Kings Arms Hotel
30 High Street
Old Amersham
under the floor. Illustration by Diana Stanley
The British Museum curator Dr Irving Finkel returns to the Society to continue on the topic of diaries.
Arrietty, the heroine of Mary Norton’s The 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 Borrowers books were a staple of his reading childhood, his sympathies are offered to all those who have never encountered them themselves.
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.
Coffee/tea and biscuits will be available from 7.30pm. The talk starts at 8.00pm. No booking necessary. Guests and new members welcome.