Stuart's Daily Word Spot: Roman a clef

Roman a clef: This is French for ‘a novel with a key’, and describes a novel about real life, overlain with a façade of fiction. Fictitious names actually represent real people, and the ‘key’ works through the relationship between the reality and the fiction. This ‘key’ may be produced separately by the author, or deduced through the use of literary devices like epigraphs.

Examples of Roman a clef novels are:

Glenarvon (1816) by Lady Caroline Lamb: chronicles her affair with Lord Byron, who is thinly disguised as the title character.

The Carpetbaggers (1961) by Harold Robbins: fictionalized version of Hollywood exploits of Howard Hughes and actress Jean Harlow.

The Ghost (2007) by Robert Harris: the character of Adam Lang is loosely based on former Prime Minister Tony Blair. The Ghost Writer is a movie by Director Roman Polanski who turned the book into a film with Pierce Brosnan playing the character. 

Pic: Farm drive above North Dalton, East Yorkshire.

Stuart's Daily Word Spot: Byronic hero

Image via Wikipedia

Byronic hero: A jaded and flawed hero, founded on the life and works of romantic poet, Lord Byron. He is usually erratic, disrespectful, self-destructive. His emotional behaviour often isolates him from the world. Byronic heroes appear throughout literature: Heathcliff is a good example. They are still common in certain types of romance, and the Phantom in the Phantom of the Opera is a relatively contemporary example, though there are doubtless innumerable modern examples.

12 June 1991 – Boris Yeltsin became first democratically elected President of Russia.

For all that he was perceived as a drunk and a buffoon in some circles, and was undeniably eccentric, he was a symbol of the emergence of the USSR from its communist straightjacket and into the modern political clothing of democracy. Still far to go before the corruption of the past is purged and yet to throw off the traditional urge to appoint a dictatorial figure as a leader, the Russians are slowly modernising their government to bring it into line with contemporary ideas.