Monica Kendall – författare

Ferdinand forbids his widowed sister to marry again.  When he discovers that she is not only married but had a child he is driven mad with fury.  The Duchess of Malfi is a study in strong characters, dark deeds and dreadful revenge.

This edition includes close textual analysis, notes on different interpretations, interviews with actors and directors and a selection of critical scenes. 

In August 1914, thirteen-year-old Amy was trapped on the Belgian seacoast as war was declared with Germany, alone with her younger brothers. British, resilient and feisty, she got back to occupied Brussels and began her war diaries. Amy knew Nurse Cavell and Ada Bodart, members of the secret network to get Allied soldiers across the frontier. She writes of zeppelins, food shortages, constant gunfire and spies. She confronts a 'sneering' German who demands to know where her brother is: 'I could have shot him, ' she comments. Then it all changes: in 1917 her mother attacks her and Amy is moved to a Catholic boarding school nearby. Constantly in trouble for being disruptive, answering back, whistling, laughing in church and climbing onto roofs 'for fun', she longs for the love and approval of her teacher - and her estranged mother.

In July 1798, a Cambridge student set out on a botanical tour and wrote the first guidebook to North Wales. Wearing spectacles and carrying a rucksack, Yorkshire-born William Bingley made notes, sketched and looked for rare plants. He befriended a Welshman with whom he made the first recorded rock climb in Britain on the north flank of Snowdon. Three years later they climbed the iconic mountain Tryfan. Bingley also helped establish the legend of the faithful hound Gelert.In retracing Bingley's steps through the historic counties of Flint, Denbigh, Caernarvon, Anglesey, Merioneth and Montgomery (as well as the town of Oswestry), the reader will discover a landscape and people of over two hundred years ago. They will clamber with Bingley up waterfalls, ride in a waggon into a candle-lit copper mine, sail on a cutter to Ynys Enlli, suffer the fleas at an inn in Beddgelert, ponder the necessity of taking a pint of rum up Snowdon, or blissfully rest in the shade of Montgomery Castle during harvest. Perhaps also, like Bingley, they will be fired by the Last Bard's curse on Edward I, while gazing across the water at sunset towards the isle of the Druids.This first edition since 1839 includes a newly researched biography, and background on the Picturesque, the Sublime, slate quarries and pickled puffins.

'An extraordinary, intriguing and wonderfully idiosyncratic work'Flora spotted a large handwritten sign perched against a shrub with two long arrows. Above the left arrow was written 'BRIDGE', above the other arrow was, in smaller capital letters, 'ABSOLUTELY NOTHING'.Set largely in 1970s Oxford and USA, Make me thy lyre is a Bildungsroman with humour, Shakespeare, art, poetry, death and loss. It is framed by a prologue and epilogue set fifty years later. Flora is an only child from suburban north London. At Oxford University she reads Arabic and plays Rosaline and Beatrice. Initially lonely, she discovers boys and friendship, but tragedy strikes. A bridge connects us to the living; can it connect us to the dead? The past matters.'There are so many things I love about this. The energy and drive and passion, and the vivid recreation and recording of a past so deeply meaningful to Flora. What do I especially love? The way Monica Kendall has woven Shakespeare into the fabric of so many moments and epiphanies/realisations - my god, he really was a genius, wasn't he?' -- Nigel Bryant, translator of Raoul de Houdenc