
—“That, Sir, I find, is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”
May 16 is Biographers Day – marking the 1st meeting of James Boswell & Samuel Johnson in 1763
Guest speaker: Scottish actor & playwright Matthew Zajac, who will be also performing his critically acclaimed play THE TAILOR OF INVERNESS – the first performance of this play in France
Broad in the beam? More broad in sympathy.
Stiff in the joints? More flexible in mind.
Deaf on the right? New voices from the Left
In politics and art more clearly sound…