I haven’t seen this in a long time—not since I decided to write (but didn’t) The Magnificent Ampersands. Anyway, time for a re-viewing.
The Magnificent Ambersons
via Travel News | Travel | Daily Express
Stay in the countryside where Emily Bronte got the inspiration for Wuthering Heights
Ponder Hall is now a B&B
(via Mary of Scotland: Katharine Hepburn in Tudor romance with inaccurate kilts | Film | The Guardian)
Yeah, the kilts are totally wrong, but that Fredric March had some swagger.
Highland Passage: A Time Travel Romance
Irvine Welsh, Jon S. Baird Reteam To Adapt Walter Scott’s ‘Ivanhoe’
EXCLUSIVE– Iconoclastic Scottish writer Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) and director Jon S. Baird(Filth) are re-teaming for a bold new adaptation of the classic Walter Scott adventure tale Ivanhoe. Jens Meurer is producing through his Berlin-based Egoli Tossell Film banner. Meurer previously worked with Welsh and Baird on Filth, which is how this latest collaboration first sparked.Basil Iwanyk and his company Thunder Road Pictures are also on-board as producers, along with Stuart Pollok , and Film House Germany’s Christian Angermayer.
Very much the standard bearer for the knight in shining armour genre, Ivanhoe follows the story of a worthy and noble knight who returns to England after the third Crusades. He fights to restore the good King Richard, believed to be held captive in an Austrian prison, and depose Richard’s wicked brother John.
Scott’s iconic romantic novel, first published in 1820, has been adapted numerous times for the big and small screen, memorably in 1952 with a cast that included Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders and Robert Taylor as Ivanhoe. The book is also notable for having first introduced audiences to the character of Robin Hood, known here as Locksley, and his band of merry men.
Via Deadline.com
DECEMBER 27, 2014 7:03 AM ET
ALAYA DAWN JOHNSONThe Game of Kings
by Dorothy DunnettThe old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures. When I was sixteen, the shelf which held authors A through D divulged a small, yellowing paperback with a splashily romantic cover: a long-limbed blond man in Renaissance dress, gripping both a woman and a rapier. The title was The Game of Kings, its author was Dorothy Dunnett, and reading it was going to change my life.
Years later, I would discover how many other writers, across varied genres, shared this foundational influence. I’ve come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground: Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.
The Lymond Chronicles follow the minor Scottish nobleman Francis Crawford of Lymond, a dark star whose gravitational charisma pulls in everyone around him: friends, lovers, enemies (and some who are all three at one time). We see him through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints over the course of the six dense, continent- and decade-spanning novels.
The Martyr of Solway | John Everett Millais | Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
About Highland Soldiers 3: The Return
Each book of the Highland Soldiers series deals with an issue a soldiers faces as a result of their service to clan and King. In Book 1, the hero falls in love with a woman who views him as her enemy. In Books 2, the hero returns to the woman he loves, only to find her engaged to another.
When I began Book 3, I kept coming back to the image of the Wigtown Martyrs, two women whose only crime was not attending church as required by law. While they could have atoned by declaring their allegiance to the King, they refused on principle. For this, they were sentenced to death. They were tied to stakes at low tide, and left to drown as the tide came in. Some accounts tell of soldiers pleading with them to say the words that would free them, but the women would not.
Those soldiers were following orders. Had they refused, others would have stepped in to get the job done. So they did as they were ordered, as was their duty. But how did they justify their actions afterward? How did they live with themselves?
In The Return (Highland Soldiers 3), the hero faces a similar sort of situation, and is haunted by the memory of what he has done.
There was no treatment available for the 17th century hero in my story. But today’s soldiers returning home with similar emotional wounds can seek treatment for Moral Injury. Here is some more information about it:
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