A Natural Curiosity

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Margaret Drabble. A Natural Curiosity

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Dame Margaret Drabble was born in Sheffield in 1939 and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She is the author of eighteen novels including A Summer Bird-Cage, The Millstone, The Peppered Moth, The Red Queen, The Sea Lady, The Pure Gold Baby and most recently, the highly acclaimed The Dark Flood Rises. She has also written biographies, screenplays and was the editor of the Oxford Companion to English Literature. She was appointed CBE in 1980, and made DBE in the 2008 Honours list. She was also awarded the 2011 Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. She is married to the biographer Michael Holroyd

‘Absorbing and thought-provoking’ Sunday Times

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‘It was just by the rose garden, on the Inner Circle. Outside Regent’s College,’ said Charles, as though this somehow made matters worse.

He had been hit across the face by a heavy object – a metal bar, a wooden club, he hadn’t been able to tell which. Fortunately he hadn’t fallen, had been able to stagger on, then had run towards Regent’s College, streaming blood, and had crashed wildly in as though for sanctuary. The porter had been alarmed by his apparition and so had Charles’s old friend Melvyn Stacey, who was just on his way in to give a lecture on the Thai–Kampuchean border on behalf of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Assembled agency do-gooders and governmental procrastinators had had to wait for their address while Melvyn listened to Charles’s outpourings of rage against thugs and vandals, while Melvyn dabbed at the spatters of Charles’s blood that had somehow communicated themselves to Melvyn’s best grey lecture suit, while Melvyn convinced Charles that he couldn’t possibly drive himself home but would have to go to St Andrew’s casualty department in an ambulance.

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