Filson Young.

Filson Young’s novel of love, lucre and lighthouses

Filson Young was often a passionate being, and quite often, it seemed, a bit buttoned up. He had two marriages and many affairs. He had a very wide acquaintance, literary, military and political. He grew a big reputation very young, not least because of his affiliation with the lively publisher, Grant Richards. Their team-work produced his first novel, Sands of Pleasure in 1905. It concerns a lighthouse and rural society in Cornwall and chandeleers and courtesans in Pairs. Read more...

Published

15 March 2023

Filson Young: BBC pioneer

This is an account of some parts of Shall I Listen? of 1933. It was the penultimate book by Filson Young (1876-1936). He was a BBC pioneer with instincts about the future of broadcasting which foreshadow the podcast age. He was a snob who disparaged Reithian London-centricity. He was a Londoner who invented a new style of outside broadcasting from a Cornish village. Read more...

Published

14 March 2023

Shrink a library #2 (Filson Young)

This post attempts to put the books of Filson Young (1876-1938) my grandmother's second husband) into some sort of context. FY (as he was widely and familiarly known during his mostly very successful life as a writer) is the subject of a fine biography (available on this site). I aim to get rid of most of his books, because they are available online as full texts or facsimiles. Read more...

Published

11 May 2022

Shrink a library #1 (My parents’)

I am downsizing the collection of books I have inherited from my parents or bought for myself. Easiest to get rid of guiltlessly are those volumes (mostly per-1930) which can be found full-text or facsimile online (mostly at Hathi Trust, Internet Archive or the Gutenberg Project).

This post is a rough survey of my parents' library. I tend to list the hard copy volumes and note whether they are available online. If they are, I will let the hardcopies go to Oxfam, etc. My point is that their books represent a particular family background but more generally, the tastes of their time. Either way, they are a snapshot of a civilisation. Read more...

Published

11 May 2022

The Battle of Jutland – getting the history right

This is an account of some issues surrounding the historiography of the Battle Jutland, including a critique of a BBC documentary on this enormous naval engagement. It refers especially to two important written sources dated 1921 (and 1986) and 1998. Read more...

Published

09 June 2016
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