Titus Groan (novel)
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Titus Groan (novel)
''Titus Groan'' is a novel by Mervyn Peake, first published in 1946. It is the first novel in the ''Gormenghast'' series. Plot introduction The book is set in the huge castle of Gormenghast, a vast landscape of crumbling towers and ivy-filled quadrangles that has for centuries been the hereditary residence of the Groan family and with them a legion of servants. The Groan family is headed by Lord Sepulchrave, the seventy-sixth Earl of Groan. He is a melancholy man who feels shackled by his duties as Earl, although he never questions them. His only escape is reading in his library. His wife is the Countess Gertrude. Large and imposing, with dark red hair, she pays no attention to her family or to the rest of Gormenghast. Instead, she spends her time either in her bedroom or in walking selected areas, in the company of a legion of birds and her white cats that alone command her affections. Their daughter is 15-year-old Fuchsia Groan, attended to by the easily upset Nannie Slagg. ...
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Mervyn Peake
Mervyn Laurence Peake (9 July 1911 – 17 November 1968) was an English writer, artist, poet, and illustrator. He is best known for what are usually referred to as the '' Gormenghast'' books. The four works were part of what Peake conceived as a lengthy cycle, the completion of which was prevented by his death. They are sometimes compared to the work of his older contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, but Peake's surreal fiction was influenced by his early love for Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson rather than Tolkien's studies of mythology and philology. Peake also wrote poetry and literary nonsense in verse form, short stories for adults and children ('' Letters from a Lost Uncle'', 1948), stage and radio plays, and '' Mr Pye'' (1953), a relatively tightly-structured novel in which God implicitly mocks the evangelical pretensions and cosy world-view of the eponymous hero. Peake first made his reputation as a painter and illustrator during the 1930s and 1940s, when he liv ...
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Barquentine (Gormenghast)
Barquentine is a fictional character in Mervyn Peake's ''Gormenghast'' series. He is the son of Sourdust, the Master of Ritual of Gormenghast Castle. He is a one-legged, hunchbacked dwarf with a bitter, vicious personality; he never washes, he dresses in filthy rags, and his hair and beard are long, tangled and dirty. He is frequently taunted by the castle's children, who sing "Rotten leg, rotten spine – ya! ya! Barquentine!" When he appears in the first book, Barquentine is 74 years old, and lives a hermit A hermit, also known as an eremite (adjectival form: hermitic or eremitic) or solitary, is a person who lives in seclusion. Eremitism plays a role in a variety of religions. Description In Christianity, the term was originally applied to a Ch ...ic existence in an obscure tract of the castle. He takes on the hereditary office of Master of Ritual following the death of his father, and accepts Steerpike as his assistant. In the second book, '' Gormenghast'', he is murd ...
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Maeve Gilmore
Maeve Patricia Mary Theresa Gilmore (14 June 19173 August 1983) was a British painter, sculptor and writer, and the wife of author Mervyn Peake. Early life Gilmore was born in 1917 and brought up in Brixton, south London, where her father, Owen Eugene Gilmore (1862–1950), was a doctor. She was educated at a convent boarding school in Sussex, now St Leonards-Mayfield School, and later attended a finishing school in Switzerland, where she learnt to speak German and French, and became a good pianist (she particularly enjoyed the music of Johann Sebastian Bach). She attended Westminster School of Art, where in 1936 she met Mervyn Peake, whose father was also a doctor. Marriage and children They married in 1937. They had three children, Sebastian, Fabian (who married the artist Phyllida Barlow), and Clare. An accomplished painter and sculptor, she also wrote several short stories. However, when Peake became ill, she put her career on hold to care for him. Her memoir ''A ...
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Titus Awakes
''Titus Awakes'' is the editorial title applied to a novel being planned by Mervyn Peake at the time he became too ill to write, about 1960. It was to have been the fourth novel in the ''Gormenghast'' series, after '' Titus Groan'', ''Gormenghast'', and ''Titus Alone''. ''Titus Awakes'' remains unfinished, as the author succumbed to illness in 1968 before the work could be completed. In the 1970s Peake's widow, Maeve Gilmore, wrote a version of ''Titus Awakes'' to which she gave the title ''Search Without End''. It runs to 65,000 words, as counted on the typescript that she asked Peter Winnington to comment on. Watney told a slightly different tale. In 1992 Overlook Press, the American publishers of the ''Gormenghast'' series, printed at the end of ''Titus Alone'' the existing coherent portions of Mervyn Peake's ''Titus Awakes'', with a brief introduction by John Watney. They consist of three pages from which it is clear that, although Titus has left Gormenghast, the castle remain ...
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Classic Serial
''Classic Serial'' was a strand on BBC Radio 4, which broadcasts in series of one-hour dramas, "Adaptations of works which have achieved classic status." It is broadcast twice weekly, first from 3:00–4:00 pm on Sunday, then repeated from 9:00–10:00 pm the next Saturday. Works adapted have included ''The Aeneid'', '' On the Beach'', and ''A Dance to the Music of Time'', featuring such actors as Joss Ackland, Kenneth Branagh, and Judi Dench Dame Judith Olivia Dench (born 9 December 1934) is an English actress. Regarded as one of Britain's best actresses, she is noted for her versatile work in various films and television programmes encompassing several genres, as well as for her .... References External links * BBC Radio 4 programmes British radio dramas {{BBC-radio-stub ...
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Gormenghast (TV Serial)
''Gormenghast'' is a four-episode television serial based on the first two novels of the Gothic fantasy Gormenghast series by Mervyn Peake. It was produced and broadcast by the BBC. First broadcast in early 2000, the serial was designed for an early evening time-slot in much the same vein as the earlier adaptations of ''The Chronicles of Narnia''. The BBC conception was based on the idea that Peake's early life in China had influenced the creation of Gormenghast; thus, the castle in the series resembles the Forbidden City in Beijing as well as the holy city of Lhasa in Tibet. Plot The series covers the events of the first two books, '' Titus Groan'' and ''Gormenghast''. It does not cover any of the events from the third book, ''Titus Alone''. Cast Production At the time of its broadcast, ''Gormenghast'' was among the most ambitious serials ever undertaken by the BBC. The series required a combined five years of production and pre-production and utilized over 120 sets. ...
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Boston
Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- most populous city in the country. The city boundaries encompass an area of about and a population of 675,647 as of 2020. It is the seat of Suffolk County (although the county government was disbanded on July 1, 1999). The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. Boston is one of the oldest ...
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WGBH-TV
WGBH-TV (channel 2), branded on-air as GBH or GBH 2 since 2020, is the primary PBS member television station in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It is the flagship property of the WGBH Educational Foundation, which also owns Boston's secondary PBS member WGBX-TV (channel 44) and Springfield, Massachusetts PBS member WGBY-TV (channel 57, operated by New England Public Media), Class A Biz TV affiliate WFXZ-CD (channel 24) and public radio stations WGBH (89.7 FM) and WCRB (99.5 FM) in the Boston area, and WCAI radio (and satellites WZAI and WNAN) on Cape Cod. WGBH-TV also effectively, but unofficially serves as one of three flagship stations of PBS, along with WNET in New York City and WETA-TV in Washington, D.C. WGBH-TV, WGBX-TV, and the WGBH and WCRB radio stations share studios on Guest Street in northwest Boston's Brighton neighborhood; WGBH-TV's transmitter is located on Cabot Street (east of I-95/ MA 128) in Needham, Massachusetts, on the former candelabra tower, w ...
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BBC 7
BBC Radio 4 Extra (formerly BBC Radio 7) is a British digital radio station from the BBC, broadcasting archived repeats of comedy, drama and documentary programmes nationally, 24 hours a day. It is the sister station of BBC Radio 4 and the principal broadcaster of the BBC's spoken-word archive, and as a result the majority of its programming originates from that archive. It also broadcasts extended and companion programmes to those broadcast on Radio 4, and provides a "catch-up" service for certain programmes. The station launched in December 2002 as BBC 7, broadcasting a mix of archive comedy, drama and current children's radio. The station was renamed BBC Radio 7 in 2008, then relaunched as Radio 4 Extra in April 2011. For the first quarter of 2013, Radio 4 Extra had a weekly audience of 1.642 million people and had a market share of 0.95%; in the last quarter of 2016 the numbers were 2.184 million listeners and 1.2% of market share. According to RAJAR, the station broadc ...
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Freddie Jones
Frederick Charles Jones''Births, Marriages & Deaths Index of England & Wales, 1916-2005.''; at ancestry.com (12 September 1927 – 9 July 2019) was an English actor who had an extensive career in television, theatre and cinema productions for almost sixty years. In theatre, he was best known for originating the role of Sir in ''The Dresser''; in film, he was best known for his role as the showman Bytes in '' The Elephant Man'' (1980); and in television, he was best known for playing Sandy Thomas in the ITV soap opera ''Emmerdale'' from 2005 to 2018. Early life Jones was born on 12 September 1927 in Dresden, a suburb of the town of Longton, Stoke-on-Trent, the son of Ida Elizabeth (née Goodwin) and Charles Edward Jones. Charles was a porcelain thrower, Ida a clerk and pub pianist. He worked briefly at Creda, the consumer electrical goods vendors, in Longton before he joined the British Ceramic Research Association in Penkhull, where he worked for ten years. His girlfriend a ...
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Sting (musician)
Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner (born 2 October 1951), known as Sting, is an English musician and actor. He was the frontman, songwriter and bassist for new wave rock band The Police from 1977 until their breakup in 1986. He launched a solo career in 1985 and has included elements of rock, jazz, reggae, classical, new-age, and worldbeat in his music. As a solo musician and a member of The Police, Sting has received 17 Grammy Awards: he won Song of the Year for " Every Breath You Take", three Brit Awards, including Best British Male Artist in 1994 and Outstanding Contribution in 2002, a Golden Globe, an Emmy, and four nominations for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. In 2019, he received a BMI Award for "Every Breath You Take" becoming the most-played song in radio history. In 2002, Sting received the Ivor Novello Award for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors and was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fa ...
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Brian Sibley
Brian David Sibley (born 14 July 1949) is an English writer. He is author of over 100 hours of radio drama and has written and presented hundreds of radio documentaries, features and weekly programmes. He is widely known as the author of many film "making of" books, including those for the ''Harry Potter (film series), Harry Potter'' series and ''The Lord of the Rings (film series), The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit (film series), The Hobbit'' trilogies. Early life Brian was born in Wandsworth, London, to Eric George Sibley, an architectural draughtsman, and Doris Alice Sibley (née Summers). His uncle was the philosopher Frank Sibley (philosopher), Frank Sibley. His family moved to Chislehurst, Kent when he was five years old. He was educated at St Nicholas Church of England Primary School and Chislehurst Secondary School for Boys (later renamed Edgebury School for Boys), where he was awarded A-levels in English and Art. Following the frustration of his varied ambiti ...
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