quote:

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Originally posted by Sarasa:
What authors (either living or dead) would you invite to a dinner party?

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Living.
 

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Posted by North East Quine (# 13049) on :
 
I'd like John Donne for an intimate dinner a deux, rather than a dinner party....

I'd love to observe Jane Austen at a dinner party. Also, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, just to see how they behaved with each other. I think Nan Shepherd would be good company.

First choice would be my very distant relative, Lorna Moon, who left north east Scotland for the glamour of Hollywood and led a quite scandalous life with aplomb.
 

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Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :
 
I think mine could make up either the dinner party from heaven or from hell...

Patrick Leigh Fermor
Graham Greene
Evelyn Waugh
Patrick Hamilton
John Betjeman
Julian Maclaren-Ross
Anthony Powell

roast beef, and a *lot* of claret, possibly in the Coffee Room at the Army and Navy Club.

There's always been something about mid 20th century writers that has drawn me in. The above is a fairly combustible mix, but it would be one hell of a night.
 

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Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :
 
Anyone for a curry night with Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Salman Rushdie & Arundhati Roy?
 

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Posted by betjemaniac (# 17618) on :
 

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Originally posted by Sipech:
Anyone for a curry night with Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Salman Rushdie & Arundhati Roy?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Sipech:
Anyone for a curry night with Rudyard Kipling, Winston Churchill, Salman Rushdie & Arundhati Roy?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Ariel:
Yeats. And Shelley (which means cooking vegetarian food). And I have questions I want to ask Shakespeare.

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Like: Did you yourself really write all that stuff?
 

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Posted by Hilda of Whitby (# 7341) on :
 
Alan Bennett, without question.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
I have a weakness for people who froze to death in Antarctica, and would love to dine with Robert Falcon Scott. Jane Austen would probably go all mim on any American, but I bet Charles Dickens would be convivial -- we need him to mix up some of his famous punch. Dorothy Sayers!
 

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Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :
 
Samuel Coleridge I gather talked like an angel, which was just as well as he kept talking.
Dickens I think might be a bit the same.

I'd like to invite Marilynn Robinson and Ali Smith. And Terry Pratchett and WH Auden.

[ 12. October 2016, 15:46: Message edited by: Dafyd ]
 

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Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 
I have always thought that Oscar Wilde could go one way or another. He'd either be the most entertaining person at the party, or the guy who needs to shut up with the one liners so that everyone can listen to Tennyson.

How about a night of cowboy food (steak and beans), beer, and bourbon with Larry McMurtry, Jim Harrison, and Cormac McCarthy? Definitely a dude-centric lineup, which I'm not entirely happy with, but it would be fun.

I'd also like to sit down for beer, wings, and football with George Plimpton, Buzz Bissinger, and Hunter Thompson.
 

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Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :
 
I would love to meet Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things still comes up in conversation in my writers groups. And sorry Sipech, but Salman Rushdie I find boring, so I wouldn't join the whole party.

Umberto Eco, who would probably make me feel like an uneducated moron, but in a nice way. And Douglas Coupland, who I suspect I would get on with very well.

John Wyndham as well, probably over coffee to discuss time and possibility.
 

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Posted by no prophet's flag is set so... (# 15560) on :
 
Robertson Davies. He wrote a series of wonderful interwoven trilogies that seem Jungian to me, and is the finest Canadian author of the 20th century in my view.

E. Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake), Mohawk-Canadian poet.

Patrick O'Brian. Writer of early 19th century naval adventures.

William Shirer. War correspondent and writer of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, books about Tolstoy, Gandhi, and the remarkable 3 volume "Twentieth Century Journey" an autobiography which seems to speak of yesterday and the present.

Emile Zola. Can more be said?
 

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Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Schroedinger's cat:
I would love to meet Arundhati Roy - The God of Small Things still comes up in conversation in my writers groups. And sorry Sipech, but Salman Rushdie I find boring, so I wouldn't join the whole party.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Lyda*Rose:

quote:

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Originally posted by Ariel:
Yeats. And Shelley (which means cooking vegetarian food). And I have questions I want to ask Shakespeare.

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Like: Did you yourself really write all that stuff?

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quote:

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Originally posted by Og, King of Bashan:
I have always thought that Oscar Wilde could go one way or another.

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I believe some people thought that at the time.
 

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Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 
Definitely William Shakespeare. There's no other author I'd fly around the world to see his plays.

 

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Posted by Og, King of Bashan (# 9562) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by no prophet's flag is set so...:
Robertson Davies. He wrote a series of wonderful interwoven trilogies that seem Jungian to me, and is the finest Canadian author of the 20th century in my view.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Kaplan Corday:

quote:

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Originally posted by Sarasa:
What authors (either living or dead) would you invite to a dinner party?

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Living.

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Posted by Callan (# 525) on :
 
Gore Vidal, Albert Camus, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Sidney Smith, AJP Taylor.

With the proviso that they all get to spend some time reading up how things have gone since they shuffled off this mortal coil.
 

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Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 

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Originally posted by Callan:
Gore Vidal...

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quote:

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But for a girls' night in I'd chose Margaret Oliphant. After a bottle of Chilean Merlot and a good bitch we'd rise, tie on the bonnets, tight wrap the shawls and go back to holding our worlds together.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Sipech:
Anyone fancy a tête-à-tête with the 2016 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature? I did not see that one coming.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Brenda Clough:
Le Guin and Gaiman are alive, and I have met them -- they are lovely people.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Sarasa:
and also bring Emily Eden . Her two novels are among my favourite comfort reads,

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quote:

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I'd like to invite Marilynn Robinson

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Me too - but having read some of her non-fiction, I know that I need more time to enjoy it than it would take her to think it / say it. So maybe you'd allow me to take an audio feed from the dinner party and digest it off-line. I could be an unseen guest a little like the DDR surveillance officer in 'The Lives of Others'.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
This kind of thought always raises up caveats in my mind. There has to be an app or a feature, to get us past language barriers, for instance. Would we understand Shakespeare, without it? Certainly you would need it to get anything out of a meeting with Martin Luther or Socrates (both great dinner companions by all report).

And while we're at it the app should get us past racial and cultural barriers. There are too many authors of the past, who would not sit at table with a person of different race or gender or even nationality. Dickens and Trollope toured America, but didn't like Americans (insufficiently deferential).
 

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Posted by Sipech (# 16870) on :
 
Some of the tensions/prejudices might serve up some interesting conversations. Imagine inviting Hitler along to be confronted by the likes of Gore Vidal, Martin Luther King Jr and Maya Angelou.
 

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :
 
What Dickens didn't like about Americans was their hypocritical racism when going on about freedom.

Anthony Trollope's mother, Fanny, wrote a book about Americans. I don't think her son did,
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Trollope is on record, in his letters, complaining about how Americans served him.

I wrote a book once about Lawrence 'Titus' Oates, and to that end read everything extant about him, both his own writings and those of others. I became uneasily aware than an Edwardian gentleman would be unlikely to approve of me (wrong race, wrong nationality, wrong gender). And I had a dream.

In my dream he looked as he does in the photo on the Wikipedia page. All he did was stare at me; no conversation was exchanged. But I knew, as one does, that this was the true man -- the historical person, not the fictional construct or the fellow in the history books. And I knew that he did not want me to write about him. If I continued, I would have to answer for it some day. He would meet me at the Pearly Gates, a riding crop in hand. I woke up with quite a nasty start.
 

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Posted by ArachnidinElmet (# 17346) on :
 
Not sure about erasing cultural differences, but for languages maybe we should be using Babel Fish ?
 

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Posted by Egeria (# 4517) on :
 
P.G. Wodehouse.
Patrick O'Brian.

And an author I've always thought would be a great dinner companion, especially for a dinner that goes on late into the evening: Herodotus! I imagine he would be so entertaining (I recommend the Histories to students as beach reading). And to make the conversation flow more easily (and to ask the man questions I wouldn't have thought of), some modern scholar, such as the late J.K. "Jock" Anderson.

I also want to meet Manetho (early third century BC), author of the Aegyptiaca , whose dynastic outline we still use today, but whose work survives only in summaries made by later historians. Where did he do his research? What king-lists did he consult? What about the stories that didn't make it into the fragments preserved today? How accurate are those summaries? I would be happy to buy him all the bread and beer, beef and fowl, that he desires!
 

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Posted by Pigwidgeon (# 10192) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Egeria:
P.G. Wodehouse...

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How could I have forgotten Plum?
 

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :
 
I read a biography of Plum which reckoned he was not very brilliant as a conversationalist or socialite and preferred a quiet life in his own home.
 

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Posted by venbede (# 16669) on :
 
I love Elizabeth David's grande dame bitchiness in her journalism, but I would be wary of her company (although she did get on with gay men).

But I would love, love, love to help Jane Grigson prepare a meal and then sit down to eat it with her and friends. She comes over as really nice. And when she criticises dubious attitudes to food, it is more in sorrow than in anger.
 

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Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Both dead, alas, but:

1. Wilkie Collins, younger contemporary and friend of Dickens. Collins invented wonderful devices for murdering his characters, and actually built at least one...to see if it would work

2. Jerome K. Jerome, a man with a very dry and witty approach to life, but who (in his late 50s) served as an ambulance driver in WW1.

Living?

J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter)
2. Peter Robinson (Chief Inspector Banks)

Ian J.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Bishops Finger:
Both dead, alas, but:

1. Wilkie Collins, younger contemporary and friend of Dickens. Collins invented wonderful devices for murdering his characters, and actually built at least one...to see if it would work

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Goodness! Where, when? Details!
 

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Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Ah....my apologies.....I've given incorrect information, having failed to check my sources beforehand.

In his labyrinthine and mysterious melodrama Armadale, Collins does indeed have one of the characters attempt to murder another by introducing poison gas into a sealed bedroom.

The author and a friend saw something similar attempted on a dog 'for the edification of tourists' whilst on a visit to the Grotto di Cane near Naples in 1853. Collins recorded in a letter to his brother that he had, out of compassion, had the experiment cut short before the dog died.

William Wilkie Collins (1834-1897) is best known for The Moonstone and The Woman in White , but wrote numerous other novels, some of which are easier to read than others. Well worth the attempt, though, IMNSHO.

Ian J.
 

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Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Sorry to double-post...Wilkie Collins' dates are 1824-1889, not as I quoted above.

Another of his novels - Jezebel's Daughter - also includes murder by poison (potions rather than gas).

Ian J.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
I have Armadale on my Ipad, also Salummbo by Gustave Flaubert, but haven't had time to read either.

Assuming one could get past the language/cultural barriers, I would love to talk to John (of Revelations). That's a man with one crazy imagination.
 

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Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
I think you might need to eat magic mushrooms (or something) to converse with St. John!

Another author I'd like to have met is H. P. Lovecraft (IIRC someone else mentioned him upthread). Quite why I seem to like authors who dispose of their victims in rather ghastly and eldritch (a good Lovecraftian word) ways, I know not...

Ian J.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
It is a mistake to know too much about authors; Lovecraft was like many of his period an anti-Semite. Many writers are very unsatisfactory people in real life.
 

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Posted by Albertus (# 13356) on :
 
Of course, because you'd like to meet someone doesn't necessarily mean you think you'd like them as a person. I'd have been very interested to meet Hitler and Stalin (both of whom I suppose do count as authors of a kind), but probably just the once would be enough. Also, though not a comparable person, Barbara Cartland, simply because I heard her being interviewed on the radio and she came across as so gloriously and battily and self-confidently larger than life.

[ 18. October 2016, 15:21: Message edited by: Albertus ]
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
Or Philip of Macedon. They excavated his party service in Greece, and he seems to have been quite the kegger.
 

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Posted by andras (# 2065) on :
 
Robertson Davies for starters; he taught me to write (not literally, but what a wonderful exemplar he was). Read The Manticore if you don't know how good he is!

Then Ursula le Guin, Plum, Trollope, Swift, Virgil, and the unknown author of Gawain. Should be quite a bash!
 

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Posted by Schroedinger's cat (# 64) on :
 
H.G Wells, George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. That would be my dinner party.

I would expect some arguments.
 

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Posted by Bishops Finger (# 5430) on :
 
Brenda, HPL was indeed a racist of his time. So too were Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers - I daresay there are/were many others.

I think I'd enjoy discussing the Great Old Ones with HPL over dinner, though!

Ian J.
 

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Posted by Brenda Clough (# 18061) on :
 
You can meet Le Guin any time -- she lives in Oregon, although she is pretty frail now. Yet another of those writers who should live forever.
 

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Posted by Sandemaniac (# 12829) on :
 
I'd quite fancy getting Gildas to the table, if only to ask him why the hell he didn't get any real history in,instead of just having a rant.

AG

[ 18. October 2016, 19:03: Message edited by: Sandemaniac ]
 

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Posted by The Phantom Flan Flinger (# 8891) on :
 
Tea & cake with Marian Keyes would be fun
 

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Posted by Chorister (# 473) on :
 
Stephen Leacock. But they'd better not serve soup at this dinner party, or there'd be way too much spluttering!
 

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Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :
 
Joshua Slocum would have some amazing tales to tell.
 

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Posted by Eigon (# 4917) on :
 
I'm told Alan Garner tends to hide from visitors when his house is open to the public, but if you could get him to a dinner table I bet he'd be a fascinating guest.
And while I'm thinking of children's authors, I'd like to have Rosemary Sutcliff, Henry Treece and Geoffrey Trease at the same table to compare notes on children's historical fiction! Geoffrey Trease used to live in Malvern and was reputed to be quite a gentleman - and I once met a man who knew Henry Treece, who told me that he had been diagnosed with a weak heart - so he'd given up his job, packed his family into an old car, and careered around Europe for a year!
 

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Posted by Teekeey Misha (# 18604) on :
 
Who would I invite to my dinner party of the vanities?

• George Orwell and Josef Conrad are the authors of my three favourite books, so they're a must.
• Dornford Yates, because I own all his works (almost each of them in first edition, because I am that sad person about whom you've heard.)
• Dorothy L. Sayers, because I do like a good murder mystery and DLS is Agatha Christie with brains.
• Graham Greene (or anyone who's written decent spy stories/thrillers - except Dan Brown and Ian Fleming, neither of whom the butler at Misha Dvorets would allow over the threshold.)
• Anthony Hope, because one day I will be offered the throne of a Balkan kingdom.
• Someone classical but I'd limit myself to one and I can't decide if I'd prefer Tacitus, Livy or Seutonius. (I think Pliny would be a bit of a bore/boor.)
• Anthony Flew, just because.
• Dostoyevsky, because I'd like a bit of Russian input.
• Some latter day historian - Mary Beard is, sadly, out because I've already done classicals and I wouldn't want her hogging my other classical guest, so any of the other decent modern historians who isn't David Starkey (whom I'm sure I'd have to kill before the soup was cleared.) Maybe that Diarmaid MacCulloch because I enjoyed his "Cranmer" and he's good on the telly.

I can only fit nine other people round the dining table. Now, if it were to be a garden party, I could invite dozens of authors I'd love to meet; I might want to meet some of them only fleetingly, perhaps just long enough to say "That book stank - what were you thinking..?" but there are others I'd lock in the library and keep here to talk to ad saecula saeculorum.
 

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Posted by Boogie (# 13538) on :
 
I met the children's poet Wes Magee - he asked me out!!

In fact he invited me to his cottage stay with him. I acted ignorant and gently put him off!


 

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Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
I met Geoffrey Trease; he came to my school to talk about his books and I suspect I got to show him around, because I remember talking to him individually and finding it awkward because I hadn't read any of his books.
 

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Posted by leo (# 1458) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Teekeey Misha:
Diarmaid MacCulloch because I enjoyed his "Cranmer" and he's good on the telly.

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quote:

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Originally posted by Huia:
Does anyone else loathe and detest "sequels" of favourite authors written by other people?

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YES!!!

Moo
 

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Posted by Welease Woderwick (# 10424) on :
 
Me too.

I love Eoin Colfer but his Douglas Adams spin-off leaves me cold.
 

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Posted by jacobsen (# 14998) on :
 
On the other hand, the Gill Paton Walsh Whimsey continuations are very good. She has managed to bring them up to post WW2 and a second generation with a good deal of panache. But I'll be sorry when the Dowager Duchess pops it.
 

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Posted by Firenze (# 619) on :
 
Nevertheless, they are All Wrong. There's an underlying modernity about their attitudes that makes me feel they are not really an aristocrat with an Edwardian childhood and a middle class 1930s bluestocking, but a couple of Guardian-reading sociologists in disguise.

I see there are also continuations of the Campion canon. Half a page was enough to convince me those were massively cloth-eared.
 

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Posted by jacobsen (# 14998) on :
 
But the Whimsey continuations feature people who have been through two world wars and both travelled extensively, and are, if children of their time, aware that times are changing. Harriet was, after all, in with the 'artistic' crowd as well as the academic one, and Peter was blown up in WW1 and experienced hunger, cold and extreme danger in WW2. There is also a good deal of discussion about the old, indulged,leisured life which is acknowledged to be a thing of the past.

One of the threads running through the continuations is the adaptation Harriet makes, first to combining work and wealth, and then to the demands of wartime conditions, followed by the post war changes. There is an ongoing comparison of the old states of things with the new.

If Harriet seems to have a sociological stance on some subjects, it's worth bearing in mind that she has known real poverty -arranging meals on fourpence a day, as she comments in The Attenbury Emeralds. And Peter would not be the only well-born chap who was uncomfortable with the idea of inherited privilege.

Heavens, I can feel an essay coming on.
 

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Posted by Curiosity killed ... (# 11770) on :
 
Those Jill Paton Walsh continuations of the Wimsey genre are still all wrong. (I have/had relatives who went through all that and the whole thing jars. My grandfather was blown up in WW1 and came back a Colonel.)

She's another one I wish would go back to writing more Imogen Quy books - her own detective heroine.

Can we want to meet people to persuade them not to continue writing poor imitations?

[ 01. November 2016, 18:57: Message edited by: Curiosity killed ... ]
 

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Posted by jedijudy (# 333) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Firenze:
Apropos of nothing much: in Czech they add the female suffix to foreign names. So there she's J K Rowlingova.

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Quotes file!

 

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Posted by Tubbs (# 440) on :
 

quote:

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Originally posted by Firenze:
Nevertheless, they are All Wrong. There's an underlying modernity about their attitudes that makes me feel they are not really an aristocrat with an Edwardian childhood and a middle class 1930s bluestocking, but a couple of Guardian-reading sociologists in disguise.

I see there are also continuations of the Campion canon. Half a page was enough to convince me those were massively cloth-eared.

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