Alan Taylor (6)Reseñas

This is a great collection of diary excerpts. I found favorite diarists that I will track down to read all of their writing. Nice short bios at the back as well as a good bibliography make this a wonderful resource as well as a fun read. I'm glad I had this showed up on a reading list. My sister and my Mama and I all read it this year. Very enjoyable and inspires me to get writing myself!

Alan Taylor met Muriel Spark and her friend Penelope Jardine when he went to Italy to interview them for The Scotsman in 1990. They discovered a shared sense of humour and a common Edinburgh background (quite a few decades apart) and hit it off immediately, and that evening in a restaurant in Arezzo led to a friendship that was to last for the rest of Spark's life. It sounds as though she treated him as a kind of honorary stepson: Taylor and his family were invited to house-sit for the ladies when they went off travelling in the hot summer, when required he acted as an informal research assistant for Spark's writing projects and escort on her professional travels, and he had to sympathise and advise on endless domestic disasters. He has gone on to edit Spark's collected novels, and has written many introductions to her books and essays about her.

This modest and entertaining memoir of their friendship is more like an extended review of Spark's importance as a novelist than a name-dropping exercise, though. We get glimpses of Spark in private life and a discussion of her endless fights with biographers and memoirists — Taylor is conscious that he's on thin ice in this regard, so he stresses that everything he's written has been checked and approved by Jardine — but the real focus is on how she came to write those wonderful novels and why we should go on reading them. Perhaps redundant, but enjoyable anyway! And I learnt a few interesting things about Spark I didn't know, for instance that William Shawn provided her with her own office at the New Yorker that she could use whenever she happened to be in the city — she insisted on having it redecorated, because she found the colour-scheme too drab.½

Thoroughly enjoyed this book and every time I had to put it down I eagerly looked forward to getting back into it. Well done and good choices from diaries and journals. Reread this at last and it is as good the second time as the first. Spent a lot of time on Google looking up details on the people who's diaries were excerpted in this book. I even ordered a few and started reading a couple I already had like The Greville Memoirs.

This is a fabulous book! I really enjoyed reading the day's entries before bed. I'm afraid some nights I just couldn't put it down and had to read a few extra days. I met some wonderful people. I am happy that short bios of the writers is included in the back as well as a full bibliography. There are several diarists whose complete diaries I will want to track down. The index of diarists allowed me to search through for favorites. Very thoughtfully put together. I'm grateful that my terrific sister shared this great book with me. I highly recommend!

I became aware of this book through the Radio 4 Extra serialisation and the fascination I had with the reading brought me to the book and then to Muriel Spark. I hadn't read anything of her work before, but as I picked up more information I suddenly realised what I have been missing. I invested in the Polygon hardback reissue of her 22 novels plus this excellent biography.
Alan Taylor's memoir does exactly the right thing by demonstrating his love of his subject without being sycophantic. It seems to be the perfect intro into the literary world of Muriel Spark.½

“This book is an intimate, fond and funny memoir of one of the greatest novelists of the last century.”

Alan Taylor has written a very personal and compelling biography of his friend, the novelist, Muriel Spark. Spark wrote 22 novels which will be coming out from Polygon next year in handsome hardback editions to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Spark’s birth. Best known for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Spark also wrote short stories, plays, reviews, essays and biographies.

“The Muriel Spark 100 programme will celebrate the life and literary achievements of one of Scotland’s finest and most internationally respected writers across the year, through a series of events, including talks, exhibitions, readings, publications and screenings.”

In advance of the reprints and the 100 years program Alan Taylor’s biography is published in November 2017. I received an advanced copy in return for a review.

Taylor first met the author in 1990 in Tuscany when he interviewed her. They hit it off and Taylor subsequently house sat for her as well as accompanied her on some of her foreign trips. He came to know her well and this is an intimate portrait.

Written in a very companionable style the book creates a colourful picture of Spark. A passionate and fiercely intelligent woman and one of our greatest writers. Taylor includes the contentious stuff – her attitude to her Jewish roots, her failed marraige, her estrangement from her son and her self-exile from Scotland. But the threads of her life are woven into a tale of warmth that shows the great affection Taylor had for her.

It does what a biography should – it brings to life the subject and makes you know them better. Spark comes across as someone you’d like to invite to a dinner party. I’ve read several of Spark’s books and she’s one of those authors you look out for in second hand shops, so a new set of hardbacks is very welcome.

If you are a fan of Muriel Spark then this is a must have biography. If you are just generally interested in writers lives it is also well worth your time. Recommended.

While the format (a 'book of days' containing diary entries) is a good idea, I felt the selection was too heavily weighted in favour of diaries from the Second World War and from twentieth-century entertainers.

The country diaries. A year in the British countryside is an anthology of diary writing with special focus on the British countryside. Although the idea is very appealing, the resulting book is aenemic and of little interest.

In The country diaries. A year in the British countryside, Alan Taylor, editor of the Scottish Review of Books, brings together fragments from diaries of 81 different British authors, from the early and mid-1700s till the present day. The book itself also has the structure of a diary. There are entries for every day, and every month, throughout the year. Some entries are very short, a matter of lines, while other entries take up more than a page. For some days, only one (short) entry is given, while for other days, multiple entries are given by different authors from different times in history.

In the introduction, Taylor explains why the book was written. As an editor, Alan F. Taylor has copiled at least two other anthologies of this type: The Assassin's Cloak: An Anthology of the World's Greatest Diarists and The Secret Annexe: An Anthology of the World's Greatest War Diarists. Having grown up in the countryside near Edinburgh, Mr Taylor has a strong feeling for the countyside and the assault on the countryside by project developers, urbanization, and the decline of farming as a profession, threatening the countryside as we know it are some of his concerns.

The introduction does not explain how Mr Taylor compiled the book, or what his considerations were in selecting fragments. From reading an initial 50 to 80 pages into the book, it quickly becomes clear that all major diarists known for writing about the countryside are represented, notably Dorothy Wordsworth and Gilbert White. Less well-known diarists, whose diaries were only published during the past two decades, such as Denton Welch and John Fowles are also presented. These were all writers, and they particularly wrote about the natural beauty of the British countryside. However, with a total number of 81 different diarists, and many of these having only one or two entries, one wonders what other criteria the editor had.

It is likely the editor compiled a list of key words for the countryside, and it seems his list must have included words such as animals, life and death, hunting, natural history, etc. Whether or not the word "farming" was included is not very clear. Perhaps British farmers did not write diaries, at least they seem to be underrepresented. Among the contemporary writers, Mr Taylor has selected several authors who have tried to protect the British countryside. It is obvious that some of his choices, as could also be seen from the introduction, are political rather than literary or aesthetic.

There are diarists from the last four centuries. James Woodforde (1740 - 1803) was a vicar and many of his diary entries are about burials. Siegfried Sassoon is often selected to write about hunting. Various farm animals make their appearances, sheep, horses, cows, etc. and of wilde life particularly hearing the cuckoo or chiffchaff in spring, or finding spiders in the bathroom gives the quitessential feeling of life in the countryside.

However, The country diaries. A year in the British countryside is not very enticing. Thoughts wander while reading, and the book seems to make little sense. Usually, a diary gives a sense of place or a sense of personality, or both, but this book is too fragmented. Paradoxically, the British countryside is not any particular place, and the choice of fragments by so many authors over a period of 400 years, means there is no particular period of reference. No unity of place, and no unity of time.

On the other hand, The country diaries. A year in the British countryside introduces many different authors and their diary writing to the reader. At the end of the book, the book includes a list of short biographies for each diarist, a bibliography to locate editions of their published diaries, and a register, to look up entries for each author in this volume.½

This is the third collection of Diaries which are edited by Alan Taylor to the same format. This one deals with Country matters and as with the other two volumes is spread over the whole year but with entries from many different years. They vary from the 1700's to 2000 plus.
As well as the usual diarists such as Gilbert White,Francis Kilvert and the like,we have a large number of less well known writers who are on the whole amusing and informative by turn.
The book is rounded off with short biographies of the Diarists and with details of their Diaries for those who wish to follow through and to go deeper into the works of particular writers.
There are just too many possible sections that I could quote from,but one sentence I really would like to pass on -'All diaries are greedily sought for,let them be ever so ill and foolishly written,as coming warm from the heart ;' - John Byng wrote in 1782. Warm from the heart,what a lovely term,and so right.

19 Dec 2009 - Borders

A lovely book which I think I'd seen advertised and put on the wish list - and there it was for a small amount of money in poor old Borders, in their big sale when they closed down.

This is a charming read - basically Taylor takes a load of country diary writers from the 1600s through to the 2000s and includes one or more entries, in chronological order, for each day of the year. So we see some people battling with snow, others seeing spring, on the same day, and we also follow various diarists such as Gilbert White and Francis Kilvert, pretty well through the whole year, while others are more spread out or only appear once or twice. Some moving, some a bit yucky (Kilvert was a bit naughtier than I imagined) and some describing the countryside very lyrically - but all are of interest and I'm considering reading this again through a whole year one day. Lovely woodcuts on the cover and for each month, too, and useful biographies at the end (which I wish I'd noticed when I started the book)

Good book for the bedside table to dip into when you've got a minute. Some of the diarists are (admittedly) unknown to me but it doesn't detract from the enjoyment, after all - who could resist reading someone else's diary?

With its broad remit and the engaging conceit of ordering it by days of the year, this anthology of diary extracts is by turns amusing, saddening, and exciting, but never dull. The format led me to read it daily over the course of a year, which emphasised the rhythm of the collection. It seems to me that the 20th century, particularly the middle years, is over-represented but this is cavilling.½

A good anthology of diary entries from a number of great diarists, arranged by day of the year, so that the section for, say, December 25, contains an 1860 entry by Henry David Thoreau, an 1870 entry by the Reverend Francis Kilvert, a 1924 entry by Evelyn Waugh and so on. I read it over a year, on the dates the entries were written, an approach the book's arrangement especially lends itself to, and which seems to me the ideal way to read such a book.

Some of the diarists are famous for their lives and works; others (such as the aforementioned Francis Kilvert) are remembered only for their diaries. Most of the diarists have more than one entry, and the selection provides a number of narrative threads that can be traced through the year.

Inevitably, the small number of selections from each author left me wanting more from many of them; I've since bought the more interesting ones that I've come across in bookshops.

My only criticism of the selection is that too many are from World War II -- there could have been more balance.½

dear diary, i love reading a good diary. love, sara

Endlessly entertaining.