Showing results by author "Kate Clanchy" in All Categories

Literary Giant seeks young man to push bathchair. Own room in Hampstead, all found, exciting cultural milieu. Modest wage. Ideal 'gap year' opportunity. So orphan Struan Robertson, leaves his native town of Cuik, and arrives in London. His job is to care for Phillip, paralysed by a massive stroke. Struan finds himself tangled in a midsummer's dream of mistaken identity and overwhelming passions. For everyone, it is to be a life-changing summer.

Five dazzling plays showcasing characters from the reign of biblical King David: In these fascinating, moving and insightful plays, a different light is shone on the famous biblical King. From the original mission of King Saul to find the shepherd boy after Samuel's prophecy, to David's final days of sickness and neglect, and taking in his days of war raids and spying as well as his loves and losses as his wives battle for status and attention, the tales bring to life a man who all too often is a figure of myth rather than a flawed and passionate human.

Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career. Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school 'Inclusion Unit', trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.

Three BBC radio adaptations of famous novels by the prolific 19th-century author Mrs Oliphant - plus an episode of Reading Aloud, with extracts from her autobiography. Sometimes called ‘the feminist Trollope’, Margaret Oliphant wrote more than 100 works of fiction in a wide variety of genres, ranging from novels of small-town life to historical tales and supernatural stories. Included here are three of her best-loved works, brimming with dry wit, perceptive irony and flawed but fascinating heroines.

Finnish teen eco-blogger, Ulli Earthgirl, wins a competition to join a low-carbon expedition to the North Pole by foot, to measure the melting ice. Blogging her way across the Arctic, she has to navigate deadly cracks in the ice, as well as the treacherous currents of environmental controversy in the blogosphere. Soon she's afloat in both worlds, as all her certainties begin to dissolve.

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behind each theory, and add to the larger narrative of how the universe works, and how we came to be here. This anthology draws out and distils science's love of narrative from a wide range of scientific disciplines, weaving theory into very human stories.