Podcasts about Temeraire

Join us for a chat as we dive into Naomi Novik's Throne of Jade, the second installment in the Temeraire (His Majesty's Dragon) series. In this episode, we discuss about the epic blend of historical intrigue, vibrant dragon lore, and complex characters that bring this story to life.We'll share our thoughts on the rich worldbuilding and the unforgettable bond between captain and dragon, explore the challenges of navigating ancient political landscapes, and highlight our favorite moments from the book, as well as our fun questions such as “Which character best embodies the characteristics: Gaslight/Gatekeep/Girlboss”. Whether you're a seasoned fan of historical fantasy or just starting your journey into the Temeraire universe, this discussion promises fresh insights, hearty laughs, and plenty of thoughtful commentary.As always, we will have a think what our literacy loving cat would think of this book. (We think she'd give the first book in the series a 10/10!)Tune in for a friendly and insightful look at one of the most imaginative fantasy adventures out there, and join the conversation about what makes Throne of Jade a standout in the genre.Support the showRecommend us a Book!If there's a book you want to recommend to us to read, just send us a message/email and we'll pop it on our long list (but please read our review policy on our website first for the books we accept).Social MediaWebsite: https://teachingmycattoread.wordpress.com/Email: teachingmycattoread@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teachmycat2read/Tumblr: https://teachingmycattoread.tumblr.comYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFXi9LNQv8SBQt8ilgTZXtQListener Surveyhttps://forms.gle/TBZUBH4SK8dez8RP9

Hullo,   Can't sleep?   Me neither.   The Northern One returns with a follow-up to last year's Summer Shorts series. Inspired by a chat with a medical friend about the advances in technology in their career, your favourite Northern Monkey takes a spin through representative art, and representation in art, and how it evolved in the nineteenth century in response to the new.   Starting off with one of the nation's favourite paintings, Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, he reclaims it for all Northern Monkeys.   Like this pod? Stand us a coffee.   x

Skip the Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. Your host is Paul Marden, CEO of Rubber Cheese.Fill in the Rubber Cheese 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey - the annual benchmark statistics for the attractions sector.If you like what you hear, you can subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, and all the usual channels by searching Skip the Queue or visit our website rubbercheese.com/podcast.If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review, it really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned in this podcast.Competition ends on 3rd July 2024. The winner will be contacted via Twitter. Show references:Lego House in BillundSutton Hoo (National Trust)Sutton Hoo at the British MuseumThe Dig on NetflixSutton Hoo mask on Lego IdeasThe Dig: Lego version of Sutton Hoo treasure 'amazing' (BBC News)Events at The Hold IpswitchAndrew Webb is a LEGO enthusiast who uses bricks in outreach programmes for teams and organisations as diverse at Arm, Pinset Mason, The National Trust, English Heritage, and the Scouts. During the UK's second Lockdown in early 2021, He made the 1500 year old Sutton Hoo Helmet out of LEGO bricks and submitted it to LEGO Ideas. The build achieved international media coverage, and has since been donated to the National Trust. Andrew continues to help attractions and institutions with LEGO programmes. By day, he works as a global head of content marketing for a B2B tech company. Find out more at http://teambuildingwithbricks.com Transcription:  Paul Marden: Welcome to Skip the Queue, a podcast for people working in and working with Mister attractions. I'm your host, Paul Marden. Today I'm talking to Andrew Webb. By day, Andrew is a content marketer for a tech firm, but in his spare time helps attractions to use Lego as a tool to attract and engage diverse audiences and enable them to interpret history and culture. We're going to talk about what it means to be an building, a model of anglo saxon helmet, and the 24 skills that are used when building with Lego. Paul Marden: So welcome to the podcast. Andrew Webb: Thank you. Paul Marden: On Skip the Queue, we always start with some icebreaker questions that you know nothing about. So let's launch into a couple of those. Book and a pool or museums and galleries for your city break. Andrew Webb: Museum and galleries.Paul Marden: Yeah. I'd expect nothing less given what we're about to talk about. This is one from one of my colleagues, actually, who is really good at icebreakers whenever we do a team building eventually. So he said, “Would you rather have it and lose it or never have it at all?”Andrew Webb: Oh, gosh, I'll have it and lose it for sure. Paul Marden: Yeah, gotta be. That one's from miles. Say thank you, Myles. That was a cracker. Andrew Webb: Do you remember the word there was a great one. Would you rather eat ten donuts or raw onion? Paul Marden: Oh, ten donuts, hand down. I could easily do that. Andrew Webb: I'd get onion. I'd get onion. Every time I would take an onion over ten donuts. I'd be sick after ten donuts. Paul Marden: Oh, no, I reckon I could take that. No problem. Andrew Webb: Okay. Paul Marden: Okay. So we're going to talk a little bit about your adventures in Lego over the last few years. So why don't we kick off and talk a little bit about your original interest in Lego? Because I know it goes back not a long way, because that would be rude. But it goes back to a few years ago, doesn't it? Andrew Webb: It does. I mean, like most people growing up in what we might loosely term the west, I had like, I was a kid, you know, I think most of us grew up with it like that. And then like, you know, growing up in that first age of plastics with Heman, Transformers, Lego, Star wars, all of that sort of stuff. Paul Marden: You're just describing my childhood. Andrew Webb: It's funny because that was. It was all sort of ephemeral, right? I mean, the idea was that the reason why that boom happened, just to dwell on why they're going plastic things. Before that, toys were made out of either tin or wood. So, you know, they were very labour intensive produce there's certainly injection moulding comes along and we could just have anything coupled with the tv shows and the films and all this sort of stuff. So we all grew up in this sort of first age of disposable plastic, and then it all just gets passed down as kids grow up. It gets given away, gets put in the loft and forgotten about. There's a moment when a return of the Jedi bedspread doesn't look cool anymore, right? You hit about 13, 14 and you're like, “Mom, I really want some regular stuff there.”Andrew Webb: So like everybody, you know, I gave it all away, sold it and whatever, but I kept onto my lego and then fast forward, you know, I become a parent and Lego starts to come back into my life. So I'm sort of at a stage where I'm working for a travel startup and I get a press release to go to the Lego House, which if no one has heard about it, where have you been? But also it is a fantastic home of the brick, which Lego built in, opened in 2016. And it is a phenomenal temple to Lego. Not in terms of like a Legoland style approach with rides and things like that, but it's all about the brick and activities that you can do in a brick. Andrew Webb: There is great pools and huge pits of Lego to play with there, as well as displays and all this sort of stuff. They've actually got a Lego duplo waterfall.Paul Marden: Really? Andrew Webb:  Oh, I mean, it's a fantastic attraction. And the way they've done it is just incredible. So they blend a lot of digital things. So if you make a small fish and insert it into this thing, it appears in the tank and swims around and this sort of stuff and the way you can imprint your designs on things. I should just quickly tell you about the cafeteria there as well, just really quickly. So the cafeteria at the Lego House, everyone gets a little bag of Lego and then whatever you build and insert into this sort of iPad sort of slots type thing, and that's what you're. Andrew Webb: So a pink brick might be salmon, a yellow brick might be chicken, whatever, and you put it all in and it recognises it all and then it comes down a giant conveyor belt in a Lego. Giant Lego box and is handed to you by robots. I mean, mind blowing stuff. This is not like with a tray at the National Trust place or somewhere like that for us to come. It is a technological marvel. Absolutely fascinating. So, of course, on the day went, it was a press preview, so there was no canteen workers, so there was no food in the box when me and my daughter, so went without that data, was a bit disappointed. Andrew Webb: But that started that whole reappreciation of Lego, both as a toy to play with my daughter, but also as a way of using Lego in different ways. And that manifests itself in lots of different things. So currently, now, you know, fast forward a little bit. I use Lego for team building exercises, for workshops, for problem solving with organisations, and also just for having fun with adult groups as well as kids. And I think one of the biggest things we've seen since this kind of started around 2000s with the sort of adults reading Harry Potter, do you remember that was like, why are you reading this children's book type of thing? Paul Marden: Yeah. Andrew Webb: And then all the prequel Star wars films came out and Lego made sets about both those two things. And it kind of. I mean, Bionicle saved the company, as only AFOL will know, but it started that whole merchandising thing and adding Lego into that firmament of IP. Right. And we fast forward now, and it's Marvel and Star wars and everything. Paul Marden: You just said AFOL. I know what an AFOL is, but many of our listeners may not know what AFOL is.Andrew Webb: Just to go for acronyms here. So an AFOL is an Adult Fan of Lego. And we've seen actually Lego in the past five years, even earlier. I mean, Lego always had an adult element to it. And one of the original founders used to use it for designing his own house. And there was a whole architectural system called Molodux. So it's always had that element to it. But just recently we've seen, you know, almost retro sets. So we see the Lego Atari 2600 video game system from 1976, which, yeah. Paul Marden: An original NES wasn't there. Andrew Webb: Exactly. NES that's come out. I've got a Lego Optimus prime back here for transformers, you know, all that kind of stuff. So with what's been really interesting is this kidault or whatever, however, call it. And I think that's really fascinating, because if we think about Lego as a toy, we are rapidly approaching the age where we might have three generations of people that have grown up with Lego. Lego first came around in the very late ‘60s, early '70s. And so it's not inconceivable that you might have three generations that had Lego as a child, especially if you grew up in Denmark. A little bit different when it would come to the rest of Europe as they expanded out. So I get to this point, and I'm getting into Lego and doing all this sort of stuff. Andrew Webb: And then, of course, COVID happens and then lockdown happens and we all think the world's going to end and no one knows. Everyone's looking for hobbies, aren't they? They say you were either hunk, drunk or chunk after lockdown. You either got fit, got fat or got alcoholic. So try to avoid those three things. And, you know, everyone's looking for stuff to do, so you have so much banana bread you can bake. And so I stupidly, with my daughter's help, decided to make the Lego Sutton Hoo helmet, the 1500 year old Sutton Hoo helmet found at Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, now in the British Museum. Out of Lego, as you do. Paul Marden: I mean, just exactly. Just as you do. So just a slight segue. I was at the National Attractions Marketing Conference yesterday and there were two people presenting who both talked about their experiences of wacky things that they did during lockdown. There was one person that opened a theatre in her back garden and had various different stars just randomly turn up in her backyard up in North Yorkshire. And you choose to build a Lego Sutton Hoo helmet.Andrew Webb: Lockdown, there will be a time, I think, as we look back, tragic though it was, and, you know, a lot of people died, but it was that moment when society sort of shuffled around a bit and people sort of thought, “Well, if I don't do it now, why not?” People were launching bakeries in their kitchens and serving their community and like. And that element of it. And so people have that. The good side of that, I suppose, is that people did find new outlets of creativity. And Joe Wick's yoga class is in their front row walking groups, you know, all this sort of stuff and beating beaten horsemans and learning to play the violin and dust and stuff. Suddenly we all had to find hobbies because we're all just in. Andrew Webb: No one was going to restaurants, no one's going to bars, no one's going to gigs, nightclubs, theatres. We like to make entertainment at home. It was like the middle ages. So I decided to build the Lego Sutton Hoo helmet, as you do. And so I start this in lockdown, and then, like, I get wind that Netflix is making a film called The Dig. And The Dig is all about, I think it's Lily James and Ray Fiennes in it, and it's all those other people. And it's all about when they found theSutton Hoo helmet. And the guy who found it was called Basil Brown, and he was asked by Edith Pretty, who owned the land, to excavate these humps in the ground that were on her estate. Paul Marden: Okay, so she owns this big estate, in Suffolk, right? And, so she can clearly see there's burial mounds in the back garden, but doesn't know what's in them. Doesn't have any clue that there's treasure locked up inside this. Andrew Webb: I'm not even sure she knew there were anglo saxon burial maps since it was. Paul Marden: They were just lumps of ground in the garden. Andrew Webb: Yeah. I mean, she may have had inkling and other stuff I've turned up over the years and whatever. And some of them were robbed sort of georgian times around then. So some people knew what they were and they were somewhere excavated and gold was taken to fund the polynomial wars and whatnot. But she asked Basil Branson, he was like an amateur archaeologist, right? And so he was just like this local guy would cycle over and do. And the film goes into all that, and the film kind of portrays it as working class. Basil Brown should know his place against the sort of British Museum who are sort of the baddies in this film who think they know what. And of course, this is all set against the backdrop of war. So they escalated it all, then they had to rebury it. Andrew Webb: And then it was used as a tank training ground, so lots of tanks rolled over it. So it's a miracle anything was ever found. But when he did find the Sutton Hoo, who told me and a bunch of other things, clasp brooches, shields, weapons and whatever, when he did find it, so people think it kind of popped out the ground as a helmet, but it didn't. And if you look at the photos, it came out the ground in hundreds of pieces. Paul Marden: Oh, really? So you look at this reconstructed mask that's now in the British Museum, and you think, “Oh, so they just found that in one piece,” lifted out as if it was a Lego hat, you know, for a minifig. In one piece? No, not at all. Andrew Webb: It was actually more like a big parlour Lego in the fact that it was just in hundreds of thousands of pieces. And so there was the first guy to have a go at it was an elderly architect at the British Museum who was, I think, blind in one eye. And he had a go at putting it all together. And he used an armature and clay and pins and whatever, put it all together and said, “Yes, I think it was this.” And then actually it wasn't. He got it all wrong. Lots of different pieces after some more research, and then it falls to this. Nigel Williams is another sub architect, and he was famous for. Andrew Webb: There was a famous Portland vase that was broken in a museum by someone pushing it over as a sort of what you might call, like a just stop oil type of protest now, I can't remember what the call was, but someone smashed an exhibit. And he had painstakingly pieced all this together. He was a total dapper dude. Three piece suit, Chelsea boots, proper swinging sixties, and he had to go and put it all together. His version is the one that's in the British Museum, but he was a massive jigsaw fan. And if you think about Lego, what it is a 3d jigsaw. You get a bunch of pieces and you have to make. Make it into a 3d sculpture. So that was one reason, the dig was the other reason. Andrew Webb: The third reason was that the relationship between East Anglia and essentially Denmark and Billand and Anglo Saxon and Jutland and all that area, I'm talking like Vikings and Anglo Saxons and invasions and all this kind of stuff against the native British, there is essentially a relationship between East Anglia, a trade relationship and a conquest relationship between them. So I built this thing and I frantically put it together and I'm late nights and just losing my marbles trying to get this thing to work. Because Lego is not designed to make, like, spherical shapes, necessarily. It's quite blocky. Right. Everyone knows this. It's the square. Paul Marden: Really easy to make a car, really easy to make a house. A spaceship. Andrew Webb: Houses. Brilliant. Yeah. Square stuff is fantastic. But baking, not only a sort of a semicircle, but a hemisphere, which is what essentially a helmet is. Is even harder because you have to get the Lego to bend in two directions. And so a lot of work went into that just to get the actual face piece came together quite easy. And there was once I had the scale of the pieces under the eyes that formed that sort of thing, and then I could build the nose and face. Ideally, it was going to be so that I could put it on my head. I've actually got a massive head. So in the end, I had to realign that and sort of make it into this sort of child sized head. Paul Marden: But it's a wearable thing, right? Andrew Webb: It is. It is wearable. I mean, at one point, it was probably more fragile than the one in the British Museum because it just kept dropping to pieces. So there's a lot of sub plates that are holding together the outer plate. So it's actually sort of. So just quick Lego terminology here. So bricks, obviously are bricks. The flat things with bubbles on are called plates and then the smoother ones are called tiles. Okay. And used a combination of these to create. There's also a technique called SNOT, which stands for Studs Not On Top. We love acronyms in the Lego community. Right? Paul Marden: Completely.Andrew Webb:  So if you say, “Oh, man, I'm an AFOL covered in SNOT,” people know what you want to know what you mean. So after a night in the tiles, I got covered. Yeah. Andrew Webb: Anyway, so I make the helmet, I make the thing, and then, you know, I get a lot of support from the National Trust, specifically East of England National Trust and Sutton, who site itself because it's there. It's their crown jewels. The British Museum, not so much, because they was like, we've got a billion exhibits here. No, it's just one of them. When you've got the Tippecar moon and the Rosetta stone, it kind of pales into significant. But actually, they were helpful. And one of the curators there, who was on Twitter, who sent me a link to some 3d photos, because if you. If you google it's all pictures at the front. That's fantastic. But what does the back look like? Paul Marden: Oh, right, okay. Andrew Webb: So actually, buried deep in the British Museum's website, in their research department, under a filing cabinet, in the back of a server somewhere, are some quite technical photographic images of it, turning every sort of 30 degrees so that. That it's documented as to what it looks. Because you got to remember that everything on the helmet is symbolic of various different things. There is symbols that mean there's a guy on a horse who's sort of fighting and all this sort of stuff. And it all has quite a lot of meaning. I can occur from different parts of history as well. So there's some sort of roman influencing things there and symbols. And so this whole thing is designed to be not only a battle helmet, but it is also because, remember, crowns haven't been invented yet. Crowns are a later mediaeval sort of invention. Andrew Webb: So this is both a symbol of authority, headwear, like a crown, but also a weapon or a piece of defensive armour and equipment. So it has several functions in its life. So it's quite a complex piece of equipment, that this symbol of authority. So I make all this and then I also submit it to a thing called Lego Ideas. So Lego Ideas is a fantastic programme where anybody in the world, members of the public, can submit Lego Ideas, right? And they go onto a website. There's certain criteria, they have to meet a certain checklist, but then the rest of the public can vote for them. So, I mean, if Taylor Swift just stuck together a load of blocks and said, “Vote for this,” she probably hit the 10,000 threshold instantly. Andrew Webb: But I'm not sure Lego would necessarily take that forward as a build. So there is a judging panel that. But actually, some of the most recent really fantastic sets have come out of Lego Ideas. Members of the public, and they're designing things that the Lego designers wouldn't have thought of themselves. So I think that's been kind of interesting. Sadly, Paul, we didn't make the 10,000 threshold. We did a lot of media coverage. By then, lockdown was over and were sort of getting back to our lives and all this sort of stuff. And my daughter was entering her dark ages. And so it sat in my studio for another sort of year and a half and I thought, “What am I going to do with this?” And so in the end, I thought, “Well, you know what? It's gathering dust here. I'm fed up with it, dustin it.”Andrew Webb: And so I actually approached Josh Ward at the National Trust at Sutton Hoo, who has been a fantastic advocate for Lego and for this particular project, and I have to thank him immensely for that. And they got some money and some funding to build a cabinet and also to house it. So I donated it to National Trust and it is now on display there as part of their firmament of interpretational trail. Paul Marden: That must feel pretty good fow you. Andrew Webb: Yeah, it is quite good looking in there and watching kids go, “Wow.” Because Lego is one of those things instantly recognisable for kids. But certain hill as a site is quite complex for children to contextualise because essentially it's several mounds in the ground. And the helmet itself is at the British Museum. Right. They've got a replica built by the royal armouries. There were several of those. They've got those. They have loads of dress up, they have great explainers and videos and they do a lot of work to show the size and shape and things as a cast iron sculpture, to represent the boat, to show just how big it was when it was pulled up from the sea, because he's buried in a boat. So do a lot of that work, sort of that sort of work as well. Andrew Webb: But having this extra funding in the. They opened up Edith's pretty's house now, and having this room where we've got some other things as well, like crayons and paper and other tools and drawings and colouring in and Lego and big chest of Lego just helps, particularly smaller children who, by the time they've walked from the car park around the site, and it has probably flagged it a little bit. And so just providing that little support for them, it's been a fantastic way to contextualise and another way to interpret that. And I think more and more venues could look into that. When you think, well, how else can we add stuff, particularly for children to help tell the story of this place? Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. We went to. It was half term last week and went to the City Museum in Winchester. So they've got some mediaeval, they've got some Roman finds there, and there was lots of fun, but they had. It was full of lots of ways for kids to engage, so there was trails to go around, there was colouring in, make your own mediaeval shield. And all of these things are ways that, you know, my ten year old could engage with it because there's only so many glass cabinets of stuff dug up from the ground that she actually wants to look at. Andrew Webb: I mean, I love. I love pit rivers, right, in Oxford, my favourite museum. Paul Marden: It's crazy, isn't it? I love it. Andrew Webb: But basically, he just went around the world nicking stuff. Right, but as a collection of objects, It's fantastic. Paul Marden: It's deeply unnerving. Andrew Webb: Sorry, sorry if any pit rivers curators are listening there, nick, and stuff about it, but, it is my favourite museum because it's just for kids. It's probably really kind of like, how do you tell that story? I also think there was an article in the garden recently that, you know, the cost of living crisis as well. Parents are looking for value solutions now and so I think it wasn't Peppa Pig World, it was Paddington World. And a family ticket is 170 pounds. That is a huge dent in the family finances for a 70 minutes experience. If you are watching the pennies, if you can afford that and save up for it, whatever. And I know these things are, you know, memory making and all that sort of stuff, and I've been to Harry Potter with my daughter. Andrew Webb: That is not cheap, but it's a fantastic day out because once you're in, you spend the whole day there. If you take a packed lunch, you can save a lot of money on that, on the thing. But I suppose what I'm saying is that, you know, our museums and galleries, particularly traditionally, the what you might call free spaces, public spaces, are facing unprecedented demand in terms of parents looking for cost effective value days out, as well as funding being cut from central government and that sort of. So they have to do a huge amount with less and less for a bigger audience. And that is a strain on any institution and things like that. Other examples of places that get this. Andrew Webb: So obviously with the Sutton Hoo helmet, the hold in Ipswich, which is Suffolk Council's kind of flagship museum in the county town of Ipswich, but instead of calling it, you know, the Museum of Suffolk, they've called it The Hold, which is a reference to the fact it's on, I think it's either because it's on the shore or it's doing sheep, I'm not sure anyway. But a fantastic space, contemporary modern space  had a Lego exhibition a few years ago, borrowed my helmet, had some Lego exhibition stuff to do. And the good thing about that is when these teams have to do quite a lot of comms marketing and, you know, that has a cost as well, but often you see different demographics than perhaps would normally go to a stones and bones museum, if you know what I mean. Right. Andrew Webb: You'll see that it makes it more accessible to the community and to different people who don't like going and looking at the Magna Carta or whatever. For some kids, a day at the British Library is fantastic. Look at all these old books for more, maybe more boisterous children. That's probably not a really great idea. So I think galleries can take a leaf out of this and think, or museums or any institution really can take a leap out of this and think, “How can we do more for less? And what tools can we have that perhaps we haven't considered before, like Lego, as a way to open up our interpretation and our offering?” So this could work in Museum of Docklands, for example. This could work in the royal armouries. Andrew Webb: There's lots of places where if you looking to improve your children's offering that some form of lego, I mean, it ends up all over the floor, it ends up being taken away. Sometimes you've got to watch out for things like that. But that's why I always recommend, like, just the basic blocks and plates, not minifigures and stuff like that, because, you know, they just end up in kids' pockets and trousers. But I do think it is a fantastic tool for developing that interpretation piece. Paul Marden: So I run a coding club using Lego. Okay. So I work with years four, five and six, typically. And we normally start off by the end of two terms, we will be building robotics, programming things, doing amazing things. But we start at the very beginning with just open up a box, and it is amazing what a bunch of seven, eight and nine year olds can do with a two by four red brick just given bricks. Yeah. And they will build amazing things. Yeah. And they will tell you amazing stories. And you also see real diversity in the behaviours of children, because some children, in that free play context, they do not have the skills to do that. And I had one girl recently who hasn't played with Lego, and free play just blew her mind, and she was in tears because she couldn't embrace the creativity of it.Paul Marden: But then the following week, when we were following instructions, she was great at building from a set of instructions, You can do that from a limited palette and give them a mission. Sutton Hoo, build a, I don't know, a sword, build a shield, build something to interpret what you have seen. You're in the transport museum. Build, build. How did you get to the museum this morning? Give them something to do and then let them go. And half an hour later, you will be amazed by what they will have built. Andrew Webb: I actually did something this at the National Archives down in Kew, where they had a kids exhibition. Well, an exhibition in the summer about wacky inventions, because obviously the National Archives holds the patents for all these things, and they've got things like Victorian top hats with umbrellas in, and, you know, all this kind of crazy Heath Robinson style stuff that, you know, forks with four sets of tines, so you can eat four times as much. It just bonkers. Really interesting things. The curators had gone through and found this wacky world, sort of. What's his name? The guy that illustrates Roald Dahl. They got illustrations and all that. Paul Marden: Quentin Blake. Andrew Webb: Yeah, Quentin Blake, yeah. So they had this Quentin Blake sort of stuff, and, like, there was activities. And I came down for some special stuff because they had the first Lego brick patent in the UK. When it was first launched in the UK, 1963, I think it was. That's when they filed the patent. Paul Marden: And I bet. So that patent would be exactly the same as a two by four brick, now, won't it? Andrew Webb: The patent was for a one by four brick. Isometrically dawn. Just three diets. Just three views with what? It was a construction toy. And then the page. Sorry. And the address was just Railway Station Billund.  There wasn't like, just all the mail just went to the railway station in Billund just addressed for attention of Lego. And it's only like. I mean, it's not even a sheet of A4, It's a piece like this. And after it is something like a lamp that won't blow out on a thing, and before it's like some special kind of horse comb, but it's kind of this bonkers catalogue of just these things. But again, it was about, “Right. We did some work. The curators and interpreters looked, you know, had kids analyse the painting to think, what could it be? And look at the dates and structure. Look at that.” Andrew Webb: And then I came out and, like, did some Lego. So we did things like, who can build the longest bridge? Who can build the tallest tower out of a single colour? Those sorts of exercises. But then also the free play was build your own wacky invention. And kids are building automatically dog washers, where the dog ran on a thing and it scrubbed its back. And one kid built something that was like a thing for removing getting pips out of apples. It was just like this sort of like this crazy little tool. They like some sort of problem that he had. Andrew Webb: And I think what this also speaks to is developing those stem skills in children and adults and building that engineering, because I've also ran Lego workshops with explorers who I used to, I thought were between Cubs and scouts, but are actually after scouts. So I did this in my local town, here in Saffron Walden, and was like, “Oh, my God, these kids are like, 15, 16. They're not going to want to play Lego. Some of them are in my daughter's year at school, so. Hello, Amy.” And it was really interesting because we did a series of challenges with them. So the egg drop challenge, can you protect an egg and drop it from the floor? And can you build this and work together? Another good one is looker, runner, builder. Andrew Webb: So you give everybody two sets of the same bricks, and one person is the looker, one person is the runner, one person is the builder. So the looker can't touch, but he can tell the runner. The runner can't look at the model, he can only tell the builder, and the builder can't speak back. And so this is a really useful exercise. And I've done this with teams where, because this is exactly what businesses see, engineering will build a product. Sales or their marketing are like, what the hell is, you know, or whatever it might be. Paul Marden: It's that. It's that classic cartoon of a Swing, yeah. Andrew Webb: Yeah. So it's that, you know, this is what the brief said. Engineering interpreter does this. Marketing saw it. So it's a great tool for things like that. Especially when you put people like the C Suite or CEO's or leaders at the end, because all they're getting is the information and it. It's there and it's how to build communications. Because in life, the fluctuations reverse. A CEO says, “Let's do this.” And by the time it's cascaded down to engineering, who don't get a say, it's not at all what he imagined so, or they imagined so, it's. It's an interesting case of using tools like that. So I did that with these kids and it was fascinating because they're 14, 15, 16.Andrew Webb: A group of three girls won two out of the three challenges and probably could have won a third one if I felt that I couldn't award it to them again because it would just look weird. And they were smashing the looker runner builder thing. They were working together as a team, they were concentrating, they were solving problems, they were being creative, they took some time to prototype, they refined and iterated their design. They were doing all this sort of work. And it's brilliant because 15 year old girls don't often take engineering related STEM subjects at GCSE. Certainly, probably don't take them at a level and more than enough. And I think that I once interviewed Eben Upton, who invented Raspberry Pi, and he said, “We think about the eighties as this sort of like golden age of computing, but actually it was terrible. It was terrible for diversity, it was terrible for inclusion.“Andrew Webb: And he said, “Like growing up, there was one other kid in his town that had a computer, you know, so there was no sort of way to sort of getting other people involved and make this accessible.” And part of the reason now computers have got smaller. Some of the work I did at Pytop was like trying to make technology more accessible and seeing it not just video games and things like that, but actually I can use this in a fashion show, or I can make music, or I can use this to power some lights to do a theatre production, and trying to bring the, I guess, the creative arts into technology. And that's when we start to see the interest application of technology. Andrew Webb: And Lego plays a part in that, in the fact that it is a tool, a rapid prototyping tool that everybody is familiar with. And it is also, you know, clean, safe. There's no, you don't need blow torches and saws and those sorts of things to kind of prototype anything. You don't even need a pair of scissors, you know, it's completely tool free, unless you're using that little mini separator to get your bricks apart. And so I think that just circle back on, like, how the Science Museum or what's the one down there? Isabel Kingdom Brunel Museum and things like that. I can see those guys could be and should be thinking about, “How could we have a Lego programme?“Andrew Webb: You don't have to have a permanent deployment like they've got at Sutton Hoo although that is great because they've got the mast there as the head piece of it. But certainly a programme of events or summer camps or summer events, because I did this with English Heritage at Kenilworth Castle as well. They were having, like, a big Lego build and the public were invited in 15-minute shifts into a big marquee and everyone got given a tile. And the idea was to build the gardens because the gardens at Kenilworth Castle were laid out to impress Elizabeth the first. And so everybody got there was like bunches of stuff and regular bricks, also flowers and this sort of stuff. And it was like, “Come on, we've got to build something to impress a queen.” Andrew Webb: He said to kids, like, “Yeah, you've got to impress. Bling it up, like, dial it to ten.” And were just getting these enormous, like, avatar sized trees with just incredible bits hanging off it. And like, “There she has a teapot because she might want a cup of tea.” And you're like, “Brilliant, excellent. Of course she does.”  And so I think that. And then they moved through. Some of the Legos were selected to be displayed and things like that. So there's different ways you can do it. You can either do it as like. And I'm a big fan of the drop in sessions because kids and parents can just naturally build it into their day rather than the pre built. My child was. We were rubbish at, like, organising things. Andrew Webb: People like, “Oh, great. Half term, it's a chocolate thing, sold out ". And you're like, yeah, because there's 30 spaces for three and a half thousand kids who want to do it. Whereas if it's like a walkthrough or a. In groups phase through and then the activity, small kids kind of conk out after about 20 minutes, half an hour anyway. You get much more people through and much more people get to enjoy the experience rather than the 30 organised people who got up early and booked. So that's my other top tip to any institution, because it's heavily weather dependent as well. Sun comes out, everyone piles pass into the nearest sort of stately home, national attraction. All of those places can definitely benefit English Heritage. Did a really big push this half term, just gone on Lego at several events. Andrew Webb: We had one here at Audley End, there was one at Kenilworth that I was at. There's been pairs of the ones all around the country, because again, you just need a marquee, which most venues have access to because they use them for other things or some sort of space in case it rains. And you just see someone like me and a whole massive tub of Lego and you're off to the races. Paul Marden: Exactly. So we were talking about this at the conference yesterday about ways in which. So for many attractions, people turning up is a literal flip of a coin. Is the weather good or is the weather bad? What can you do to adapt your attraction to be able to deal with when it's bad? And then what can you do to bring people when you have made that adaptation? So, you know, you've now got a marquee and you have a Lego exhibit that you can put into there. So it's just dumping a pile of Lego and a bunch of well trained volunteers or visitor experienced people who can facilitate that, police it, little Johnny sticking minifigs in his pocket. Paul Marden: And then you turn on your Google Adwords and show that you've got this, you know, bad weather reason to go to a stately home that my daughter would turn her nose up to all of a sudden, “Okay, we're going to go and do that. We're going to go and have afternoon tea and you're going to go and play with some Lego and see some animals, maybe.” Yeah, what can you do to attract that extra audience and adapt to the bad weather and service different sorts of people? Andrew Webb: I think that comes down to a bear in mind. I convert some of my Lego lens rather than a venue lens. But I think speaking as a parent and someone who does this is you need a reason to go back to somewhere that you already know. Okay, so you go to Stonehenge, you go and look at the stones, you go, “Wow.” You look at the visitor centre and then it's ticked off. I mean, you see busloads of tourists. Stonehenge is at Cambridge, maybe, or Oxford people, when people do England, Lambeth, Heathrow, London Crown Jewels, Tower Bridge, West End, day trip out on a coach to Stonehenge, maybe to Cambridge, and that's it, off to Paris. Right? So parents like British people like that too. Like why go to Stonehenge four times a year? Or why go to any venue when you're familiar with it? Andrew Webb: It's always about offering something new and something different. Audley End up near where I live, I think, is English Heritage. All through July, every Sunday, they're just doing music. So there's a string quartet or someone with a harp or maybe someone with a guitar or whatever. And you've got a book, but it's. It's not like there's 30 places and it's a bonfight. It's just like, “Oh, wow, they've done something different.” They do a really great thing. Like, they do victorian falconry, for example. So they get someone in who talks about how Victorians use falconry for hunting as a sport, but also for the kitchen table, and they're flying falcons around and doing the whole bit of meat on a string and all this sort of stuff. And everyone, like, “They do a world war two one.”Andrew Webb: I mean, the editorial calendar for any venue's got to look like, “Go and make Christmas food. January, we're closed to kind of dust and clean everything. Valentine's Day, chocolate make you put. It's daffodils”, it's whatever it might be. And then you just build that. Build that programme in and you need. This is why I think that venues now, again, I'll just come back to that. You talk about AdWords, but that, again, is more spend. It's like, how'd you build that mail list? How do you drop into the local Facebook groups and Mumsnet and all that kind of stuff? You know, that's where you can do it organically rather than. Because people don't sit in front of Google necessarily, or think, like, what should we do? Paul Marden: You sit on the sofa on a Thursday night trying to figure out what on earth are we going to do this weekend? Yeah, so you're completely right. The mum's net, the content marketing, is hugely important, isn't it? Andrew Webb: Which is my job. But also it's kind of like how can institutions become part of that? When I say community, if you think about most people travel a thin hour to go somewhere. I mean, people go further afield, you know, but. But basically it's like, what? My mom turns, like, a tea and a pee. So you've got to go somewhere. You've got to have a cup of tea, visit the loos. It's all about tea. It's all about canteens and loos, basically. You could have a World Heritage Site, UNESCO World Heritage site. And it's like, how good's the caf? And are the toilets clean? Yeah, that's what people remember. Gar went hens at dawn. I was awed by the majestic. But that Looney D cleaning, you know, it's not good. It's all that people come home with. Andrew Webb: So, you know, institutions go into place that they are trying to offer different things. Like late nights. We've talked about that. How can we use this space after hours? Because if you think about it, if your institution's open 10 till 6, most people are at work five days a week, you're gonna have students and pensioners who are gonna be not great spenders, either of those two groups. So, late nights, I went to a great one in the National Gallery when the James Bond film. I was kind of sitting royale or whatever. He's still on the top of the National Gallery overlooking Trafalgar Square, and they've got the national dining rooms there and they had Vesper Martini, everyone got a cocktail. Andrew Webb: And then went to look at the fighting Temeraire, which is the bit where he's standing with Q, the new Q, who voices Paddington, whose name escapes me and gives him, like, a gun and a radio, but they're like the fighting Temeraire by Turner is this little thing. And so, you know, you've got to make hay out of that, right? You've got to sort of, like, do a late night, various ones. And so all it was a few cocktails in the cafe next door and are taught by the curator and stuff like that. But 30 people just looking for an experience. And so if venues are clever, of course, the dark side of this is when you get Willy Wonka world up in Scotland. Andrew Webb: Or interestingly, some of the Lego events that have been happening at NEC have caused a massive online backslash in the community for just being exceptionally bad value for money. And so you read about these things that people have said, “Come and visit Santa's grotto, and it's just a muddy field with a tree in it,” so you've got to be careful. But I think those events, those sort of fly by night kind of institutions, don't really work. But how galleries can leverage the creativity of what they're doing? Whether they are come and paint in our, you know, our local gallery, come and have an art class, come and do that. People are looking for stuff to do that is value for money. That isn't always drink lead, you know, it's not always cocktail making or things like that. Andrew Webb: And that comes with a whole heap of other things and dietary requirements for cookery courses and just clean up and the mess and all that kind of stuff. So I think that, yeah, canning organisations, the ones that can really think about that, and I'm happy to help organisations who want to think about this, especially through the life of Lego. They will be the ones that will start to add and build out and develop their. What you might term this whole sector needs a name. The kind of extracurricular offering, we might say, above and beyond their collection and then their traditional interpretation and if they're. Paul Marden: Thinking of doing this. So there's a good why. Yeah, the why is you can reach diverse audiences, helps people with interpretation. Andrew Webb: Quite cheap. Paul Marden: Yeah, absolutely. It's a cheap way of extending your offering and diversifying what you do. You can bring in event elements to this, but how do they do it? Apart from engaging with somebody like you? And I'm going to guess there's not many people like you. So that's going to be a tricky thing for some people to do. But if they were starting from scratch, how would they go about doing this? You said earlier, “Don't go mad with buying the bricks and spending a fortune on.”Andrew Webb: There are people like me that can do all this as well as myself. I think that the first thing is plan it. Plan what you need to do. You can't throw this stuff together. You might be looking at. Already the hold have been contacting me for a late night they're doing in September. They contacted me April. Paul Marden: Okay. Andrew Webb: Because if you're a creator, you're planning exhibitions, you are thinking on that long term cycle. Paul Marden: Yeah, completely. Andrew Webb: And so what you need to do is bake this in as part of that curational process or part of the interpretation of things at the start, rather than like, “Right, we're doing exhibit on Peter Rabbit, let's chuck in a load of fluffy bunnies or whatever.” You know, it's got to be. You've got to think about it and have it contextualised. I think the best things are. What success looks like is, first of all, you need a space. Now you can hire a marquee that comes with a cost. If you're a venue and you've got your own or you've got a hall or a stables or interpretational room or something like that, often spaces, specifically bigger ones, will have classroom spaces for school groups anyway. So that's often that can be where you can host these sorts of events. Kids are very familiar. Andrew Webb: The chairs are all small wall colour, you know, etc. Industrial strength carpet in case stuff gets built. So locations like where you're going to stage this? Paul Marden: Yeah. Andrew Webb: Secondly, I think you need to think about, what do we want people to do? What is the experience? What is the narrative piece? Because you can't just say, here's a big part of Lego. Kids will just build cars and houses, right? You know, they need context. You know, if you give a kid a sheet of paper, you could draw anything. They're like, well, what? And so you need to give them a mission almost. They need a task, I think. Also think about, as I said before, keeping the tasks around 20 minutes, because actually adding the time running out jeopardy element is quite fun for kids because they'll go, “Well, I've only got five minutes left.” And often that's when it all falls apart and then they have to iterate the design. Andrew Webb: So think about that kind of moving people through in 15 to 20 minutes cycles. We had kids at Kenilworth, that would go out the exit and just walk back around and come in the front like that. Like four or five times. One boy came in, he was loving it. So think about that. Think about how you're going to move people through the space. Think about what you need to envisage it. So the Kenilworth, for example, there was me hosting it from dawn toward dusk. We had another builder there who was helping take break it all down and put them against the model that we built. There were two members of staff who were letting people through, so just monitoring it from an entry exit point of view, walkie talkies, in case people had issues and things like that. Andrew Webb: And think about when you're going to do it. Okay, so half term is a good one. It's a good thing to do. We saw a lot of this at Kenilworth, but I've seen other places as well, particularly half terms and things like that. You often see grandparents caring for grandchildren, right? Because parents are at work and grandparents can only walk around the site so much before they want to sit down. So sometimes have it, like, think about where they can. And when I was at Kenilworth, grandparents came in with their two grandkids, and the kids started playing and I was like, you could join in, too. Oh, no, I don't want it. You know, they were almost like, “I can't do this. It's like, come on, get in, get in. Come on, grandma. Come on. I'll show you how it works. “Andrew Webb: By the end of that session, they were memory making. I then took their photo with their phones, they'd have this sort of grandparent. But, you know, you always say it like, my grandfather taught me to fish. Like Sean Connery says in the hunt for red October. This sort of moment where sort of, it's a Hollywood trope that grandfather knowledge is sort of passed on type of thing. Right. And so you can see that where you could have this, almost either the reverse of that, of kids showing grandparents, but also they're all having this event outside of the parental unit. So it's a new type of experience. It adds value, it gets people to play with their grandkids. Paul Marden: Priceless. Andrew Webb: So I think that's kind of an interesting way. So think about when, think about where and think about what will be my three sort of tips for any institution looking to put this together. Paul Marden: You gave one the other day which I thought was priceless, which was, don't give them wheels. Andrew Webb: Oh, yes. Paul Marden: Don't include the wheels. Andrew Webb: Take the wheels out of any sets, unless you are the Transport Museum or the, you know, a car based museum, because kids will do wings as well. I'd probably suggest taking those out because kids have just built cars. Some kids have just built cars, you know, even if you give them a mission. Unless that is the mission. The other thing that I would think that venues could do as well as sort of all day events, because it's quite a time drain, you know, on staff and this sort of stuff, but it is a value. The other thing you can think about is one off evening events for adults. Yes, I've done this. I did this at my local add them shops. Bricks, beers and bubbles challenges supercompass teams. Think of it like a pub quiz with brick is the answer. Andrew Webb: So build me a thing that does that kind of thing. Teams all get together, you can race them, you can see who goes the furthest. You can do all this stuff. And the hold is what I'm doing at the hold in September. I did it at the hold a couple of years ago. And what was interesting was that we had quite diverse groups of adults. We had just couples who were clearly AFOLs and were like, “Yeah, I'm going to go to that.” We had a group of friends. One of them had just come back from years travelling and they didn't want to go sort of straight to the pub and just interrogate him about his travelling, whatever. Andrew Webb: They kind of like, “Well, we wanted something to do where we could have a beer and have a chat, but were doing something else whilst we're doing that.” And that's the joy of Lego. Your hands are doing the work and you're almost like the back of your brain is doing the work and you're like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. Before you kick them.” And the concentration levels are there and then you can kind of get into that state of flow. And so they were just having this lovely chat, had a beer, talking about stuff, but also memory making in terms of when he came back from his travelling. So I think that's really important. Andrew Webb: Did you know that this is your brain, right? And then your brain on Lego, there are 24 discrete skills that are happening in your brain. So Lego research this, things like fine motor skills, cognitive sort of thinking about things, future planning, my favourite emotional regulation that is not going, “Oh, my God, it's not working. And smashing all to pieces.” So I've seen this as well with children, is that when you give them a Lego, if you gave them jelly and a football, they'll all just. They're a high energy kind of things, right? And that's fine, great outdoors, kids want to burn off energy. Here's a load of balls. Go crazy, right? Or ball pits, trampolines, bouncy castles, those sorts of things. When you get on Lego, what actually happens is it's very hard to be anarchic, to use a wrong word, but a word. It's very hard to be anarchic with Lego because you can't really do it. Andrew Webb: And so you can get a group of kids together and they'll almost self invigilate. And at one point, I ran it at a local toy shop and the parents are all hanging about and like, “I've never seen them so quiet.” They were just in the state of flow. And so, I think, you know, again, back to the. Back to the explorers and the scouts, that was one of the best sessions that those kids had done as teenagers because the reason was they were given permission to play with Lego. They still had the muscle memory from when they were smaller children. They were solving. They weren't just being told to play with Lego, they were actually solving engineering challenges. How can you design a bridge that will take this weight? How can you protect an egg? How can you think about this? Andrew Webb: And so you need to think about the challenge and the what. You need to think about that, the where and you think about the when, as I said, and get those right. You can have a very exceptional visitor experience for not a huge amount of effort. It's not highly costly, it's not highly technical, it's just a bit of elbow grease and a bit of forward thinking in terms of what we might need. And I think that parents appreciate just that minute away where they can. It's almost like a 20 minute babysitter, right, where they can just go, “Don't touch that.” You know, you're walking around a stately home, “Don't sit there, don't touch. Mind the lady.” All that kind of no data that parents give out institutions, they can just take a breather and check their phones and whatever. Paul Marden: And the kids are just having an amazing time. Andrew Webb: Yeah. And the kids are happy. And at the end of the day, as a parent, we all do our best and you just want, you know, them to be playing with something screen free, getting along and learning something. And, you know, that is the win. That is the ultimate takeout. You can layer on your own institution in context and rev up the visitor experience, bring in new visitors, attract a more diverse group of people that perhaps wouldn't normally come to a Regency Rococo style villa or whatever it might be, then that's all to the better, because, you know, you can start to use this in your planning and you can do what Suntton Hoo did? And go, right, well, we've done this and it's really worked. Andrew Webb: And then I can apply for funding for it and I can expand and I can make it permanent and then I can sort of say, well, this now becomes a tool and a string and arbo for our educational. It doesn't have to be split between visitor attractions and development. It can, you know, you can split it between several parts of the institution and use it in different ways, use it for educational purposes as well as visitor experience. So the world's your oyster with a bit of thinking. Paul Marden: With a bit of Lego and a bit of thinking. Andrew Webb: Bit of Lego, yeah. A few bricks and a couple of tricks and you're off to the races. Paul Marden: Andrew, this has been brilliant. Thank you ever so much. Andrew Webb: You're welcome. Paul Marden: I've got one more question for you before we finish. Now, you bottled this earlier on when I said we always have a book recommendation from our guests. And in spite of having the fullest bookshelf I've seen in quite a long time, you've bottled it on a book. But you did offer me a favourite movie. And so what would be your movie recommendation of choice? Andrew Webb: My go to movie would probably be Withnail and I, Richard E. Grant's first film. Every line has came down from God on a tablet. I mean, it is just. Yeah. Richard Griffiths as Uncle Monty, Paul McGann. It's just one of my favourite films and, you know, cult classic that no one's really. Well, people have heard of it now, but again, they even make stuff out with Alan Eyright. So you can go and watch a screening of it at the farm at Crow Crag up in Penrith, you know, and everyone dresses up and everyone comes with Mister blathering sets tea and I come on holiday by mistake and Jessie says, Danny. Andrew Webb: And, you know, fortunately, for better or for worse, I know these are tough times, but people try and find the fun in things. They try and at the end of the day, everyone's looking for a good time, whether we're children or an adult. You want something to just have a laugh and take you away for a moment. And if films and culture but also experiences can do that, then that's all for the good. Paul Marden: Well, look, this is going to be a challenge, but listeners, if you would like a copy of Andrew's film recommendation, then when we release the show message on X, if you can retweet that and say, “Give me Andrew's movie”, then the first person that does that, somehow I will get the movie to you. It might be on VHS, it might be on DVD, but somehow we will get you a movie. Andrew Webb: I found a CD the other day from a bar I used to go to in Clapham in the noughties and late ‘90s. I said to my mate, look, I'm great, put it on. And I went, “I can't.” I haven't got a CD player anymore. I had to go dig through a box somewhere in the study to find a portable CD player that plugged into my computer that could. By the end of it, we're just laugh. Forget it. Paul Marden: Andrew, this has been wonderful. Thank you ever so much. Andrew Webb: You're welcome. Cheers. Paul Marden: Thanks for listening to Skip the Queue. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a five star review. It really helps others find us. And remember to follow us on Twitter for your chance to win the books that have been mentioned. Skip The Queue is brought to you by Rubber Cheese, a digital agency that builds remarkable systems and websites for attractions that helps them increase their visitor numbers. You can find show notes and transcriptions from this episode and more over on our website, SkiptheQueue.fm. The 2024 Visitor Attraction Website Survey is now LIVE! Help the entire sector:Dive into groundbreaking benchmarks for the industryGain a better understanding of how to achieve the highest conversion ratesExplore the "why" behind visitor attraction site performanceLearn the impact of website optimisation and visitor engagement on conversion ratesUncover key steps to enhance user experience for greater conversionsFill in your data now (opens in new tab)

Bonjouuuuur ! Nous revoilà avec un journal de lecture, format qu'on aime bien proposer, même si à chaque fois ça nous plonge dans une frénésie de lecture et/ou de papillonnage :D On espère que ça vous plaira, n'hésitez pas à nous donner vos avis, via instagram @entrenospages ou par mail : entrenospages@gmail.com. Bonne écoute ! Les livres abordés dans cet épisode sont : - Fondation/Foundation, Isaac Asimov - Mémoires de Lady Trent/A memoir by Lady Trent, Marie Brennan - La fiancée américaine, Eric Dupont - Les ignorants, Etienne Davodeau - Les enquêtes d'Enola Holmes/An Enola Holmes Mystery, Nancy Springer - Derniers jours d'un monde oublié, Chris Vuklisevic - Six stories/Six versions, Matt Wesolowski - Téméraire/Temeraire, Naomi Novik - Assassin's Creed, Eric Corbeyran et Djillali Defali - Jours de sang/Redder days, Sue Rainsford - Iznogoud, René Goscinny et Jean Tabary - Ouragan, Laurent Gaudé - Blacksad, Juan Díaz Canales et Juanjo Guarnido - La chute du patriarcat, Marta Breen et Jenny Jordahl - Anaïs Nin : Sur la mer des mensonges, Léonie Bischoff - Je serai là, L'homme étoilé - Les sauveurs : 7 héros de la cause animale, Fabien Morin, Chhuy-Ing Ia, Julien Derain et Laurent Hopman Music promoted by La Musique Libre Joakim Karud - Canals: https://youtu.be/zrXbhncmorc Joakim Karud: https://soundcloud.com/joakimkarud

Sapphire, Joseph, and Michelle chat about what they've been reading, watching, and listening to this week including Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel Prophet Song, Alison Rumfitt's gutchurning new release Brainwyrms, and Down The Drain, the hotly anticipated memoir from model and actress Julia Fox. This week's deep dive book is the million copy bestseller A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. For this episode, listener recommendation request comes from Dan who is looking to branch out into the fantasy genre after enjoying The Earthsea books by Ursula K. LeGuin. Joseph recommends The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin, the first book in Jemsin's ‘Inheritance Trilogy'. Sapphire recommends The Poppy Wars by R.F. Kuang, and Roadside Picnic by Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky. Michelle recommends The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, the first book in Maas' four book ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses' series, and Temeraire (aka His Majesty's Dragon) by Naomi Novik, the first book in Novik's nine book ‘Temeraire' series. Also mentioned in this episode: Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt The Bee Sting by Paul MurrayWestern Lane by Chetna MarooStudy for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein‘Hanya's Boys' - an essay by Andrea LongChu about A Little Life and Hanya Yanagihara's other novels SFGateway website - browse all the titles in the SF Masterworks series Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Book 5, Doctor Arc - Oshi and Dragonus are discussing war in the jungles of Baleros, the beginning of a new legend, and the creation of the United Nations Company. On Dragons: The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffery, Puff the Dragon, Dragon Tales, Dragon Lance, How to Train Your Dragon, Game of Thrones / House of the Dragon, Temeraire by Naomi Novik, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Skyrim Adaptations (or the lack thereof): Earthsea, Avatar the Last Airbender, The Last of Us Other Topics: Piccard, My Cousin Vinny (book), Mean Girls, The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, Taskmaster, Katherine Ryan (comedian), Sarah Millican (comedian), Weekend Update (SNL),  Saving Private Ryan

This week on PodQuest we talk about the new reality gameshow Squid Game The Challenge on Netflix, Walnut watched All You Need Is Kill, the source material for the Tom Cruise and Emily blunt sci-fi action film Live. Die. Repeat. - The Edge of Tomorrow. And Chris read Naomi Novik's 2006 Alternate History Fantasy novel His Majesty's Dragon, the first in the Temeraire series. We also chat about the new season of Loki and the general state of the film industry, Walnut's thoughts on Critical Roles Mighty Nein origin comics, and Chris does a quick check in on Persona 5 Tactica. With the entertainment strikes mostly over, we're going back to movies for our next book club and picking back up with Groundhogs Day, the 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray. We'll be talking about it on our December 7th episode. Timestamps 00:00:00 - Intro 00:08:17 - Agenda 00:09:00 - Loki S2 and the state of the film industry 00:32:29 - *SPOILERS* for the end of The Marvel's 00:35:26 - Squid Game The Challenge 00:58:59 - Critical Role's Mighty Nein Origins Comics 01:06:03 - All You Need Is Kill (2004 Novel) 01:26:17 - His Majesty's Dragon (2006 Novel) 01:32:46 - Persona 5 Tactica 01:37:49 - Outro Support One-Quest https://www.Patreon.com/OneQuest Follow Us Email - Social@one-quest.com Twitter - @One_Quest Instagram - @One_Quest Facebook - OneQuestOnline Follow Chris on Twitter - @Just_Cobb Follow Richie on Twitter - @B_Walnuts Follow Drootin on Twitter - @IamDroot Check out Richie's streaming and videos! Twitch b_walnuts YouTube BWalnuts TikTok b_walnuts Intro and Outro music Mega Man 2 'Project X2 - Title Screen' OC ReMix courtesy of Project X over at OCRemix

This week on PodQuest we talk about the new reality gameshow Squid Game The Challenge on Netflix, Walnut watched All You Need Is Kill, the source material for the Tom Cruise and Emily blunt sci-fi action film Live. Die. Repeat. - The Edge of Tomorrow. And Chris read Naomi Novik's 2006 Alternate History Fantasy novel His Majesty's Dragon, the first in the Temeraire series. We also chat about the new season of Loki and the general state of the film industry, Walnut's thoughts on Critical Roles Mighty Nein origin comics, and Chris does a quick check in on Persona 5 Tactica.

Available on Amazon and leading online bookstores worldwide. Aerial combat brings a thrilling new dimension to the Napoleonic Wars as valiant warriors rise to Britain's defense by taking to the skies . . . not aboard aircraft but atop the mighty backs of fighting dragons. --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/daniel-lucas66/message

With the Napoleonic wars still going on, Temeraire is a major asset to the British military. Unfortunately, the Chinese have found out that the egg didn't go to Napoleon and have come to claim him back. With trickery, manipulation and murder attempts on board an eight-month ship voyage, will Laurence and Temeraire stay together long enough to make their plea to stay together? Or will Temeraire choose his own path? Follow the Author: Website: https://www.naominovik.com/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/naominovik Twitter: https://twitter.com/naominovik Tumblr: https://naominovik.tumblr.com/ Good Reads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/8730.Naomi_Novik Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/naominovik/_saved/ 00:00 Intro 00:54 Background 02:29 Age Level & Content Warning 03:29 Judge a Book by It's Cover 04:47 Discussion 52:07 General Thoughts 54:35 One Question for the Author 56:39 Rating 57:10 Read Again? 57:44 Favorite of the Series so Far 58:01 Outro TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/lunar_skulk Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lunar_skulk --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ewm-bookclub/support

In this mini episode, the team asks the questions they didn't ask before in the full review of Temeraire (His Majesty's Dragon) by Naomi Novik. For the full book review, see series 1 episode 14/15Support the showP.s If there's a book you want to recommend to us to read, just send us a message/email and we'll pop it on our long list (but please read our review policy on our website first for the books we accept).Social MediaWebsite: https://teachingmycattoread.wordpress.com/Email: teachingmycattoread@gmail.comInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teachmycat2read/Twitter: https://twitter.com/teachmycat2read?s=09Tumblr: https://teachingmycattoread.tumblr.comYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFXi9LNQv8SBQt8ilgTZXtQ

This week's BWB Extra continues our conversation with Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin, co-authors of Chokepoint Capitalism. Cory is a renowned science fiction author, activist and journalist who's written a range of highly acclaimed books, and Rebecca is a Professor of Law at Melbourne University and Director of Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, and in this chat we get to know more about what makes them tick and how they came to be doing what they do today.Check out Cory & Rebecca's recommendations:"Temeraire" by Naomi Novik "Honk if you are Jesus" by Peter Goldsworthy Talking Heads studio albums BWB is powered by Oury Clark.

Brian's guest this week is fantasy author Naomi Novik! Naomi is best known for her massively successful Temeraire series in which dragons fight in the Napoleonic Wars and was, as Brian recounts in the episode, an early inspiration for his own writing. She's also written the Scholomance trilogy, standalone novels Uprooted and Spinning Silver, and a host of short fiction.Naomi and Brian talk about international travel and attending conventions, Naomi's love of fan fiction, her early work in video games, and writing characters—including non-humans—who think differently from modern people.Fina Naomi on Twitter and her website.Find Brian at his website, on Twitter and Instagram, or find his books on Amazon, direct from his bookstore, or wherever books are sold!Don't forget to support the show on Patreon, or pick up some swag on Redbubble. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the first episode of our Painting of the Week podcast! In this episode Phil and Laura look at Turner's The Fighting Temeraire, which was once voted ‘The Greatest Painting in Britain'. For more information and to see the artwork being discussed please visit www.seventh-art.com/podcast

The review of Throne of Jade, by Naomi Novik. The Sequel to His Majesty's Dragon take so much of what made the original story great and adds new twists and intrigue to a fascinating world.  The Dragon's Library is a collection of reviews on books, movies, shows, and games.  Listen to my review and then try reading the book itself for a fantastic journey.You can check out the book at your local library or purchase it at the following links.Throne of Jade(Audible)Throne of Jade(Barnes And Noble)Follow me on Twitter and Contact me with the email address below.Twitter: @Dragon_Library2Email:  thedragonslibrary.main@gmail.com New intro audio designed to be compatible with new youtube intro.

We read “Temeraire: His Majesty's Dragon” by Naomi Novik, the first book in a series of alternative history novels where the Napoleonic Wars are fought with Dragons. The second of a two-parter (we recommend first listening to the previous episode if you haven’t done so already!)[Note: At around 16 minutes we briefly mix up Captain Catherine Harcourt and Captain Jane Roland. Lawrence meets Harcourt first, and she is the one that he accidentally calls Miss. He meets Caption Roland later, and they get into a relationship.]Content WarningsAbuse/neglect of a dragon (dragons are sentient, and the abusive relationship is somewhere between a parent/child or owner/pet situation)WarfareMild SexismAdditionalWe reference JK Rowling’s work in this episode and want to make it clear we support Trans rights - here are a few UK Trans organisations we support and you can too:https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/http://genderedintelligence.co.uk/https://transgenderni.org.uk/Social MediaYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFXi9LNQv8SBQt8ilgTZXtQInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teachmycat2read/Twitter: https://twitter.com/teachmycat2read?s=09Tumblr: https://teachingmycattoread.tumblr.comWebsite: https://teachingmycattoread.wordpress.com/Email: teachingmycattoread@gmail.comSupport the show (https://ko-fi.com/teachingmycattoread)

My first review. A double bill with the gamecube game, Kirby Air Ride,  and the first book in the Temeraire series, His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik.Kirby Air Ride (GameStop)His Majesty's Dragon (Amazon) ________________________________________________________________________ You can follow me on Twitter and contact me with the email address below.Twitter: @Dragon_Library2Email:  thedragonslibrary.main@gmail.com

Discussion of A Deadly Education, written by Naomi Novik, and narrated by Anisha Dadia. A Deadly Education [Overdrive/Libby]  / [Audible] / [Libro.fm] Spinning Silver [Overdrive/Libby]  / [Audible] / [Libro.fm] / [Episode 30] Uprooted [Overdrive/Libby]  / [Audible] / [Libro.fm] Temeraire (series) [Overdrive/Libby]  / [Audible] / [Libro.fm] The Last Graduate (The Scholomance: Book #2) [Overdrive/Libby]  / [Audible] / [Libro.fm]

We read “Temeraire: His Majesty's Dragon” by Naomi Novik, the first book in a series of alternative history novels where the Napoleonic Wars are fought with Dragons. We join Captain Will Laurence as he reluctantly forms a bond with a newly hatched dragon and instantly becomes the “I’ve only had Temeraire for a day and a half but if anything happened to him I would kill everyone on this boat and then myself” meme.If you like the premise go read it, we’ll wait! (Definitely read it.)Part one of two. Content WarningsAbuse/neglect of a dragon (dragons are sentient, and the abusive relationship is somewhere between a parent/child or owner/pet situation)WarfareMild SexismAdditionalWe reference JK Rowling’s work in this episode and want to make it clear we support Trans rights - here are a few UK Trans organisations we support and you can too:https://mermaidsuk.org.uk/http://genderedintelligence.co.uk/https://transgenderni.org.uk/Social MediaYoutube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFXi9LNQv8SBQt8ilgTZXtQInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/teachmycat2read/Twitter: https://twitter.com/teachmycat2read?s=09Tumblr: https://teachingmycattoread.tumblr.comWebsite: https://teachingmycattoread.wordpress.com/Email: teachingmycattoread@gmail.comSupport the show (https://ko-fi.com/teachingmycattoread)

Un viaggio intorno ai bar, quello 'nostrano' di Stefano Benni con i flipper e i telefoni a gettoni, e quelli letterari all'estero, come il "Café Griensteidl" di Vienna dove si incontravano von Hofmannstahl, Zweig e Schnnitzler (scusate se è poco) e i cafés parigini come il "Café de la Paix", meta di Hemingway, il "Thé Columbin", frequentato da una giovane Marguerite Yourcenar, il "Gaya" popolato da Djagilev, Picasso, Ezra Pound, Cocteau, il "Bar du Ritz" e, in tempi recenti, il "Café le Temeraire" dove Jodorowsky era solito esibirsi nella lettura dei tarocchi. Alla fine torniamo in Italia, nella caffetteria di una stazione, dove un personaggio pirandelliano parla di vita e di morte. A metà episodio incontriamo anche una singolare partita a carte dove tutti i giocatori "passano" e alla fine cala il sipario.

It's... our November episode! In December! Because reasons!We hope that our sporadic upload schedule (sorry about that) is made up for (we hope) with two amazing books - and our Christmas Book Box unboxing! If you have no idea what our Christmas Book Box is, well, listen to the episode and you'll find out. Easy peasy.Jess binges and gushes about the page-turned that is A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, the first book in the All Souls trilogy. Part foray into dark academia, part Anne Rice vampires do sexy science, this is a book that comes highly recommended.Vee has a moment with His Majesty's Dragon, the first book in the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik - the second Novik book read by Vee this year, and the third book by Novik covered by us this year! Are we... a Naomi Novik podcast? We'll get back to you on that.We also talk about e-readers, the joys (and necessity) of libraries in Covid times, and laugh a lot. Oh, and did we mention our Book Box unboxing?

Science writer Tom Chivers discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Science writer Tom Chivers discusses with Ivan six things which he thinks should be better known. Tom Chivers is science editor at UnHerd.com. His second book, How To Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (and Knowing When to Trust Them), will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in March 2021. He is a two-time winner of the Royal Statistical Society's Statistical Excellence in Journalism award, and was once told by Terry Pratchett that he was "far too nice to be a journalist". Goodhart’s Law https://unherd.com/2020/04/we-cant-put-too-much-faith-in-covid-19-statistics/ Kill Team https://www.goonhammer.com/getting-started-kill-team/ and https://unherd.com/2020/03/self-isolation-is-feeding-my-warhammer-addiction/ Selection bias https://unherd.com/2019/09/statistically-you-shouldnt-believe-the-news/ Red kite https://unherd.com/2019/11/let-loose-the-lynxes/ Coordination games https://unherd.com/2020/03/would-you-take-a-coronavirus-risk/ Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series https://www.npr.org/2016/06/14/481391755/temeraire-and-laurence-at-peace-at-last-in-league-of-dragons This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

In a programme first broadcast in 2016, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Fighting Temeraire, one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'. With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery David Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain and James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum Producer: Simon Tillotson.

“the police called it Fagin’s Nursery” “Dickens knew the area well and it featured in his novels” “It’s changed a lot, mostly for the better” “ship building and ship breaking – the Temeraire and the Mayfloweer” “many would say they wouldn’t visit the area alone” “a mecca for foodies” Isobel introduces us to Bermondsey   […]

Josh, Scott, Chuck talk about everything writing-related! Come join the conversation! *** Hosts: Josh Hayes, Scott Moon, C. Stephen Manley [00:00] Opening remarks [06:30] Weekly update—Tase Me, Please Edition Josh: Vacation Sunburn™, wrote some chapters in the coauthored work, listening to more audiobooks. Scott: Victory Day (Alien Invastion #3) is on pre-order. How great covers can change a book. Serious side quests and plots. Chuck: Extended Kid Time™ dealing with family medical issues per 2020® [18:00] Main Event: LIVE! Writing Roundtable July 2020! -Josh postulates that 2020 is the way that it is because the Chiefs won the Super Bowl. -Josh is enjoying The Demon Cycle series by Peter V. Brett -Confusion over titles of demon races and finally picking up the concepts that were introduced in the first book. Super grim dark. -A character that goes from a child to an adult over the course of a series, which can be troublesome for a series. -Not for the faint of heart, but the characters were more developed than Joe Abercrombie’s First Law characters -Scott’s Magic Yeti -Chuck was in the hunt for high fantasy that wasn’t grimdark but not epic, but more like D&D fantasy of the 80’s. -What has changed in the last 30 years? -It depends on the fantasy you read; Josh wasn’t compelled to read Priori of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon because of the prose and POV shifts. -An overload of characters from that book. -Josh also read The Shadow of What Was Lost (Licanus Trilogy) by James Islington -It was a boy going on a Hero’s Journey with two different types of magic and a bit obvious. -Josh recommends The Way of Kings (Stormlight Archives #1) by Brandon Sanderson (of course) -Working title for The Way of Kings was Writing This for Josh. -Chuck chose Web of Eyes (Buried Goddess Saga #1) by Rhett Bruno and Jamie Castle -Josh explains the indoctrination into Stormlight is much like Scientology…. -Scott did not like most of the characters, but he liked Shallan. -Scott reacted differently to The First Law trilogy than Josh. -Chuck was curious about the concept of the generic character, but there’s an appeal there. -Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time starts as a clone of JRR Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings but diverts after the first book. -Magic system fatigue. -Follow along with the Everyman™. -Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Tales series has parallels to A Song of Fire and Ice – magic. -A discussion of explaining the magic or not (hard v. soft). -Josh explains Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson -Josh then explains Stormlight magic… Anyone read some steam punk? -Josh started The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi -Scott and Chuck read some Cherie Priest Clockwork Century novels -Deadwood with Magic would be fun. -Chuck enjoyed Stephen King’s The Outsider, but Josh did not like the show. -Scott loved Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, which is a mix of fantasy and historical fiction -Josh surprisingly enjoyed The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North - [1:03:31] Closing remarks Coffee and Concepts Writer’s Journey Storytelling  *** Become a Medium today! https://keystrokemedium.com/mediums/ Don't forget to Like and Subscribe and get involved with the mayhem and shenanigans in the live chat! http://www.youtube.com/c/keystrokemedium If you have any thoughts or ideas for show topics or if you have authors you'd like to see on the show, let us know. Visit our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/KeystrokeMedium For all the latest and greatest KSM Gear, check out our store at: https://keystrokemedium.com/ksm-store/ Also, subscribe to Sci Fi Explorations for the best discounted and free books we come across through our contacts: http://www.scifiexplorations.com Keystroke Medium Anthologies      Kingdoms of Iron and Stone - https://amzn.to/2GjbE6I       Horizons Beyond - https://amzn.to/2SrJ6uX      Farthest Reach – https://amzn.to/2UZINeo The Writing Dream – and How to Make it to Happily Ever After – Keystroke Medium’s first non-fiction book. https://amzn.to/2UZINeo If you enjoy this podcast, please leave us a review and rate the show on iTunes, Podbean, Stitcher, or wherever else you found us!

Author Naomi Novik joins us for the season 4 finale of Invaders From Planet 3! Naomi tells us how her love of fantasy and science fiction was born when her mother read Polish fairy tales to her, such as Agnieszka "Piece of the Sky". At the same time, her parents were reading the Disney picture book version of Peter Pan to her, along with Tolkien's The Hobbit, and other works. She tells us how the Polish stories helped create a bond between her and her mother's past, and how her love of Disney's version of Peter Pan got her started down the road to creating her own stories... or, at least commissioning them at that point. We also talk about the evolution of Naomi's relationship with fan fiction, from reading it in university, to her early days as a writer when she began creating it, to her eventual decision that it was too constraining for a story she wanted to tell: the story of Lawrence and the dragon Temeraire in her breakout Temeraire series of novels. And she talks about how, even after building a career around her own unique stories, she still enjoys writing fanfic. Naomi also tells us about feeling liberated when the Temeraire series came to an end. And she discusses the importance of having control over a story's ending, right from the start. Our conversation took place in the impromptu studio of bloginhood in the Dublin convention centre last summer at Worldcon. To learn more about Naomi and her stories, visit her website: www.naominovik.com To listen to Invaders From Planet 3, or to subscribe, visit Libsyn, iTunes, or your other favourite podcatching service. Be sure to rate and review us while you're there!  

On this episode, we're talking about dragons, specifically dragons that shapeshift into a hot person so you can kiss them. Well, ok, in one of the tentpoles a girl smooches the actual dragon-shaped dragon, but we'll get to that. The tentpoles this week are In the Vanishers’ Palace by Aliette de Bodard, the movie On Drakon, and “O Captain, My Captain” by novembersmith.   What We’re Into Lately The Monster of Elendhaven by Jennifer Giesbrecht The Untamed The Impossible Contract by K.A. Doore Civilisations   Other Stuff We Mentioned Dragon’s Bait by Vivian Vande Velde Sorcerer to the Crown by Zen Cho Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey Jupiter Ascending (2015) Uprooted by Naomi Novik Beauty and the Beast The Sound of Music (1965) The House of Binding Thorns by Aliette de Bodard The House of Sundering Flames by Aliette de Bodard How to Train Your Dragon (2010) The Temeraire series by Naomi Novik Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian Hornblower Saga by C.S. Forester The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien How to Pronounce Smaug King Uther Pendragon Hamlet’s King Claudius The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon The Three Things One Can Do with a Dragon  “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”  “Beauty and the Beast” The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis Be The Serpent Episode 15: My (Psychic, Firebreathing) Little Pony  Cruel Enchantment, a short story collection by Janine Ashbless “The Dragon’s Bride” by Janine Ashbless “Treasured” by Dira Sudis, Sealcat Sherlock   For Next Time  Princess Tutu   Transcription The transcript of this episode is available here. Picture us throwing bouquets of roses at our wonderful scribal team!!

Molly and Alice talk about dragons, and the people who were really, really love them dragons. Lord of the Rings, Temeraire, Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Discworld, Harry Turtledove, Dragon Age, Skyrim (barely)

FFR #56: Doctor Who At long last, Anita and Ebony finally get around to talking about Doctor Who on the podcast! First, they both share their different relationships with the history of the show, and what they’re bringing with them to the new season, which stars Jodie Whittaker as the show’s first female Doctor. (Please note that this episode was recorded in early November, and only includes discussions of the season’s first five episodes.) We get into the overall political values of the new season under new showrunner Chris Chibnall, and give special attention to the episode “Rosa Parks.” Carolyn drops by FROM THE FUTURE to share the latest in entertainment news, and as always, Ebony and Anita each share a little something in What’s Your FREQ-Out? We want to hear from you, so head on over to feministfrequency.com/freqout and send us your FREQ-Out today! SEGMENT TIMESTAMPS: 2:55 Entertainment News: Call Me by Your Name author announces sequel novel in the works; the dangerous transphobia of Danish film Girl; Hannah Gadsby’s speech at THR’s Women in Hollywood Gala; SonicFox wins Best Esports Player at The Game Awards 8:25 Doctor Who 42:50 What’s Your FREQ-Out? (Ebony on the Temeraire books by Naomi Novik, Anita on something else) RELEVANT LINKS: Check out our producer Phil Surkis’ podcast Spice Cabinet, briefly referenced on this episode: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/spice-cabinet/id1307048969?mt=2 Read critic Oliver Whitney’s piece on the transphobic dangers of Girl: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/belgiums-oscar-submission-girl-is-a-danger-transgender-community-1166505 Watch Hannah Gadsby’s speech at last week’s Women in Hollywood event: https://jezebel.com/hannah-gadsby-on-the-convenient-and-incredibly-irritati-1830906188 Learn more about Naomi Novik's Temeraire series: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/TEM/temeraire

Kay was stuck adulting (cough, day job, cough), but Chelsea recently had the opportunity to sit down with Layla Reyne! They talk about Layla’s latest book, Imperial Stout, the first in her new Trouble Brewing series. The book will be out in e-book on July 23 and in paperback July 31! They also talk all things angsty and romantic suspense, fanfiction, and about great things they’ve been reading lately. You can find Layla at her website, Twitter, Facebook, and/or Instagram. PS if you notice some awkward transitions while Kay's talking about Temeraire in our 'current reads' segment, it's because Chelsea had to cut out about fifteen minutes of us babbling about various Peter Jackson related things. We're so sorry. There was a lot of hysterical laughter. TIME STAMPS: 00:00-01:54 – Intro 01:54-20:19 – Current Reads 20:19-59:39 – Interview with Layla Reyne  59:39-01:02:14 – What’s Coming Up, Outro, and Outtakes

In this episode we discuss Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. You can buy a copy at Barnes & Noble, or you can watch the 1995 miniseries online from Amazon, iTunes, or Hulu. We also reference or spoil: Hamilton, Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, House of Suns, How to Train Your Dragon, and Naomi Novik‘s Temeraire […]

The Bakra 312 Written for television by: Luke Schelhaas Directed by: Charlotte Brändström Starz Synopsis: The Artemis finally reaches Jamaica bringing Jamie and Claire that much closer to their goal. During a lavish ball on the island, the Frasers encounter old allies, as well as former adversaries who threaten to derail their mission. My Summary: Flashback to Young Ian's capture. Young Ian and the Artemis arrive at Jamaica. Young Ian is given to The Bakra. She's Geillis Duncan risen from the dead. Young Ian is drugged, questioned, and sexually assaulted. Claire and Jamie et al. just miss the Bruja. They meet an ally. Misadventure and horror in the slave market. They purchase a slave. The plan the release. Geillis needs a reading and a third sapphire. To the Governor's Ball Team Fraser go. They meet an old patient. They see a ghost, Lord John Grey. Lord John meets Claire. The third sapphire is found. Claire sees a ghost, Geillis Duncan. Claire and Geillis catch up. Geillis agrees to help find Young Ian. The prophecy reading is done. Yi Tien Cho might get the girl. Thomas Leonard arrives. Jamie and Claire escape. Freedom is given. Jamie is arrested. How it played: That's right Young Ian, draw first blood. That'll show ‘em. Many months later, Jamaica. (in a French accent) I'm looking for pirates. Eleanor Guthrie is the Bakra? LMAO. You're in Jamaica mon. Two boys left, that's some scary math. It is a long way to travel Young Ian, about 4500 miles as the crow flies. The Bakra eats them or something. There is a Rose Hall in Jamaica. Well hello there, creepy sexy lady. It's Geillis Duncan. Bath of goat's blood – there are beliefs that animal blood bathing can retain youth. Young Ian, “She's creepy, she's sexy, she's scary.” NEVER EVER take a beverage from Geillis. EVER. She's the ruffie queen. Loose lips. Why does she need the third sapphire? “I sex the virgins up, then kill them.” “You'll know what to do then.” Time Traveler. Sexy AF. Pedophile. Murderer. Poisoner. Slave Master. She's the whole package that Geillis. Geillis is looking for the third sapphire; Claire calls Jamaica the jewel of the Caribbean. Coincidence? I don't think so. Team Fraser break. MacIver is the happiest wig wearing dude ever. A Ball! Meh, no thanks. Who wants to meet the Governor? Right call Jamie, don't let Claire out of your sight. A hog's head of wine was 32 gallons. Ugh, the slave market. Claire is all sorts of uncomfortable. The horrors of the slave market are visually toned down for television. The spirit of how horrendous and dehumanizing it was is made clear. I cannot imagine anyone ever thinking slavery was justifiable. Here's a history of Jamaica and slavery. We're hunting Young Ian's. Another act of dehumanization, branding. Claire loses her shit as only Claire can and hits the auctioneer with her parasol. She starts a bloody row. Then asks Jamie to do something about it. She wants to help the enslaved man. This scene could be, “How Claire accidentally owns a slave.” Temeraire is his name. Jamie schools Claire on the politics and legality of slave ownership. They discuss how to free him in the future, so he stays free. “Hey, honey, we're going to a ball.” They ask for Temeraire's help and tell him he's free as soon as they can find a way to do it. A prophecy. A reading curtailed. I need the third stone. Oh, that whacky Margaret Campbell. Um Geillis, I think your intel is incorrect. We arrive at the ball. The King's House. Jamie's a dandy, Claire's in her 20-year-old gown. That hair! Eke. That wig. Yikes! Yi Tien Cho cleans up. Fancy meeting you here Archibald. Claire's discomfort grows at the sight of the wigged slaves. Jamie asks when the slave trade ends. Yi Tien Cho is a proper distraction. The ladies are interested. He notices Margaret giving a reading to a slave and is intrigued by her. From across the room, they have a moment. Giddy honeymooners. Jamie and Claire stop time with their eye lock. “I will have you later, oh yes I will.” Oh, you smart writers, ghosts it is. It's Lord John Grey. John is dumbstruck and goofy overseeing Jamie. He's stunned to meet Claire. Fergus is looking concerned behind them. Watch out Geillis that wig might spring to life and bark. Egad. Claire's hackles are up. Willie is well. He and Isobel will come in the Summer. These wigs are killing me. A malediction is a curse or imprecation. John was made Governor as an ill favor. Help us find Young Ian. Yadda yadda. Oh, THE SAPPHIRE. Why's he wearing it? What? Claire doesn't like how John looks at Jamie. Claire's hair is a travesty of non-wiggedness. Yi Tien Cho makes a move. He's digging on Margaret. Such a romantic. The Governor chats up Claire. “Come now we both know your virtue was not in jeopardy.” Claws are out. Another ghost revealed. I-spy Geillis. Claire and Jamie use the same phrase. How clever. “Of all the gin joints, in all the towns, in all the world.” Geillis Frenemies unite. Claire gets the 411. “Why are men such fools? Ye can lead them anywhere by the cock for a while. Given them a bairn and you have them by the balls again. But it's all ye are to them, whether they're coming in or going out—a cunt. Well here's to it I say. Most powerful thing in the world.” The Philosophy of Geillis. To watch your burning, what a rush. “Bob's your uncle.” “I hid out for a while,” code for I went to France. Yes, of course, Geillis, the tropics are very bad for Englishmen. No, no, of course, I haven't seen him. Of course, I will help. Frenemies gonna frenemy. Hey there, miss grabby hands, that's my sapphire. “She's a touch strange, isn't she?” As Claire said, “You have no idea.” Time for a magical mystery tour. Margaret is in the house! Let the readings begin. Clever roping job. Margaret doesn't want to do it. It feels like death comes to do this reading. With the third sapphire in hand…it's scary talk. 200 years upon the death of a child that is 200 years' old upon its birth. BRIANNA because she was conceived 200 years in the past and born 200 years in the future. Benjamin Button was released in 1922. Newlyweds acting like newlyweds. Oh no, it's a Thomas Leonard. On the way to escape they learn, Young Ian is at Rose Hall. The lying biotch. They agree to allow Temeraire his leave with other Maroons. The Leonard sees their escape. They hold up their bargain and release Temeraire near Rose Hall. Jamie gives Claire the pictures of the kids when Leonard arrives. And the Leonard arrests Jamie after Claire gives him a piece of her mind. Claire is left to find Young Ian. My final thoughts: Absolute episodic whiplash. How many things can be thrown into one episode? I can imagine the writers' room buzz, “We've only 2 episodes left. Jam it all in here or we're not going to make it.” It feels overwhelming at times having everything occur over the course of one day. The episode had no time to breathe and create a realistic pace. I also wonder why Jamie wasn't in full disguise? A wig is certainly not enough to make him less visible. The wigs and Claire's atrocious hair were their own characters. I half expected the wigs to animate and something alive coming out of Claire's coif. A sweet twist giving Yi Tien Cho and Margaret a connection. It may be love at first sight for them. I hope the finale is less jam-packed with the presumed release of Jamie and rescue of Young Ian. What's Coming up? Episode 313 Eye of the Storm: Claire is forced to play a game of cat and mouse with an old adversary as she searches for Young Ian. The Frasers race through the jungles of Jamaica to prevent the unthinkable. How can you participate? To have your questions/comments added, email or call the listener line after the show airs. Join the weekly Twitter chat Wednesday nights at 6pm PT/9pm ET to discuss the previous latest episode using the hashtag #ADoO. Comments or messages may be included in the podcast or a written post. The entire Outlander book series is written by Diana Gabaldon. You can find her on Twitter and Facebook. Visit Outlander Starz on social media, like or follow: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and the official website. All photos are the property of Starz/Sony. Retrieved from Outlander-Online screen captures. Follow A Dram of Outlander Thank you for sharing posts, joining the discussions, and following this website or pages listed below! Facebook,  Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, YouTube To financially support the podcast, go to my Patreon page. Call 719-425-9444 listener/reader line to leave your comments.  

When James Bond met Q at London’s National Gallery in 2012’s ‘Skyfall’, the pair sat opposite a painting rich with symbolism. It also happens to be the UK’s favourite artwork. We visit the gallery with deputy director Susan Foister to discover the symbolism behind ‘The Fighting Temeraire’.

Wing Commander Nick Robson Chairman of UK Armed Forces Tug of War Association chatting with Jay James and Hal Stewart on the #BigWednesdayShow. The interview took place directly after the Inter service Athletics at HMS Temeraire. Listen to Forces Radio BFBS on FM, online or via the free app - Apple > http://apple.co/1NPLjVw or Android > http://bit.ly/1TZFixd

We're back for season 5 and episode 100, discussing Naomi Novik's Temeraire books. Have you ever wanted more dragons in your Age of Sail naval fiction? Of course you have! Haven't we all? Thankfully, that is a thing that exists and we discuss it in this episode.

Cameron meanders even longer than usual and Katie insults his homeland. They discuss His Majesty's Dragon by Naomi Novik, the fist book in the Temeraire series. 353 pages paperback.

Backstage Knitting Podcast Episode 15“Socks. Nope.”•Shout out to Laura from Seattle, she introduced herself in our Ravelry group!•On the Needles:oAnna is working on a Ravenclaw house scarf in Mosiac Moon’s “Lycanthropy.” She is also working on more products for her Etsy shop and the Beekeeper’s Quilt by Stephanie Dosen of Tiny Owl Knits•http://www.mosaicmoon.com/item_991/Lycanthropy-on-Laurel-Sport-4-oz-skeins.htm•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-beekeepers-quiltoBethany is working on her Coffee Date Shawl by CC Almon, her Hamilknit hat by Emily Straw and pussyhat #13•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/coffee-date-shawl•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/hamilknit•Off the Needles:oAnna finished some gauntlets for her Etsy shop and some secret baby knits for her coworker. oBethany finished pussyhat #12•In Time Out: oAnna frogged and has given up forever on her Petticoat socks.oBethany frogged her Halloween socks. •Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna is making project bags for the #BSKPHAMILONG and her Etsy shop. •Weaving: oBethany is still working on her pink and purple scarf using her Ashford SampleIt loom and Cascade 220. She is reading a weaving book that is beyond her looms capabilities. •https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-As-Art-Form-Statement/dp/088740068X•Knetflix and Knit: oAnna watched the movie musical NINE. She is watching Season 5 of Star Trek: Voyager. She is reading book 3 of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.•https://www.amazon.com/Black-Powder-War-Temeraire-Book/dp/0345481305/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487285297&sr=1-6&keywords=temeraire+series+by+naomi+novikoBethany is watching season 4 of Gilmore Girls, season 5 of The West Wing, NBA basketball, some of season 4 and 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and just re-watched The Princess Bride. She is listening to the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. •https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Order-Phoenix-Book/dp/B017V4NLJ4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487285497&sr=1-1&keywords=harry+potter+and+the+order+of+the+phoenix+audiobook•In Rehearsal/Performance: oNew Muses general auditions are February 12 and 13, 2017. oNew Muses is producing a staged reading of 1984. Bethany will be there running box office! •http://www.newmuses.com•Events: o#BSKPHAMILONG! Now through March 15! Prizes include: patterns from Jennifer Lassonde, the Hamilton Mixtape and some AMAHZING project bags! •http://www.ravelry.com/designers/jennifer-lassondeoMadrona: February 16-19, 2017. Bethany will be there Saturday from 4-6pm. oStitches West: February 24-26, 2017 in Santa Clara, Ca. oEmerald City Comicon: March 2-5, 2017 in Seattle, WA. Bethany will be there all 4 days. Anna will be there on Saturday. oZachary’s Cabaret: March 10-11, 2017 in Puyallup, WA. •https://www.facebook.com/events/1195958793858728/•MISC: oAny interest in a virtual knit night? As a prize or event? Let us know! oWe would love topic suggestions. We will open a thread in the Ravelry group for you to share with us! You can find and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Periscope as Backstage Knitting Podcast. Show notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.weebly.com Please join our awesome Ravelry group!

Backstage Knitting Podcast Episode 15“Socks. Nope.”•Shout out to Laura from Seattle, she introduced herself in our Ravelry group!•On the Needles:oAnna is working on a Ravenclaw house scarf in Mosiac Moon’s “Lycanthropy.” She is also working on more products for her Etsy shop and the Beekeeper’s Quilt by Stephanie Dosen of Tiny Owl Knits•http://www.mosaicmoon.com/item_991/Lycanthropy-on-Laurel-Sport-4-oz-skeins.htm•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/the-beekeepers-quiltoBethany is working on her Coffee Date Shawl by CC Almon, her Hamilknit hat by Emily Straw and pussyhat #13•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/coffee-date-shawl•http://www.ravelry.com/patterns/library/hamilknit•Off the Needles:oAnna finished some gauntlets for her Etsy shop and some secret baby knits for her coworker. oBethany finished pussyhat #12•In Time Out: oAnna frogged and has given up forever on her Petticoat socks.oBethany frogged her Halloween socks. •Sew A Needle Pulling Thread:oAnna is making project bags for the #BSKPHAMILONG and her Etsy shop. •Weaving: oBethany is still working on her pink and purple scarf using her Ashford SampleIt loom and Cascade 220. She is reading a weaving book that is beyond her looms capabilities. •https://www.amazon.com/Weaving-As-Art-Form-Statement/dp/088740068X•Knetflix and Knit: oAnna watched the movie musical NINE. She is watching Season 5 of Star Trek: Voyager. She is reading book 3 of the Temeraire series by Naomi Novik.•https://www.amazon.com/Black-Powder-War-Temeraire-Book/dp/0345481305/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487285297&sr=1-6&keywords=temeraire+series+by+naomi+novikoBethany is watching season 4 of Gilmore Girls, season 5 of The West Wing, NBA basketball, some of season 4 and 5 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and just re-watched The Princess Bride. She is listening to the audiobook of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. •https://www.amazon.com/Harry-Potter-Order-Phoenix-Book/dp/B017V4NLJ4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487285497&sr=1-1&keywords=harry+potter+and+the+order+of+the+phoenix+audiobook•In Rehearsal/Performance: oNew Muses general auditions are February 12 and 13, 2017. oNew Muses is producing a staged reading of 1984. Bethany will be there running box office! •http://www.newmuses.com•Events: o#BSKPHAMILONG! Now through March 15! Prizes include: patterns from Jennifer Lassonde, the Hamilton Mixtape and some AMAHZING project bags! •http://www.ravelry.com/designers/jennifer-lassondeoMadrona: February 16-19, 2017. Bethany will be there Saturday from 4-6pm. oStitches West: February 24-26, 2017 in Santa Clara, Ca. oEmerald City Comicon: March 2-5, 2017 in Seattle, WA. Bethany will be there all 4 days. Anna will be there on Saturday. oZachary’s Cabaret: March 10-11, 2017 in Puyallup, WA. •https://www.facebook.com/events/1195958793858728/•MISC: oAny interest in a virtual knit night? As a prize or event? Let us know! oWe would love topic suggestions. We will open a thread in the Ravelry group for you to share with us! You can find and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Periscope as Backstage Knitting Podcast. Show notes can be found at www.backstageknitting.weebly.com Please join our awesome Ravelry group!

View this week’s image here.Producer: Dan MorelleSubscribe, rate and review on iTunes and follow Janina on Twitter.Follow History Hit on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.Please share this episode on Twitter and Facebook. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'. With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery David Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain and James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum Producer: Simon Tillotson.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'. With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery David Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain and James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum Producer: Simon Tillotson.

This image: Joseph Mallord William Turner, The Fighting Temeraire, 1839 (c) The National Gallery, London Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss "The Fighting Temeraire", one of Turner's greatest works and the one he called his 'darling'. It shows one of the most famous ships of the age, a hero of Trafalgar, being towed up the Thames to the breakers' yard, sail giving way to steam. Turner displayed this masterpiece to a public which, at the time, was deep in celebration of the Temeraire era, with work on Nelson's Column underway, and it was an immediate success, with Thackeray calling the painting 'a national ode'. With Susan Foister Curator of Early Netherlandish, German and British Painting at the National Gallery David Blayney Brown Manton Curator of British Art 1790-1850 at Tate Britain and James Davey Curator of Naval History at the National Maritime Museum Producer: Simon Tillotson.

In Episode 6 The Sunflowers have been taking a look at Turner's The Fighting Temeraire! Joseph Mallord William Turner was a really famous artist who lived from 1775 - 1851. He was especially famous for his paintings of dramatic skies and weather. He even went on trains and ships to study the movement of the sky and how to create it using paint!  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We will be discussing His Majesty's Dragon, by Naomi Novik. This book is the first in a series called "Temeraire."

The Cake House (Vintage)  Part mystery, part compelling coming-of-age tale, The Cake House is a riveting debut novel that re-imagines the classic story of Hamlet amidst the hills of suburban Los Angeles. Rosaura Douglas's father shot himself when her mother left him . . . or at least that's the story everyone is telling. Now her mother has remarried and Rosie is trapped in a new home she calls "The Cake House," a garish pink edifice that's a far cry from the cramped apartment where she grew up. It's also the house where her father died--a fact that everyone else who lives there, including her mother, Dahlia, and her mysteriously wealthy stepfather, Claude, want to forget. Soon, however, her father's ghost begins to appear; first as a momentary reflection in a window, then in the dark of night, and finally, in the lush garden behind the house where Rosie spends most of her days. After he warns her that Claude is not to be trusted, Rosie begins to notice cracks in her new family's carefully constructed facade. Dahlia is clearly uncomfortable in her marriage; her stepbrother, Alex, is friendly one second, distant the next, and haunted by troubles of his own; and Claude's business is drawing questions from the police. And as the ghost becomes increasingly violent--and the secrets of The Cake House and her family's past come to light--Rosie must finally face the truth behind the losses and lies that have torn her life apart. Praise for The Cake House "Intense and savagely beautiful, Latifah Salom's The Cake House grabs you, then grabs you harder.  The magic of this suburban-gothic literary thriller is the scale on which it's done—small and absolutely terrifying. An accomplished, mesmerizing debut."  —Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander “Reading The Cake House, I vividly saw the whole edifice rising up before me, latticework covering a multitude of sins. A wonderful, chewy, complicated book that doesn't flinch from danger or pain but rejects despair.” —Naomi Novik, author of Uprooted and the bestselling Temeraire series “The Cake House is a gem of a novel: a mystery wrapped in a cloak of family dysfunction with subtle Shakespearean trim expertly woven in by an incredibly gifted debut novelist. Rosaura is a heroine with spunk and a vulnerability so endearing I missed her the second I closed the book for the final time. Salom has written a dazzling coming-of-age tale that will resonate long after you reach the end.” —Elizabeth Flock, New York Times bestselling author of Me & Emma and What Happened To My Sister “Tense, shocking, and seductively dark, The Cake House is a brand-new twist on a classic story—an urban reinvention of a Shakespearean tale.” —Rebecca Coleman, New York Times bestselling author of The Kingdom of Childhood Latifah Salom was born in Hollywood, California to parents of Peruvian and Mexican descent. As a teenager she attended the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and she holds degrees from Emerson College, Hunter College, and from the University of Southern California's Masters of Professional Writing program. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

We talk with Naomi Novik, fanfic writer, Ruby on Rails coder and author of the Temeraire series, from DragonCon 2014 in Atlanta! Then, we wrap up Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

A terrible twosome talks the Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik, and why dragons are a surprisingly good fit for the Napoleonic wars. Spoilers are light but present.

'Three studies from the Temeraire' is an oil on canvas triptych, painted between 1998-99. The history is of special interest, unusual yet evolutionary. In 1998 Twombly was working on three related but at the time independent canvases on three adjacent walls of his Gaeta studio. The theme was these ancient vessels and all the senses of myth and history they inferred - there was originally neither particular thought of Turner, an artist who he had always especially admired, nor of the three panels as a single work. Gradually they coalesced into a single epic event and were shown in the National Gallery in London in the exhibition "Encounters: new art from old" in the year 2000 alongside Turner's famed 'The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up, 1838', which was painted in 1839. The theme of this exhibition was 'great artists of our time converse with the greatest artists of all time'... and of course Twombly's pictures assumed their role as contemporary evocations of Turner's 'The Fighting Temeraire'. Looking at the three canvases together, as a single panorama, there is a potent sense of passage as the ships drift, float and sail into the warm, sensuous but slightly ominous embrace of infinity. There is a strong sense of procession, with the flag-ship bringing up the rear, or maybe they are all images of the same ship, passing into history. This 'dissolving' fleet is a poignant echo of Turner's 'Temeraire' as she is towed by a tugboat to her last resting place in the cooling glows of a fast descending sunset. Both Twombly's and Turner's paintings are dominated by sky and water, indistinguishable in Twombly, but both elements in which things can float. There is too a wonderful correspondence between the emotive reflections in Turner's 'Temeraire' and the dripping lines that that flow from Twombly's apparently doomed ships. The qualities and sensibilities which echo from Twombly's 'Three studies from the Temeraire' are manifold: the imagery suggests the passage of time, the inevitable end to any voyage, the passage from the present to the past and vice versa. These works imply that continuity of human, cultural and aesthetic experience in which the past is always available, as Twombly so believes. His passing, disappearing fleet may indeed also symbolise that unbroken chord which links classical antiquity with the present. Twombly's 'Three studies' would never have been inspired as they were, or painted as they were, without Turner's 'Fighting Temeraire', even though they were initiated without any such specific association. Certainly they are far from slavish copies or shallow contemporary imitations. It is likely that Twombly's modern interpretation would confuse a latter-day Turner, however he would have recognised certain qualities - the fascination with the aura of the heroic, the melancholy and beauty of passage, the magic of profound light, the evocation of depth, profundity and mystery. Cy Twombly was born in 1928 in Lexington, Virginia. In 1948-49 he trained at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; he then won a Fellowship to the Art Students League in New York where he forged a close association with fellow student, Robert Rauschenberg. They subsequently attended the progressive Black Mountain College in North Carolina where they studied under Robert Motherwell. In 1952 Twombly won a grant to visit Europe and, with Rauschenberg in tow, they travelled extensively returning to New York in 1953. In 1957 Twombly left New York for Rome, virtually for good, although he still returns every year to Lexington for a few months. By 1960 Twombly was established and much recognised, especially in his new home Italy, but also in New York where his classically-inspired, highly individual and seemingly subjective marks, doodles and lines - moments of experience set against moody rich and absorbent creamy white grounds - were the very antithesis to the then current vogue for Pop Art and Minimalism. If there was any relationship with New York it was his certain affinity with Abstract Expressionism. These often gently convulsive works gradually calmed into the more austere but nervous, and highly distinctive, 'blackboard' pictures distinguished by the 'scribbles' which became an absolute hallmark of Twombly's work. During the late 1970s and the 1980s Twombly's paintings had a less frenetic sense of pace and energy, and assumed an even more mysterious and contemplative nature. There is a noticeable maturity about these works and an admission of a debt to artists who he particularly admired including Monet and Turner in their mysterious tones and contemplative attitude. He also moved out of Rome to where he presently lives, in the old port town of Gaeta, roughly half way between Rome and Naples.

Naomi Novik's new Temeraire novel, Tongues of Serpents, goes on sale next Tuesday (7/13/10). Naomi dropped into the Del Rey offices last week and spoke with us about writing the series, which has expanded to six novels since we published His Majesty's Dragon back in 2006 and is now expected to run to nine novels total. What's involved in writing such an extended story? Find out in this interview.Naomi Novik: http://www.temeraire.org/Tongues of Serpents: http://bit.ly/cOhuEPSuvudu: http://www.suvudu.com/

Naomi Novik, author of the Temeraire series, stopped by Suvudu Studios recently to record a couple of interviews. She then made us an offer we couldn't refuse: if we were interested, she'd be willing to do a reading for us and our audience. How long do you think it took for us to say "YES!"? Naomi gives a spirited reading of a section from Chapter 3 of Tongues of Serpents (which was posted to Suvudu as a free chapter sample earlier) and we're excited to be able to share it with you!Naomi Novik: http://www.temeraire.org/Tongues of Serpents: http://bit.ly/cOhuEPSuvudu: http://www.suvudu.com/