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A Late Beginner, [21] 16; [37] 6

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The Sunday Times Podcast of the Week

The Sunday Times

‘If you like books, you will love this podcast.’

Episode 5: Revival

The Slightly Foxed Podcast

Gail, Hazel, Anna and Donna Coonan of Virago Modern Classics gather round the table to talk about giving new life to forgotten voices, and Helen Bourne heads for the Pyramids with a young Priscilla Napier.

Before the Sun Set

Penelope Lively on Priscilla Napier, A Late Beginner

This wonderful recreation of a time and a climate of mind – a hundred years ago, one realizes, startled – is not just an evocation of place but also of the child’s eye view. A Late Beginner ranks quite simply with the greatest accounts of how it is to be a child, to see with that strange, skewed, uncontaminated vision.

‘Tombs, dear. Where’s your other sock?’

Extract from A Late Beginner, Priscilla Napier

No one told me that the pyramids had been one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but they were certainly the primal wonder of mine. From early on they exercised an oddly persistent fascination.They could not, it seemed, be taken for granted, like hills and trees and houses. Approached along the pyramid road they got larger and larger and larger until they filled up one half of the sky. It took a long while to ride lurchingly round the Great Pyramid on a camel, and from no angle could their stupendousness be made a thing of nought. They were made of square yellow blocks, exactly like sugar lumps, but higher than I was.

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