Gladstone's Library on BBC Radio!

10 October 2016

Gladstone's Library on BBC Radio!

Last month BBC Radio Wales’ All Things Considered visited Gladstone’s Library to speak to Warden Peter Francis about what role our Victorian library plays in contemporary life.

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Thomas Pennant: Welsh Naturalist, Explorer, another man before his time!

7 October 2016

Thomas Pennant: Welsh Naturalist, Explorer, another man before his time!

Our founder, William Ewart Gladstone, was not the only famous figure connected to Flintshire. Thomas Pennant, a famous polymath, naturalist and traveller of the Eighteenth Century, was born and lived in Flintshire.

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Reading Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day

13 September 2016

Reading Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day

Ask someone to name a Virginia Woolf novel and they may well mention To The Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway. Night and Day, Woolf’s second novel published in 1919 – a copy of which can be found in the Annex – probably won’t come up in conversation unless you are talking to someone who is a dedicated Woolf reader. Night and Day isn’t what you might expect of her. Think of Woolf and the word experimental comes to mind. It’s also somewhat longer than some of her later novels. This is early Woolf, on the way to breaking with convention and doing things differently, but not there yet.

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A blog from Gladfest Festival Director, Louisa Yates

13 September 2016

A blog from Gladfest Festival Director, Louisa Yates

On Sunday 4th September, at approximately 5pm, I was the lucky recipient of a bout of applause. Over 80 people showed their appreciation in the usual way for two-and-a-bit days of Gladfest, our now annual fixture where the brightest stars of the literary firmament come to Hawarden. If I do say so myself, that applause was especially well deserved this year. Gladfest has always been good but there was an energy about it this year that really made it one-of-a-kind.

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Gladfest interview: Malcolm Guite

11 August 2016

Gladfest interview: Malcolm Guite

Malcolm Guite is a poet and a priest working as Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge. He also teaches for the Divinity Faculty and for the Cambridge Theological Federation and lectures widely in England and North America on Theology and Literature. Malcolm works as a librettist for composer Kevin Flanagan and his Riprap Jazz Quartet, and has also worked in collaboration with American composer J.A.C. Redford, and Canadian singer-songwriter Steve Bell. He was the inaugural Artist in Residence at Duke Divinity School in the USA in September 2014, and ‘Visionary in Residence’ at Biola in Los Angeles in March 2015. 

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Gladfest interview: Ian Parks

2 August 2016

Gladfest interview: Ian Parks

Ian Parks was one of the first Writers in Residence at Gladstone’s Library in 2012. His collections of poems include Shell Island, The Landing Stage, Love Poems 1979-2009, and The Exile’s House. He is the editor of Versions of the North: Contemporary Yorkshire Poetry and was Writing Fellow at De Montfort University, Leicester from 2012 – 2014.

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A book list with a difference

17 July 2016

A book list with a difference

‘Books are a delightful society. If you go into a room filled with books, even without taking them down from their shelves they seem to speak to you, to welcome you.’

With the wisdom of William Gladstone ringing in our ears, we asked the ‘delightful society’ of Gladstone’s Library staff to tell us about a book that they love.

A book-list with a difference.

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Work Experience in Marketing - Niamh Yale-Helms

15 July 2016

Work Experience in Marketing - Niamh Yale-Helms

I am a sixth form student from Hawarden High School studying Mathematics, History, English Language and Media Studies. After having started my year 12 syllabus in History studying British Prime Ministers and already gaining a strong interest in William Gladstone and his work, I immediately thought of Gladstone’s Library as an apt location for work experience as it’s just a few minutes down the road from where I live and has an abundance of literary works which link into the British Parliamentary Reform I have been studying.

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Entertaining Judgment: An interview with Greg Garrett

15 July 2016

Entertaining Judgment: An interview with Greg Garrett

On 22nd -24th July, author and Professor at Baylor University Texas, Greg Garrett leads a course at Gladstone’s Library exploring depictions of the afterlife in contemporary film, music and literature. The course is entitled Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination and follows Greg’s book of the same name…

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Reading List: Politics of the Mid-Tudor Crisis

1 July 2016

Reading List: Politics of the Mid-Tudor Crisis

A Reading List for Gladstone’s Library.

Bloody Mary, The Life of Mary Tudor – Carolly Erickson (1996)

This biography contains information not only on the early life and the short but ruthless reign of Mary I, but the political manoeuvring which took place after the death of Edward V on 16th July 1553, when, on his deathbed, he named Lady Jane Grey as his successor, despite his father’s Third Act of Succession. This left both of Henry VIII’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, without a legal claim.

The book details how Mary then raised an army to take the throne for herself and the turning of the Council of Lords on Jane and John Dudley.

*Available in Gladstone’s Library at shelfmark M 27 M1 / 12

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