Data de naixement: 1942-08-10
Gènere: female
Nacionalitat: England
Lloc de naixement: Windsor, England, UK
Llocs de residència: North Yorkshire, England
Educació: Cambridge University (MA in History)
Professions: teacher
broadcaster
reviewer
Relacions: Warrack, John (husband)
Organitzacions: Ampleforth College
BBC
Biografia breu: Lucy Beckett was born in 1942 and educated at Cambridge University (MA in
History). She married young, has four children and six grandchildren, worked for
more than twenty-five years as a teacher, and has always read and written widely.
She and her husband, the musicologist John Warrack, live close to the ruins of
Rievaulx Abbey, one of the great Cistercian monasteries of northern England.
At Ampleforth College, the Benedictine school in Yorkshire run by the monks of
Ampleforth Abbey, she taught English, Latin and History from 1980, ran the school
theatre for 6 years, became Head of English in 1987 and Head of VI Form (the senior
years: boys aged 16-18) in 1991. When she retired from the school in 1996 she
continued for five years to teach Latin and Church History to the novices and juniors
in the monastic community. Lucy Beckett has broadcast for the BBC on a variety of literary, musical and
theological topics. She is a regular reviewer of theological and historical books for
the Times Literary Supplement, and has written many reviews and articles for The
Tablet, Priests and People, the Church Times and International Record Review.

Membres

Ressenyes

A Postcard from the volcano; a novel of pre-war… de Lucy Beckett

This is a trifle unorthodox, but I think I'll make some public notes as I go along. I am a tremendous admirer of Lucy Beckett, and have been looking forward to this as a significant work on serious subjects. Sadly, halfway through, I find myself counting pages. The tale of a bright young man, born in 1905, in his odyssey from old Silesia through the horrors of Nazism and World War Two ought to bring out the best in a serious author. So far, it only brings out the most: the piles of words and ideas which could, in my partner's words, gag a maggot. Not that Ms Beckett isn't a penetrating thinker or a graceful prose-stylist, but the presentation so far smacks more of homiletics than fiction, like the lectures in a required course, rather than the discourse in a seminar of well-motivated students. I ask myself as I read whether this book, despite the flaws I've mentioned above, have some use-value for well-intentioned readers who don't know this historico-cultural material as well as she does -- and as I do too, let me assure you. Well, the verdict must remain Open at this point. On a lower, purely literary level, POSTCARD has (so far) the weakness which is nearly fatal to Ms Beckett's TIME BEFORE YOU DIE, namely a wooden main character recalling both Master Fletcher and Cardinal Pole in the earlier work. A novelist who starts with this disadvantage is rowing upstream with only one oar. It CAN be done, but . . . [To be continued]… (més)