Harper Lee
Sad to hear the news about the death of Harper Lee, but she left her mark on the world with To Kill a Mockingbird, a great book which Holywood did proud with the movie of the same name starring Gregory Peck.
Which reminds me I was at the dentist the other day and said to the receptionist that I needed my "Gregory Pecks" to read my bill, but the young woman didn't know who or what I was talking about.
That's the trouble with Cockney rhyming slang - it gets dated all too quickly.
'To Kill A Mockingbird' is back in the news again because its author Harper Lee has released another book 'Go Set A Watchman' which was apparently written before her famous novel told through the eyes of a rambunctious 'tomboy' Scout and her widely respected father, Atticus Finch.
I read various alarming reports in the media recently claiming that the Education Secretary at Westminster, Michael Gove, had banned certain great works of American literature including To Kill and Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible.
Now this surprised me I have to say and I considered writing about this outrageous act because The Crucible, for example, saved me form a force fed diet of Shakespeare which I could never really warm to when I was at school.
Yet here we have the truth in an article written by Michael Gove for The Telegraph - the whole thing's a old of baloney from beginning to end, a complete work of fiction, and even though he's a 'nasty' Tory in some people's eyes not even he would dream of killing a mockingbird.
You'd think that the people behind these ridiculous reports would now have the good grace to apologise for writing such nonsense although I suspect it all comes down to the kind of politics that people are so fed up with these days.
To Kill A Mockingbird (14/07/15)
'To Kill A Mockingbird' is back in the news again because its author Harper Lee has released another book 'Go Set A Watchman' which was apparently written before her famous novel told through the eyes of a rambunctious 'tomboy' Scout and her widely respected father, Atticus Finch.
But I won't be reading 'Watchman' because it was rejected by Harper Lee's publisher who gave her great advice many years ago to re-write the whole story as a coming of age tale, and the rest is history as they say.
So what's the point of reading an old, discarded book whose plot line was rejected as not cutting the mustard more that 50 years ago?
After all it's only a work of fiction and apparently not a terribly good one at that, otherwise Watchman would have been published long ago.
To Kill A Mockingbird (28/05/14)
I read various alarming reports in the media recently claiming that the Education Secretary at Westminster, Michael Gove, had banned certain great works of American literature including To Kill and Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men and The Crucible.
Now this surprised me I have to say and I considered writing about this outrageous act because The Crucible, for example, saved me form a force fed diet of Shakespeare which I could never really warm to when I was at school.
Yet here we have the truth in an article written by Michael Gove for The Telegraph - the whole thing's a old of baloney from beginning to end, a complete work of fiction, and even though he's a 'nasty' Tory in some people's eyes not even he would dream of killing a mockingbird.
You'd think that the people behind these ridiculous reports would now have the good grace to apologise for writing such nonsense although I suspect it all comes down to the kind of politics that people are so fed up with these days.
