Tom Hubbard

This book is a collection of biographical records portraying the life of Rudyard Kipling, drawn from official biographies, memoirs, testimonies, letters, diaries, conversations, anecdotes, essays, and reviews.

This book offers you a virtual tour of much of Fife, mainly of its 'fringe of gold'. It starts just west of Newburgh at the border with Perthshire and ends at the Kincardine Bridge, with substantial forays inland. The county's international bearings are highlighted, with poetry and prose invoking ancestral 'Fifers' such as the Russian poet Mikha l Lermontov and the American novelist Herman Melville of 'Moby-Dick'. Goethe's 'Faust' finds a Scottish accent of sorts (as also the Shakespeare of 'Macbeth' and 'The Tempest'), and Alexander Pushkin unknowingly borrows a tale from Dunfermline's Robert Henrysoun. The centre-piece, which provides the title of our gallimaufry, is a play based on the vicissitudes of Michael Scot of Balwearie, the medieval polymath famous in both legend and history, and centering on his pact with the devil. More recent local heroes are celebrated, not least Joe Corrie of 'In Time o' Strife'. 'This is what makes Tom Hubbard such a rewarding guide: a man steeped in the places and tales of the Kinrick who doesn't get run over by them, rather he manages to unfold fresh visions, partly because - as cosmopolitan traveller and translator, all human effort lies before him.' - from CHRISTOPHER HARVIE's Foreword.

`The Flechitorium presents an enormous range of subject matters, forms, styles and language but all of them are lynch-pinned by the author's deep and sometimes ambivalent relationship with his native Fife ... But what is a "Flechitorium"? You'll have to read the poem therein to find out, dear reader, but be careful - this is a collection with a real bite to it. `On the bill in this particular Flechitorium are a fistful of narrative ballads, historical and humorous to get us off to a flier. Then the mood changes and becomes more reflective and sombre ... That old Scottish literary tradi on of flyting is resumed and developed in the contretemps between the allegorical squirrel and the peacock in Dunfermline Glen .... And as a bonus, the gathering of braw poems is enhanced by a sulfurous tale to conclude - though one more RLS than Hammer House of Horror. `The Flechitorium is a delicious Fife broth or even Langtoun bouillabaisse ... with its many hints and references to other literary cuisines beyond Fife and Scotland. At mes it is funny, at others serious, it is always humane in its span of concerns from bawdy to spiritual yet the poems are crafted to address and engage intellectually as well as emotionally. Whether supped with short or lang spuin it will satisfy all tastes.' From the Preface by William Hershaw

A vulnerable and bullied boy vanishes from a boarding-school in an austerely beautiful part of the Scottish county of Fife. A young nurse from the American South encounters love - and culture-clash - at the school. Her beau, a teacher and former army officer, is a tense and troubled man. A precocious young aesthete stumbles towards maturity. A lecherous, alcoholic headmaster quotes Shakespeare at inopportune moments. Tragedy? Farce? Both? Offset by praise-poetry to Fife landscape and folk culture, Tom Hubbard's complex, sardonic tale scurries through unexpected corridors and caverns, up and down dubious stairs, its secret architecture reflecting the "Big Hoose" in which much of the action takes place -

A Belgian pagoda and a red Hungarian hedgehog; 12-year-old Hector Berlioz falls in love; a French tribute to Edgar (Allan) Poe; lakes in Germany and Italy, rivers in Switzerland; home thoughts from the Mediterranean; the bloody end of bonny Kate; the painters El Greco and Csontvary; variations on Dostoyevsky, Turgenev and Chekhov; Catullus celebrates erotic marriage; with much more. Tom Hubbard takes us on another poetic tour of Europe, offering a number of translations (or rather transcreations) on the way. Parapets and Labyrinths, a collection of poems mainly in English (but with a significant presence of the Scots language - glossary included), is a companion volume to The Chagall Winnocks, which was published by Grace Note Publications in 2011. The poet wears his learning lightly, more of a cultivated 'flaneur' than a stuffy academic - If there is anything labyrinthine about these poems, it is because the poet is no mere aficionado of the 'grand tour', but sharply observant, knowing there is nothing straightforward about Europe and its outlying archipelago of the British Isles, Ireland and Iceland - Darkness may be latent in many of the poems, but - the pleasure principle trumps everything else in the poetry of Tom Hubbard. NOTES FROM MARIO RELICH

From the forests of Finland to the plain of Lombardy, from a Scottish beach to a river island in Hungary,Tom Hubbard deploys the riches of the Scots language to explore that tragicomic space we call Europe. The poems are variously tender and mischievous in their reatment of our all-too-human foibles - Hubbard believes that an international outlook and a parochial one (centred, in his case, on his native Fife) can be mutually enriching. The poems in THE CHAGALL WINNOCKS draw on the folklore of many European countries, not least that of Scotland - and indeed it is a retelling of a Fife legend, which opens this collection of poems, which have grown out of his travels in, and study of, the continent as a whole. Many of these poems tell stories, in the form of ballads or the reworking of traditional tales; conversely, this collection of poems could be seen as a series of short stories, albeit in verse form. Hubbard's new collection is a bold statement of faith in the Scots language, and echoes Hugh MacDiarmid's remarks on 'the unique blend of the lyrical and the ludicrous' which is possible in Scots, 'its Dostoevskian debris of ideas - an inexhaustible quarry of subtle and significant sound' ('A Theory of Scots Letters').

This book looks at Rider Haggard from a different standpoint, his own. It carries a selection of critical appraisals of Haggard's work by his contemporaries up until the early 1950s.

This volume presents documents that roughly follow the chronology of Joseph Conrad's life and deliberately considers two documents that reveal surprising and important facts that Conrad had carefully concealed.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the "Lives of Victorian Literary Figures" series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors.