Cornflower

Sea-dark purple

   

     "It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple - the true episcopal colour and countless variations of it."

     More 'purple prose' and the CBG's thoughts on Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop are to be found here.

The past ....

 

     "... is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

Do come and join us in an English country house during a long, hot Edwardian summer ...

One summer evening in the year 1848 ...

    

     "...three Cardinals and a missionary bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome."

 Please come and find out which "masterpiece" opens with that line, then I hope you'll join in and read it with us.

Cornflower Book Group - The Debt to Pleasure

  

    "I myself have always disliked being called a 'genius'. It is fascinating to notice how quick people have been to intuit this aversion and avoid using the term."

    That's the wonderfully dreadful Tarquin Winot speaking, and genius or otherwise, we'll be talking about him over at Cornflower Books.

   The cake to go with the book will be here later.

A consummate piece of storytelling

   

     Do come and join us for what promises to be a very good read!

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 4

    "Winston Churchill was fond of saying that the Chinese ideogram for 'crisis' is composed of the two characters which separately mean 'danger' and 'opportunity'.

     Winter presents the cook with a similar combination of threat and chance."

Do come and join us on a culinary journey which is not all it seems!

A journey

   

     "A journey is a person in itself; no two are alike. And all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us."

Join us on Cornflower Books, if you will, as we travel with Charley. 

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 3

 

    "'I like the letters to be slanted a little,' the lawyer said.

     Here is the fellow, with nothing settled but talks of style, thought Raman. 'Impossible,' he cried, having his own notions of calligraphy suitable for a lawyer. 'Slanting letters are suitable only for oil-merchants and soap-sellers.'

The lawyer became insistent. Raman tried to explain his philosophy of calligraphy. 'Sir, listen to me. The letters on a lawyer's board must always stand up proudly, and not lie supine. Head erect.' The man repeated his specification. Raman felt that he needed enlightenment and launched on fierce dialectics; persons seated at other tables suspended their own arguments to watch the fun here."

Would you like to watch the fun too? Come and join us!

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 2

     "When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was on me, I was assured by mature people that maturity would cure this itch. In middle age I was assured that greater age would calm my fever and now that I am fifty-eight perhaps senility will do the job. Nothing has worked."

Would you like to read on? Come and join us!

The happy medium

    

     "Do you know 'happy medium' are two words which mean 'miserable mediocrity'? I say, go first class or third; marry a duchess or her kitchenmaid. The happy medium means respectability, and respectability means insipidness. Does it not, Mr. Pooter?"

Gosh! For more from The Diary of a Nobody, have a look here. 

Cornflower Book Group 2010: Volume 1

     "It was a small, almost insignificant fire, the smouldering consequence of wiring overdue for replacement a decade earlier; an irritating addition to the maintenance team's job-list rather than a major item of college news. But when the carpenters came to remove a small section of charred oak panelling they were confronted by an image that would change the history of Kineton and Dacre College."

If you'd like to read on, please come and join us!

The Marmon

    

     "[The car's engine] panted at us in the whiskey-and-emphysema whisper of an Edith Wharton dowager. 'Dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar-dollar,' the Marmon said."

From Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner. More on it here.

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volumes 11 & 12

     "Floating upward through a confusion of dreams and memory, curving like a trout through the rings of previous risings, I surface. My eyes open. I am awake."

And -

"My dear wife Carrie and I have just been a week in our new house ... a nice six-roomed residence, not counting basement, with a front breakfast-parlour."

These are the opening lines of the book group's November and December titles respectively. To find out more click here.

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volume 10

    "Where are those blue-remembered hills ....?"

     Come and join us at the Book Group, and perhaps we'll find them.

Cornflower Book Group 2009: Volume 9

  

     "The sunlight of late September filled the pale, formal streets between Portland Place and Manchester Square. The sky was a burning blue yet the still air was chill. A gold chestnut fan sailed down from some unseen tree and tinkled on the pavement. In the small antique-dealer's a strong shaft of sunlight, cloudy with whirling gold-dust, penetrated the collection of red lacquer and tortoiseshell, ormolu and morocco. Imogen Gresham held a mug in her bare hands; it was a pure sky blue, decorated with a pattern of raised wheat ears, and of the kind known in country districts as a 'harvester'. Her eye absorbed the colour and her fingers the moulding of the wheat. Her husband however saw that there was a chip at the base of the mug, from which cracks meandered up the inside like rivers on a map."

To find out where this opening passage comes from, click here, then do come and read the rest of the book along with us!