Kings Arms Hotel
30 High Street
Old Amersham
Dr Irving Finkel returns to the Society with his new talk.
Arrietty, the heroine of Mary Norton’s Borrowers books, kept a diary. This diary she assiduously filled out, while quotations from it provide chapter headings in the second volume, The Borrowers Afield. The speaker discovered that this celebrated Arrietty diary was no fictional invention to enhance the plot, but a miniature desk-top Victorian production of which Mary Norton must have owned a specimen herself, incorporating it with such effect in her story.
Dr Finkel’s determination to secure an example of this miniature diary for the Great Diary Project (the subject of an earlier Society talk) met not only with success, but led also to far-reaching consequences. These will be explained and elaborated in this upcoming illustrated lecture.
The Borrower books were a staple of his reading childhood. His sympathies are offered to all those who have never encountered them themselves, but this is easily rectifiable.
Dr Finkel is a British philologist and Assyriologist. He is currently the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum. He is an author of a number of academic publications and fiction books.
Recordings of his previous talks given to the Society “The Great Diary Project” and “The First Ghosts: Most Ancient of Legacies” are available to our members on demand.