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Anne Chisholm
and Paul Levy
Frances Partridge:
The Biography: A Life
320
6pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50
Frances Partridge, one of the great diarists of
the 20th century, was also the last survivor of the
Bloomsbury group. Before she died in 2004, aged
103, she collaborated with Anne Chisholm on her
biography, the story of how she found herself, in
the 1920s and 1930s, caught up in a group of friends
– Woolfs, Bells and Stracheys – already renowned
for their creativity and unconventional private lives.
She lived long enough to chronicle them all, and to
come through personal tragedy to a productive old
age. Anne Chisholm, author of previous biographies
of Nancy Cunard, Lord Beaverbrook and Rumer
Godden, and the current chair of the Royal Society
of Literature, will discuss this remarkable woman
with Paul Levy, editor of Lytton Strachey’s letters
and himself a friend of Frances Partridge.
Richard Dowden
Africa: Altered States,
Ordinary Miracles
Clock face on Tom Tower
335
TUESDAY MARCH 2009
Gillian Slovo
Black Orchids
327
7pm / Blackwell, 48-51 Broad Street / £7.50
When the genteelly impoverished and rebellious
Evelyn marries the charming Emil, scion of a rich
and privileged Sinhalese family, she thinks that her
dream of a life in England can now come true. But
this novel is set in England during the 1950s and no
matter how hard Evelyn wishes, England will not
take kindly to strangers, especially families who are
half black and half white. Written by the author of the
Orange prize-shortlisted Ice Road, this is a profound
and moving novel about outsiders, race and Britain
and a search to feel at home in your own skin. Gillian
Slovo is the daughter of celebrated South African
activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First.
8pm / Festival Room 1, Christ Church / £7.50
Director of the Royal African Society, Richard Dowden
has been Africa Editor of both The Independent and
The Economist. Over a period of 35 years, he has
been present at each of the continent’s major crises,
and has also witnessed the warmth, wisdom and
joy of the people and the diversity of their habits,
attitudes and purposes.
What Dowden has seen and experienced in Africa
has transformed his views of the continent. Africa:
Altered States, Ordinary Miracles enables us to see
and understand it in a new light too.
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