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Blackburn, Julia

Julia Blackburn has written many books, and her subjects are diverse – from Napoleon to Billie Holiday – but she thinks the underlying connection is her interest in people caught in a predicament of one sort or another.

The numbers in square brackets refer to the issue of the quarterly in which the article appears.
The unbracketed numbers refer to the starting page of the article.
For entries in multiple issues of the quarterly, the occurrences are separated by semi-colons.

The Emperor’s Last Island, [1] 28; article by, [48] 28

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20040301153630 David Wheeler on Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island - Slightly Foxed Issue 1

Napoleon’s Last Garden

David Wheeler on Julia Blackburn, The Emperor’s Last Island

The bright orange spine of The Emperor’s Last Island shone conspicuously. The author’s name didn’t register, but the powerful word ‘island’ most certainly did, and when I took the slim volume from the shelf and saw the painted sketch of Napoleon and read the subtitle, A Journey to St Helena, my pulse began to quicken. My great-grandparents were married there, a place more remote than anywhere else on earth; of greater significance to me, in the mid-1960s my own teenage eyes gazed briefly upon this island with its fortress-like cliffs; but in the intervening years I had read nothing about it.
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Learning By Heart

Julia Blackburn on Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of Ballads

I was born in 1948 and so I stepped over into vague adulthood during the 1960s. My parents were what you might call bohemian, which meant they used Freud as the springboard for seeing sex in every aspect of life and they believed in doing whatever they felt like doing and to hell with the consequences. They were also good people in their way: my mother full of laughter and sociability, my father full of booze and poetry and fascinated by the transforming power of metaphor ‒ just so long as you could find the right one to fit the occasion . . .

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