![]() ![]() In Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), Hardy expert Michael Millgate suggests the small area of heath beside Hardy's birthplace at Upper Bockhampton as the origin of Egdon Heath, but Hardy added to it areas near Puddletown, Bovington, and Winfrith. The valley of the River Frome, scene of much of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, marks the southern boundary of the heath. Hardy located the Dorsetshire heath in his maps, the end-papers for editions of his work published in his lifetime, and in The Return of the Native, as an amalgam of scattered areas of moorland chiefly east of Dorchester and north-west of Wareham, north of the Dorchester-Wareham road and south of the Dorchester-Wimborne road. ![]() ![]() One of the Rainbarrows, Duddle Heath, part of Hardy's Egdon Heath Real-world origins ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() She was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and the first African American woman to be inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1976), but these are just two from an. Written in 1953 but never published in Britain, Maud Martha is a poetic collage of happenings that forms an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary life: one lived with wisdom, humour, protest, rage, dignity and joy. Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) is a new author for me, perhaps because she was primarily a poet. And the 'scraps of baffled hate'-a certain word from a saleswoman, that visit to the cinema, the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus-are always there. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams, too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. ![]() What, what, am I to do with all of this life? ![]() Introduced by Margo Jefferson, this is a miniature wonder of a novel by the celebrated poet and first Black author to win a Pulitzer Prize, published in Britain for the very first time. ![]() ![]() ![]()
![]() ![]() The front cover art sets the tone for the book: a younger Palpatine kneeling in subservience to the looming visage of an alien. For fans interested in learning more about the Sith and their intricate Grand Plan to bring down the Republic and the Jedi, Darth Plagueis adds some intriguing and disturbing depth to the backstory of the Prequel Trilogy. But part of Palpatine’s effectiveness as a villain always has been the mystery surrounding him, and the novel craftily leaves the shroud of secrecy in place over some aspects of his character where revelation would do more harm than good to the saga. So are some of the other longstanding questions about Palpatine’s past, before and after he became a Sith apprentice. In Darth Plagueis, those questions are finally answered. Ever since, Star Wars fans have wondered how much of Palpatine’s tale was true and how much was Sith fabrication – and whether that murdering apprentice might even have been Sidious himself. In the ominous opera house scene in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, Darth Sidious lures Anakin Skywalker to the dark side with the legend of Plagueis the Wise, a Sith Lord who had discovered the power to stop death but who couldn’t save himself from murder at his apprentice’s hand. ![]() |