My favourite blogposts - out of 2500

  

Favourite Blogposts

If you read the blog earlier this week you will know that I have reached my 2500^th post here, in 12 years of blogging, including entries on all the works of Agatha Christie. And of course, many others.

I decided to find out how many books I had featured on the blog, and the only way to do that was literally to count the linked titles as in the ‘author’ tabs above – quite a time-consuming task. (I was being terribly careful, trying to make sure there were no duplicates, authors with 2 names, before thinking that within a day my figures will be out of date anyway, so I just needed to do my best but not double-check.)

So – I included books that had even a brief description, short stories (but counting one book for multiple entries on stories), plays and poems. Not theme posts, list posts, James Bond in Love.

And the total was 2015 (ish). (If only I’d run a few more posts it could have been 2024…) – which is what I had expected.

There is a heavy emphasis on crime fiction, but I will write about anything that takes my fancy, and although clothes do feature a lot, I won’t hold back from other topics when it suits me.

I have decided to make a list my favourite posts – and here they are. These are not in any order, just how they came to mind

 

1)   The Clue in the Castle by Joyce Bevins Webb.

This is an incredibly obscure children’s book, a school story (picture at top), that I loved and reread frequently. When I posted on it, it was for my own benefit: I thought that no-one else would be interested. But thousands of people have enjoyed it - an elite few are those who have also read it: what I love is that although the post is nearly 10 years old, a commenter will turn up after remembering it, or rereading it, and thinking ‘surely there’s nothing on the internet…?’ But there is. And if you read the post, you may not be interested in the book but I don’t think you could be in any doubt about how much I loved writing about it.

Supplementary: February’s Road by John Verney, another book I loved inordinately as a child, and another blog reference that brings people in years later, people who also loved the book. I used a John Verney picture on a post a few days ago, and explained more about him there.

2)   Oh You Spanish Ladies…. The Golden Spaniard by Dennis Wheatley. I can only say – Wheatley is a nonsensical writer, but he knows how to keep the reader transfixed, and this is another post that I very much enjoyed writing. I made myself laugh. This is the only one of his books that I have posted on, but he comes up in other contexts – weaponry in a James Bond book, and all kinds of weird religious mentions, as I explain in this post. You can find the varied posts that feature him here.

 

3)   Why I would have made a wonderful opera singer except for not being able to sing, at all.  House of Names by Colm Toibin looks at the story of Elektra and her deeply dysfunctional family: I looked at the book, and then at the Strauss opera Elektra, with stage directions. Regret for an alternate life I was never going to have.

4)  One of my most popular posts came when I wanted to investigate  How ballerinas kept their tights up in the days before Advanced Elastic. Again, thousands of people wanted to read about this. You need silk tights, each to be fastened securely with pennies and yards of elastic.

 

Supplementary: A recent reread of Irene Thomas’s autobiography, The Bandsman’s Daughter, produced this additional description, from when she was in the chorus at the Royal Opera House. “The tights were not like the easy stretchy ones of today. They were solid cotton and could only kept really smooth by rolling the waistband over and twisting a penny – an old penny – into each side. After a 3-hour opera this became agonising. I still sometimes feel as though I’ve got holes in my sides.”

5)   Hilary Mantel is one of my favourite authors, and has featured a lot on the blog. She died in September 2022, and I was devastated.  The i newspaper asked me if I could do a rush job on a tribute to her. In exactly two and a half hours I wrote this (and 20 minutes of that was checking quotes and facts) and I am extremely proud of it. If I’d had time to do one more edit I would have changed a couple of things, but it is as it is. It expressed what I felt about her. ‘The three Tudor books are her legacy, works that will be read for as long as people have a curiosity about the past, or people, or the way history works, or moral frameworks. The best books of the century.’

 

6)   For Armistice Day 2018 (100 year anniversary of the end of World War I) I wrote about Patrick Shaw Stewart and his poem I met a man this morning – a beautiful, sad poem and a melancholy story. The poem is also known as Achilles in the Trench, and I did my own translation from the Ancient Greek of a couple of lines of Homer for it.

Supplementary: I have done a number of entries on poems over the years – Sappho, Adlestrop, John Cornford (another sad war poem, this time the Spanish Civil War), the wonder that is Cavafy’s perfect Ithaka, (and Tennyson’s Ulysses too), WB Yeats a few times, Thomas Wyatt, John Donne  on St Lucy’s Day, the glorious love poem of Donal Og, another wonderful love poem translated by Ezra Pound, Louis MacNeice’s Les Sylphides.

 

7 James and the Giant Octopus  Possibly my favourite post title (though also consider Why is that stripper crying? Lost in New Orleans) and I loved linking up James Bond and Biggles. They turned up together again in my post on – not where you might expect to find them – secretaries.

 

8 I Capture the Castle may be my favourite book of them all. I love Hilary Mantel, Middlemarch, and Proust, I love Ford Madox Ford and Robert Irwin. But if I was ill or miserable or couldn’t see the point of the world or reading was hard, the book I would turn to is Dodie Smith’s masterpiece. (and I will just mention that the New York Review of Books recently published a wonderful piece on the book from a London writer,  Anna Leszkiewicz). I have done many posts on the book- see a selection here – including posts on Mortmain’s fictional books, but remember especially fondly finding a dress for Topaz in the early days of the blog.

9 My other great comfort-read author is Nancy Mitford, and of the many, many posts on her I will pick out my researches into What Cedric wore for the Ball – I found out what was meant by ‘Doris Keane in Romance’, and illustrated another costume covered in rose petals. This post has links to the varied paths this sent me on.

10 Representing all those hundreds of crime books: I was extremely pleased with the Wimsey Exam Paper, most of which would mean nothing to anyone except a serious fan of Dorothy L Sayers' books.

11 In the About section on the blog, I say that I particularly like 'high-grade tosh in the form of massive bestsellers from a bygone age, mostly now forgotten' - two posts with links to define what that actually is. (With mention of the sub-genre 'books I read so you don't have to'.)  And I loved doing the Tosh posts. Not exactly the same, but linked, there is a more recent post on The Books that Are Always in Charity Shops – the post has links to the books that started me off – Axel Munthe, and Aylwin. Again, a massive response from readers, with the comments giving an incredibly long and heart-warming list of the books that our parents or grandparents had on their shelves…

Supplementary: Readers always enjoy a theme post, and click magnets have included Secretaries, Mourning, Impersonation, Character Names in Books, Motives in crime fiction… the easiest way to find such posts is from the Themes and Lists tab above.

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That’s quite long enough for now – but I will be running some other posts relating to my reaching this landmark….