Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Before taking up her fellowship, she had a month to kill: on the day after her 21 st birthday, with a hangover, she started what would become her first novel. He was almost in sight of Dieppe when a storm blew his boat, drenched and battered, all the way back to England. It’s traditional to imagine two Donnes – Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend – but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that. You could try, but you would be so coated in the unacknowledged fear of being forced to look, that what purchase could you get on the world?
Katherine Rundell - Wikipedia Katherine Rundell - Wikipedia
He took his galvanising imagination and brought it to bear on everything he wrote: his sermons, his meditations, his religious verse. It covers all non-fiction in the areas of current affairs, history, politics, science, sport, travel, biography, autobiography and the arts. Google her and you will find a photograph of Rundell elegantly poised on the crenellated roof of All Souls.
Published after Super-Infinity, this collection of short essays celebrates endangered creatures from crows to pangolins. Rundell’s childhood in Zimbabwe – running barefoot in the wilds and avoiding imaginary crocodiles in rivers – makes her sound like a plucky children’s book heroine. Rundell's fifth novel, The Good Thieves, tells the story of a girl named Vita who travels from England to New York with her mother to look after her grieving grandfather. It notes that he loved the trans- prefix on words because he believed that we were creatures born transformable; and it observes that the one constant running through his life and work is his steadfast belief that we, humans, “are at once a catastrophe and a miracle”.
Super-infinite by Katherine Rundell | Waterstones
Her skill as a novelist shows us John Donne the man, so real, so eccentric, fizzing with talent, weird as hell; while her attention to detail makes her a historian of the first rank. Five of his children were either stillborn or died before they were 10, and he even had a prophetic vision of one of them dying while he was away on a trip to Paris in 1612. He was born and baptised a Catholic at a time when the faith was regarded with fear and suspicion, and his younger brother Henry, imprisoned in Newgate for harbouring a Catholic priest, died in 1594. Her father, who now works in Mali for the UN, was a civil servant, her mother a French lecturer at university.Anyone turning to the prose letters seeking disquisitions on politics or news of his love affairs would be disappointed; Donne lived under a state which both censored and spied on its citizens, and his letters are largely – though not solely – practicalities.
Great Deal 
New Comment