Virginia Rounding: Author, editor, proofreader, indexer

  • History of a relationship

    My first visit I barely made acquaintance, dragged along by a medic and musician boyfriend in the hot summer of ’76; while he discussed diapasons in the organ loft I drooped around the pillars, glad of somewhere cool. My next encounter, more than ten years later, I was ‘depping’ for a friend who sang. Late

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  • Edward Cooke

    Doctor of Physick, philosopher, you hold a teasing pen; what wisdom would you give us if your hand could move again? Scientific formulae, concepts to explain our mind and frame? – the spread of human knowledge still your worthy aim? Or would you spell out now the name above every name? Have you entered on eternity,

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  • Three Stories from the Book of the Foundation

      GODRIC THE BUTCHER One day, as was his custom, Alfune from the Priory was visiting the butchers one by one, asking them for gifts to feed the poor; he decided to approach a man named Godric, famed as very stern and niggardly of mind. When Alfune saw that Godric would give nothing, being moved

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  • THE BURNING TIME Final extract from Introduction: Setting the scene

    If we open our story in the year 1530 or thereabouts, we find little to suggest the turmoil to come – apart from the King’s increasing impatience with Rome, and the rise of Lutheranism in parts of Europe. (Soon after Luther’s teachings had been condemned by the Pope in 1521, his works had been publicly burnt

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  • Portrait of an Old Man

    i.m. Miron Grindea A sultry afternoon; I identify the house; walk twice round Emperor’s Gate not wanting to be early … A tousled grey head from an upstairs window: – Who’s that? Are you the plumber? “I sent some poems; you called me.” – You haven’t come to mend the sink? Well, never mind… I step

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  • The Smalpaces

    Percival and Agnes stare from neighbouring frames. She outlived him thirty years, as her lined face tells. Stern in starchy Tudor collars, how remote they seem, as though their eyes would barely recognise our world. Yet underneath, their naked bodies tell another story and inform the formal faces with more sympathy, till hers seems sad,

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  • THE BURNING TIME Some more from the Introduction: Setting the scene

                  Of the burnings which took place in England between 1529 and 1558 by far the largest number occurred in one small area of London – the area known as (West) Smithfield. Just outside the City walls though still within its bounds, not far from Newgate prison, ten minutes’ walk from both the Guildhall and St

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  • The Vision of Rahere

    At the shrine of Rahere the cowled monks read the same pages from Isaiah for eternity; little heads cluster like buds around the canopy and a winged creature with bestial but not unfriendly face recalls the monster who seized Rahere in dream before Bartholomew appeared to issue his commission. With our worldview, sophisticated – so we

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  • My friend Walter Mildmay

    what the dead had no speech for, when living, They can tell you, being dead … [T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding] Mildmay, in the dark you look ornate but barely comprehensible, and so dead; the tokens you’ve chosen to be remembered by far less eloquent than the naked Smalpace bodies. Your heavy marble out of place amongst the

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  • Creativity, as captured by Lawrence Durrell

    The solace of such work as I do with brain and heart lies in this – that only there, in the silences of the painter or the writer can reality be reordered, reworked and made to show its significant side.  

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