I have been discussing the aversion of a friend to fantasy fiction and tv/film and it’s interesting to note that their main problem with the genre – citing in particular Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, were the silly names – Mordor, Frodo, Targaryen etc. Why should they care about characters who were [...]

It’s been since the 5th Element that Luc Beeson has done actual science fiction, and now the famed director is back with Lock-Out, an action thriller that seems to have a little more of the Transporter thrown into the mix. But just how much of the pl…

My University thesis, The Court in English Alliterative Poetry, 1350-1450 is now available as a free download for Kindle for the next five days. I thought I would experiment with the new Kindle Select programme and see what happened! Here’s a link to the UK version: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003O86P40 And the US: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003O86P40

Daphne who runs Tanzanite’s Castle Full of Books has kindly allowed me to write a guest post for her blog about Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure. In the post I ramble on about how I came to write Chivalry, the background for the story and some of the important themes: Arthurian romance, the terrible generalship [...]

Dramatization of Tolstoy’s War and Peace I never new there was a theatre version of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy before, but I just came across an announcement about the Prague German Language Theatre Festival – and apparently there is – though it’s in German. I wonder if anyone would do an English version. [...]

You can see my Goodreads author profile here: http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1353250.Mark_Lord Not sure if it will help much, but was quite fun to set-up! It’s interesting to see that Goodreads are also allowing you to now sell eBooks via their website. I wonder how many sales they are getting though? Most of mine so far seem to be [...]

Following on from my posting of information about Leo Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, I have now created a new page about one of Tolstoy’s greatest classics: War and Peace. War and Peace is one of those novels that a lot of people think about reading, but never get round to, probably being put off by the [...]

As well as Science Fiction and Fantasy I also love many works of classic literature, and probably my favourite author is Leo Tolstoy – specifically his great works like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, but also some of his lesser known fiction like The Cossacks. To that end I have started populating some information [...]

Along with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which I mentioned yesterday, I have now also added the Breton lais of Marie de France to the website. Here’s a quick run-down of the full contents that are online – you can also get it all of Marie de France’s lais as an eBook for easier [...]

In the Medieval History and Literature section of this site I’ve recently posted the full modern English translation by Jessie L. Weston of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – a rather fine poem, and a good translation. Here’s an excerpt from the first section of the translation: After the siege and the assault of [...]