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Ashes anniversaries: Armstrong’s Australians A Set the default text size A Set large text size
Replay A Set the default text size A Set large text size
This winter marks the centenary of the Australian team’s record-breaking feats under Warwick Armstrong’s leadership. After regaining the Ashes at home 5-0, it then retained them away 3-0.
Its eight consecutive victories is an Ashes record. It was a world record until the West Indies broke it in 1984. Armstrong is still the only captain to have led a team in eight or more matches without a single defeat.
It’s timely to acknowledge those achievements a century later, and also to consider how his side that went to England might fare today. How strong was it, and how good a captain was Armstrong?
Last modified on Mon 8 Mar 2021 10.44 EST
Agatha Christie
South Lodge at Greenway, Devon
The main house is so well preserved itâs as if Agatha Christie just stepped outside. In the drawing room it takes little imagination to picture yourself listening to one of her manuscript readings. If you are inclined to detective work, youâll work out for yourself that the scratch marks on the bedroom door were made by the family dog. Christieâs holiday house, Greenway, is gracious and beautifully proportioned. It sits high above the River Dart, amid extensive grounds that slope steeply down to the water. âThe loveliest place in the world,â is how she described it. Christie left it to her daughter, who passed it to her son, and he gifted it to the National Trust in 2005. Staying in South Lodge â once the gardenerâs cottage, and one of three NT cottages to rent on the estate â you could spend all day watching light dance on the river, boats passing and
From the NS archive: Cobwebs on Hardy 16 May 1942: Would Thomas Hardy have been one of the great English poets?
By Stephen Spender
In this review of Edmund Blunden’s new biography of Thomas Hardy, Stephen Spender questions the author’s method. Blunden tracks the reception of Hardy’s work, taking the approach “of a guide book”. Spender is convinced by the biography that Hardy’s life was boring and uneventful but its examination of Hardy’s under-explored poetry redeems the account of this great writer’s life. Mr Blunden remarks, in his account of Thomas Hardy’s death, on the inevitable irony of circumstance by which his corpse was cut open, the heart being buried in Stinsford Churchyard, the body in Westminster Abbey. Perhaps a similar irony hangs over this book, which reads at times like an obituary notice in the