Sat 11th September Book signing with local author Jacky Gray Warwick Books 10am

Sat 18th September Book signing with local author Jacky Gray Kenilworth Books 11am

Friday 1st October   Morning Coffee with Helen Castor   Rose and Crown   10am WW

Friday 1st October   The Real Jane Austen   Unitarian Chapel  3pm WW

Monday 4th October   An Evening with John Sutherland and John Crace  Bridge House Theatre 7.30pm WW

Friday 8th October   An Evening with David Crystal   Bridge House Theatre  8pm WW

Saturday 9th October  Nella Last : A Modern Pepys?  Northgate Methodist Church Hall 10.30am WW

Sunday 10th October   ‘Keeper’ with Andrea Gillies  Bridge House Theatre  3pm WW

Wednesday 27th October  ‘Never Eat Shredded Wheat’ with Christopher Somerville  Warwick Library 7pm

Wednesday 3rd November  ‘Shakespeare On Toast’  with Ben Crystal  Lord Leycester’s Hospital 7pm

Wednesday 10th November  ‘A Shilling A Day’ with Peter Rhodes  Kenilworth Library  7pm

Wednesday 17th November ’Outlaw: India’s Bandit Queen and Me’ with Roy Moxham Warwick Library 7pm

Please note tickets for all Warwick Words events (WW) must be booked through Warwick Words.  All other events can be booked at Warwick Books or Kenilworth Books. Tickets for the Library events can also be booked at Warwick Library or Kenilworth Library and are free but should be booked in advance.

Peter Rhodes will talk about his new book ‘For A Shilling A Day’atKenilworth Library on 10th November at 7.00pm.

‘We can get you buggers for a shilling a day, but the horses cost eighty quid each.’ Knee-deep in mud and slush, covered in boils and lice, this was what his sergeant-major told one of the interviewees in this extraordinary and moving series of accounts of lives lived in the service of king, queen and country The author, Peter Rhodes, a regional newspaper journalist, has built up a unique collection of interviews with war  veterans and now had his work published in book form.

He built up his compilation of nearly 200 pieces over the course of 25 years, and the book begins with an interview with 110-year-old John Evans recalling the death of General Gordon in Khartoum in 1885 and ends with the killing of a Midlands soldier in Afghanistan more than 120 years later.

What an important and fascinating talk this promises to be. Tickets will be available shortly from the usual places…Kenilworth Books and Warwick Books, and the libraries at both places.

Join Warwick Books at Warwick Words for an afternoon of two halves: The Real Jane Austen with famed biographer Paula Byrne and Fashion in the Time of Jane Austen with Sarah Jane Downing who recently appeared with Dan Cruikshank on TV.

Jane Austen’s world was revolutionary in every sense. The American colonies, then France, overthrew their kings and established republics, and revolution as well as refinement  was the background to her writing.  Egalitarian ideals were also reflected in the fashions of the period, which adopted designs inspired by the period of classical democracy: light, flowing and diaphanous.

Paula Byrne, who is an acknowleged expert on Jane Austen will talk about her new biography The Real Jane Austin, which is due out in 2012, and Sarah Jane Downing will give an illustrated talk on how fashion was shaped by the cultural ideals of the time. A super afternoon for all Jane Austen fans.

The event takes place on Friday 1 October at the Unitarian Chapel at 3.00pm.

Tickets £8 (Includes afternoon tea).

Well not theirs exactly but the first novel from Jo Eames who is one of the owners, and very good it is too….see our review

We are very pleased to announce that John Sutherland and John Crace will be coming to Warwick Words as an unmissable duo as part of our ‘Meet The Author’ series.  John Sutherland will be talking about his new book ‘Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature’, and this promises to be one of the most entertaining talks you have heard in a long while if one of his previous books ‘Curiosities of Literature’ is anything to go by.  ‘Love, Sex, Death and Words: Surprising Tales from a Year in Literature’ is a rich and varied exploration of the human condition across the centuries in which John turns up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising or curious artefacts that literature has to offer day by day throughout the year. Particular emphasis will be laid on the dates of the Warwick Words Festival itself, so this will be of added interest. John’s brief CV tells you an awful lot about him………..’John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus of Modern English Literature at UCL (”emeritus” being Latin for “scrapheap” and “Northcliffe” journalistic shorthand for “you cannot be serious”). He currently teaches at the California Institute of Technology and is the author of twenty-odd books, mainly on books of a more important kind than his own.’

His partner at the event John Crace will be talking about his new book which is due out at Warwick Words `Brideshead Abbreviated The Digested Read of the Twentieth Century’.  John, the creator of the Guardian’s Digested Read column, hilariously summarises the great – and not so great – classics of modern literature…His Guardian pieces have rightly acquired a cult following. Each week fans avidly devour his latest razor-sharp literary assassination, while authors turn tremblingly to the appropriate page of the review section, fearful that it may be their turn to be mercilessly sent up.

Now he turns his critical eye on the classics of the last hundred years, offering bite-sized summaries of everything from Mrs Dalloway  to Possession via Lolita and Midnight’s Children. Those who have never quite got round to reading Ulysses  will be delighted to find its essence distilled into a mere four paragraphs. Those who have never quite got on with Seven Pillars of Wisdom will be pleased to find it hilariously parodied in an easily swallowable 752 words. And those who find all such books intimidatingly highbrow will be relieved to find that they can also discover, between the covers of this book, John Crace’s take on the likes of Jeffrey Archer, John Grisham and J.K. Rowling.

Witty, occasionally a bit cruel, the two Johns are ideal foils to each other and this promises to be a real highlight of the Festival, and not to be missed….

The talk has been re-scheduled from the times shown in the hard copy version of the Warwick Words programme and now takes place on Monday 4th October at 7.30pm and is in the Bridge House Theatre.