Play of the Week: Hamlet

In today's post, Miss Mazur introduces the senior school production of Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

Books of the Week

Today we have several recommendations, kindly suggested by Mr Hager and Theo Katzenellenbogen.

Endeavour by Peter Moore 

Recommended by Mr Hager

This is an amazingly readable non-fiction work centred around the ship Endeavour and Captain Cook’s extraordinary voyage to the Pacific Ocean in 1769, and his role in the exploration of Tahiti and Australia. 

SPS Predict the Booker Prize 2025: and the winner is ...

On Monday evening, SPS readers gathered in the Kayton Library, and online, via the live-stream, for our annual Predict the Booker event. Six Paulines, from the 5th form to the U8th, stepped up to the podium, each of them recommending one of the shortlisted novels and attempting to win the audience's vote. 

But is the audience vote worth winning? As our host, the imperturbable Mr Mahmoud, politely pointed out, when it comes to predicting Booker prize-winners, the SPS audience have a spectacular record of unrelenting wrongness. For six successive, success-less years, we've failed to back the right horse.  So could this be the night that finally broke the curse? Read on, and find out …

Book of the Week

Next Monday, the Kayton Library is hosting its annual 'Predict the Booker' Event. Six Pauline readers explore and appraise the shortlist for this year's Booker Prize for Literature, before the audience vote on which novel they think will win: you can find out more about the event here, and the shortlisted novels here, and we'll be reporting on the event in next Wednesday's post.  

Meanwhile, today's book of the week - a classic of the horror genre - is perfectly poised between two significant dates: last Friday's Hallowe'en, and next Saturday's anniversary of Bram Stoker's birth in 1847.  Yes, our book of the week is Dracula - recommended by Tom Ritchie.  

The Greatest Literary Dog is ...

Thanks so much to everyone who voted in last week's poll to determine which literary dog SPS readers think is the greatest. Your votes were spread widely between the different candidates, and we'll be bringing you the results in a moment - but first of all, a role call of shame: the dogs we forgot ...

Mrs Cummings was kicking herself: 'I cannot believe I forgot about Gaspode! Terry Pratchett was famously a cat person but Gaspode is a delight. Gaspode possesses human-level intelligence and the ability to speak, as well as an extensive collection of diseases (including 'Licky end' which is only found in pregnant sheep). He is enamoured of the werewolf, makes filthy jokes and is a 'thinking brain' dog for Foul Ole Ron. A canine Dickensian urchin he appears in various books, but is best in Men at Arms.' 

Great Literary Dogs ...

This week, in a post we arrived at by a rather circuitous route*, we're focussing not on books of the week, but on dogs. We asked staff and departments to nominate their favourite dogs in literature, and here are their responses.  

Mr Hager (whose own dog, Cormac, is named after the late, great American novelist Cormac McCarthy) starts us off:  'Can I suggest Mr Bones from Paul Auster’s Timbuktu?  

It’s been ages since I read it but it’s pretty ambitious to do a whole novel from the perspective of a dog.  Mr Bones and his master (who is old and ailing) travel to Baltimore in a quest to find his master’s old English teacher.  The novel meditates upon death, the afterlife, and the state of America.'  

Black History Month

Today's books of the weeks have all been chosen in relation to Black History Month: Standing Firm in Power and Pride.

Life on Mars by Tracy K Smith
Recommended by Mr Hager

Life on Mars,Tracy K Smith’s 2011 poetry collection, is a remarkable, versatile work which takes ‘space' as its central metaphor, alongside the work of David Bowie and great science-fiction films of the past. She pushes the boundaries of what ‘space’ can mean, and sues it to ask many questions about life and death, about religion and the quest for meaning in life, about the direction that we as a human race are moving in - as well as specifically the direction of travel in America - and about the best and worst of human actions towards each other.