Sayid laughs often. I realise his laughter means several things: humour, yes, the absurdity of life, often, but also embarrassment, denial, fatalism. And underneath the laughter, sadness. Sayid’s family had been nomadic. By the time Sayid was a young man, however, the family was semi-settled. He told me this with a shrug of his shoulders. His father still owned camels, but used them now to trade between desert and city. More than anything, Sayid loved to accompany him. From his father he learned the desert ways. But one morning, without telling anyone, his father went alone, far out into the Hurra, to a stranger’s well, looking for water. One by one, the camels came home, their empty water-skins flapping. Sayid’s father never returned. I try to imagine this. ‘Did he get lost?’ I ask. Sayid shakes his head. ‘My father not lost. He know the ways like a bird.’ Her search would become a book, about the search for the truth of her mother’s Irish family, who had lived through famine, poverty, the Easter Rising and Civil War, ultimately discovering the family secret of her mother’s rescue mission to free her sister and her baby from a Protestant home for fallen women.

Castle's first appearance was as Westmoreland on stage in Henry V on 5 June 1964, at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park. He was 24 years old. His first Broadway theatre appearance was in February 1970 as "Jos" in the short-lived musical Georgy. With all it’s faults, Northanger Abbey does try hard and as the only version available on film, must be accepted, if only to complete the set of all Austen films to date. The best advice I have heard is, "If you are going to watch it, try to enjoy it with an open mind and no expectations." After all, it does deserve our gratitude. If it hadn’t been for Northanger Abbey, Pride and Prejudice (BBC/A&E 1995) might never have been made. It was at a screening of Northanger Abbey that writer Andrew Davies met producer Sue Birtwistle and the idea of making P&P into "a fresh, lively story about real people" was born. She found me really and I have met her and I know her. But she was the completion of this story if you like.” It’s a real-life memoir that begins as an exciting detective story, and ends up telling an utterly enthralling family saga. I step outside onto the lawn and open my mouth to the sky, allowing soft English rain to fall on my tongueAgnes was the last to leave. She travelled, with her hat-box – though it contained no hats – to Sussex where she worked as cook in a “Big House” and on the eve of the second World War she married a young English soldier. My life was to be a world away from her own: after the war our small family moved to Egypt, to Cyprus, to Malaya, and as we did so – as if following Ireland’s example – the British Empire fell about our ears. I was born and lived my adult life in England, only child of an English father and an Irish mother. Much of my life as a writer had been spent in television and many of my screenplays were adaptations of 19th-century classic novels – Austen, Eliot, Wharton – work based on massive amounts of someone else’s fictional material. It was work I’d enjoyed, but television drama had changed and so had I. Now I was after something different, something entirely my own. I was determined to write about my mother and about Ireland. Warship (1975) – Lieutenant-Commander Peter Tremayne, officer commanding the Royal Navy submarine HMS Ovid in the episode "Under the Surface" Bob Mortimer wins 2023 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction with The Satsuma Complex Difficult, but I’ve settled on ‘The Beginning of Spring’ by Penelope Fitzgerald for its intensity, economy and strangeness, like a spontaneous leap of powerful, unmediated imagination.

insignificant personalities, on stage and was seen in the film King David (1985) as the commander of

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Maggie knew Agnes was from Ireland, but beyond that information was sketchy: ‘I know my mother had come from Ireland, alone, on a ferry boat with only a hat-box (though it contained no hats), having left home in a hurry after poisoning her mother’s geese.’ It was when I was first shown the Borrisokane Parish records and saw the date of my great-grandmother’s birth, July 1845, the height of the Great Famine, I knew I had my starting point. How had the Kavanaghs come through catastrophe and gone on to flourish?

Dystopian Fiction Books Everyone Should Read: Explore The Darker Side of Possible Worlds and Alternative FuturesAs fires rage and birds faint, the heat is taking its toll on wildlife. Swifts have fallen from the sky over London. Deer crowd, panting, in the hot-house shade. Among the most dramatic events was a wildfire in Norfolk’s Wild Ken Reserve where eight-two acres of thorny scrub went up in flames destroying nesting territories of turtle doves, grasshopper warblers and reed warblers.’ There are wildfires in California. In Spain. In France near where we take a family holiday. In January 2023 several European countries saw the warmest start to the year ever recorded. Is this the future? At home we’re being advised to take a new approach to our gardens, to acquire new knowledge: to make drought-resistant Mediterranean gardens. Even in my mother’s famously rain-soaked homeland – ‘If it’s not raining it’s dripping off the trees’ – the summer was so dry farmers tell me they’ve had difficulty watering their cattle. Milk yields are therefore low. EU grants encouraging more head of cattle have combined with something only just beginning to be understood, namely, climate change (something the fossil-fuel industries were aware of decades ago). Floods. Drought. Fires.