Elizabeth Caffin recalls first looking into T S Eliot’s poems. Some time in the mid-1950s I gave a morning talk to the third form of a Christchurch secondary school. My subject was the poetry of T S Eliot; I…
Mandy Hager dodges Anne of Green Gables to reach for Paul Gallico. Paul Gallico’s Flowers for Mrs Harris is a simple tale related in his unpretentious and somewhat “telling” style. Revisiting something well-loved from childhood or adolescence is always a…
Linley Boniface recalls what Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals meant to her growing up in the “anti-Corfu” of 1970s Palmerston North. The territorial skirmishes of marriage manifest themselves, at my house, in bookcases. We have always had too many…
Anti-brain fade Self-confessed geek Bernard Beckett is seduced by the history of science Asked to write on a “book that means a lot to you”, I knew I’d write about non-fiction, and indeed a piece of science writing. I am…
Alan Loney records his long-lasting admiration for the lute-playing poet. The persistence of the ancient Greek poet Sappho (c630-570 BC) in the literary imagination of the West is one of the most remarkable aspects of the poetic tradition. While many…
Peter Russell looks at his childhood reading through the eyes of Ovid. At the time when the story opens, a little boy named Maui … was playing on the sea-shore. He was so happy, picking up shells and watching the…
Gavin Bishop leafs through two boyhood favourites. The three of us are about the same age – my first picture book, my teddy bear and me. The book lies, or should I say languishes, coddled in tissue and plastic to…
Dunedin writer Christine Johnston rediscovers the still-growing pleasures of Tom’s Midnight Garden. I would have borrowed a copy of Tom’s Midnight Garden from Dunedin Children’s Library, which in those days was located in two of the terraced houses in Stuart…
C K Stead recalls encountering Rupert Brooke’s The Complete Poems. During WWII my sister Norma, two and a half years my senior, acquired a “pen-friend” in Rugby, England. I don’t recall the friend’s name, but we sent her family food…
Our English teacher in form five was a nice, ineffectual guy. He stuttered, so in typically compassionate boys’ school style, we called him “Static”. His discipline was pretty tenuous; some of the second-year fifth formers (this was the 1950s: score…
