Selected Poems, by Fulke Greville (ed. Neil Powell)

A friendly warning: this isn’t a brief post. It goes on for quite some time… sorry about that.

 

Fulke Greville, 1^st Baron Brooke, lived from 1554 to his murder in 1628. He was therefore an approximate contemporary of Shakespeare (1564-1616), Marlowe (1564-1593), Jonson (1572-1637), Donne (1572-1631), Sidney (1554-1586), Spenser (1552-1599), Chapman (1559-1634), and half a dozen other giants of English poetry and letters.

Greville is, probably deservedly, rather less known than any of these. To be honest, until recently, I’d never heard of him. And yet, when some time ago I was making my way through an anthology of English verse, it was Greville who, amid this stellar era, caught my attention: not because of any obvious genius, but in a way because of the exact opposite – amid the easy rhymes and conventional attractiveness of the many flowers of late Elizabethan poetry, Greville sticks out like a thorn bush.

Sluggy Freelance, Chapters 66-69, by Pete Abrams

So, I’m back with Sluggy Freelance, for what will be, for the present, my penultimate review. If you’re unfamiliar with Sluggy – the sprawling gag-a-day/sitcom/adventure/drama/horror/thriller webcomic now in its 21^st year – my previous review sketches out the basic concept of the comic, so there’s no point me repeating myself, and I’ll just press on…

Sluggy Freelance, Chapters 63-65, by Pete Abrams

Sluggy Freelance – a sprawling epic that has kept its devotees hooked since the 1990s. One of the most venerable webcomics, Pete Abrams’ Sluggy began more than twenty years ago, with newspaper-style, three-panel, gag-a-day (not very good) strips, and developed to become, without exaggeration, one of the most complex, varied, surprising and ingenious narratives I’ve ever encountered.

Island of Adventure, by Enid Blyton

I was distracted from writing this review at the time I actually read the book, so this will be brief…

When I was young, some of my favourite books were by Enid Blyton. Oh sure, my favourite book was The Lord of the Rings. But aside from that, Enid Blyton was high on the list. I never read Noddy; I think I only ever read one Secret Seven. And most shockingly, I never read any Famous Five at all (though I did once have a very complicated sort of choose-your-own-adventure Famous Five kit with dice and special apparatus).

What I read, and what I adored, were her eight Adventure novels, starting with this, The Island of Adventure.