Lindsey Davis’s top 10 Roman books Books | guardian.co.uk

The classical thriller writer, creator of private investigator and poet Falco, lists her top ten books from shelves and shelves of Roman material. Lindsey Davis’s top 10 Roman books | Books | guardian.co.uk .

Fresh start and EOTN

Anyone who follows this or occasionally reads it will know I have not been updating this blog. I am trying to get started again.

Thus news here is that the film of Eagle of the Ninth is now being made!

Film of Eagle of the Ninth

Academy Award-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald has signed on to direct The Eagle of the Ninth, according to an announcement in Cannes 2008 by Focus Features. Macdonald won an Oscar for his documentary One Day in September and directed Forest Whitaker to his Academy Award for Best Actor in The Last King of Scotland.

Scotland co-writer Jeremy Brock adapted the screenplay for Eagle from Rosemary’s novel , originally published in 1954, which is set in the second century in Roman-ruled Britain, telling the tale of a young Roman’s search for the truth about the disappearance of his father’s legion. 

Macdonald is currently completing production on State of Play, starring Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck. ‘Pre-production’ on The Eage of the Ninth is set to begin at the end of the year. 

Rosemary appreciated

Led there by the excellent appreciative bluerememberedhills.blogspot.com I found this post to an ancient history website in 2003.

” I knew Rosemary as a friend and, briefly, as her editor………most of her best writing was done in the 50s and 60s, beginning with ‘The Eagle of the Ninth’ and ending with ‘The Mark of the Horse Lord’, which is my own favourite. What she really wanted to do, however, was to write romantic novels full of sex, but here her experience, and imagination, let her down. She was crippled by Still’s disease, contracted as a child – many of her protagonists have physical disabilities of one kind or another. She had no movement in her legs, and hands whose work (including writing and miniature painting) was done with just a forefinger and a tiny, rudimentary thumb.

She had, as did Henry Treece, a mystical communion with the past, which enabled her both to recreate tiny details, and to confound military historians with her understanding of the art of battle in any situation she cared to devise. Her sense of place was uncanny, in that she could get no nearer to a site than the seat of a car on an adjacent road. Friends often served as her eyes, and also as her researchers, but it was the conclusions she drew from the evidence, and her re-creations of them, that made her contribution to the literature about the ancient world so distinctive. Where she was simply embellishing recorded history, she was no better than anyone else.

She also had one of the rudest senses of humour in anyone I have met.”

I grew up with Rosemary and much rings very true to me. She did indeed have a rude sense of humour (in both senses). I am not so sure about her wanting to be a romantic novelist above all. Nor do I think her finest books were only in the 1950s an 1960s; for example the award-winning Song for a Dark Queen was written in the 1970s. Her autobiography, Blue Remembered Hills points to the romantic love of her life – a rafish RAF pilot who emigrated eventually to Australia.

OUP cannot spell her name right

OUP: UK General Catalogue
To my despair I discover today that even Rosemary’s first publisher cannot spell her name right – here in a ‘book box’ for schools. What sort of example is that? They presumably are responsible also for the standard ISBN records for this, which also get the spelling wrong. I shall be onto them via our agents.

Scottish essay competition winner

Scottish schools essay competition 2004-2005 winning essays
The winning essay in a school’s essay competition in Scotland a couple of years back was about Rosemary Sutcliffe (sic) – Rosemary’s name spelt wrong but that happily on this occasion did not trouble the University judges!

The Lantern Bearers: A Review

With The Lantern Bearers Rosemary won the Carnegie Medal in 1959 . An American review … I discovered Rosemary Sutcliff in my early teens, and she quickly became one of my favorite authors. I can still vividly recapture the magic of reading her books. It was a real pleasure to return to The Lantern Bearers, which I first read when I was about thirteen, and find the magic still intact.

Sword at Sunset

Eric Eller describes himself as a ‘recovering chemical engineer’. Of Sword at Sunset he writes:”… Rosemary Sutcliff’s Sword at Sunset stands out for its raw emotion and storyline stripped down to the essentials … This novel makes other versions, no matter how much fantasy and magic are injected, pallid by comparison. Other authors have recreated a gritty, ‘realistic’ Arthur since Sutcliff introduced the idea more than forty years ago, but this first attempt at that take on the Arthurian legend still stands out as the best”.

Film of Eagle of the Ninth

Duncan Kenworthy, London-based producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Love Actually, has acquired the film rights to The Eagle of the Ninth, which has sold more than a million copies since its appearance in 1954. It was made into a BBC mini-series shot in Aberdeenshire in the 1970s.

Writing for ages 8 to 88 …

Rosemary once said of her writing: “The themes of my children’s books are mostly quite adult, and in fact the difference between writing for children and for adults is, to me at any rate, only a quite small gear change.” (Townsend, John Rowe. 1971. A Sense of Story. London: Longman p. 201)

Winning Awards

Awards that Rosemary won included:

• Library Association Carnegie Award for The Lantern Bearers in 1959
  Boston-Globe Horn Book Award for Tristan and Iseult in 1972
  Highly Commended by the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1974
  The Other Award for Song for a Dark Queen in 1978
• Phoenix Children’s Book Award for The Mark of the Horse Lord in 1985
  

Sutcliff not Sutcliffe!

Too many people spell Rosemary’s name wrong, with an ‘e’, as Sutcliffe! Indeed, if you Google ‘Rosemary Sutcliffe’ with an ‘e’ you find many versions of this error in schools and in bookshops. In fact one of her publishers made this mistake in their promotional material for one of her books.

Rosemary on being a disabled artist

Rosemary wrote this for the “Emotions in Focus” exhibition of erotic art by disabled people mounted as a celebration of the International Year of Disabled People 1981. Victor Lownes opened the exhibition at The Round House, London (UK).

Career-wise, I’m one of the lucky ones. My job, as a writer of books, is one of the few in which physical disability presents hardly any problems. I would claim that it presents no problems at all but my kind of book needs research, and research is more difficult for a disabled person. I am less able to see for myself or dig priceless information out of deeply hidden archives. I have to rely more on other people’s help and on libraries. And even libraries can present problems -like one which shall be nameless – which is very proud of its ramp to its entrance but keeps its entire reference department upstairs, with, of course, no lift.

Rosemary and North East of England

Alan Myers compiled an “A to Z of the many writers of the past who had a significant connection” with the North-East of England which has now disappeared from the web . He writes of Rosemary:
“One of the most distinguished children’s writers of our times, Rosemary Sutcliff wrote over thirty books , some of them now considered classics. She sets several of her best-known works in Roman and Dark Age Britain, giving her the opportunity to write about divided loyalties, a recurring theme. The Capricorn Bracelet comprises six linked short stories spanning the years AD 61 to AD 383, and Hadrian’s Wall features in the narrative.

Some book covers