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Fiction

Alan Garner

    Alan Garner is a unique and highly gifted writer, skilfully crafting his text with carefully chosen language. His is a unique voice in modern England – a tongue married to a landscape and culture - that of my childhood - subtly  expressing, through idiom and cadence, the richness of local dialect and culture, avoiding the patronising but rich and true. Drawing on mythical and classical imagery, he weaves a fascinating range of tales in a hypnotic style that captivates, drawing the reader deep within his world.

    Link to the unofficial Alan Garner homepage

Strandloper: Jacket photo by Richard Haughton

Russell Hoban

 

    Riddley Walker (or at US amazon.com)
    Cult books are often to be avoided, but this is not one of them. This book sparkles with the love of linguistic invention and an almost mysterious fascination with the root meanings of words in context. In a post-apocalyptic future in which language is no longer a mainly written medium, but pre-eminently oral, words take on the life that is the reality around them. The result is a mesmerising tribute to human inventiveness and the search for meaning as Riddley comes of age and seeks to understand the ghastly truth of human history.

 

 

Thinkers

 

John Ralston Saul - the freedom to doubt

 

 

 

 

    Democracy and globalisation
    Audio and transcript of a lecture delivered at the University of New South Wales in Sydney in January 1999 and broadcast on ABC TV

 

 

 

 

Music

 

David Helpling

 

 

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