A Rich Soup with additional material - Tapa blanda

This is a fine memoir Brian Farrington writes warmly of his childhood in Dublin where he saw Yeats and sat next to Maud Gonne in the theatre. He has a wonderful gift of recall and writes beautifully of his experiences teaching French and of the many friends he has made during his long and happy life. TOM PAULIN. Poet and Critic --Tom Paulin, Poet & Critic

A Rich Soup by Brian Farrington reads like a marvelous adventure tale, with one exception; it s all true! With his fine-tuned poetic sensibility along with the narrative skills of a born storyteller he carries us from the evening song-fests in the home of his Dublin childhood to the ordeal of overcoming altitude sickness in climbing the Matterhorn to the even greater challenge of confronting a mean-tempered French socialist who has hanged his cat. Every page of his memoir is engrossing, intellectually stimulating and full of the juices of life. JAMES W FLANNERY Winship Professor of the Arts and Humanities. Director,W.B. Yeats Foundation, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia --Prof James Flannery, Emory University, Atlanta, USA

This memoir by Brian Farrington reminds us of an educational world that is now all but gone an ambience in which radical teachers sought to spread universal enlightenment, holding to the principle that reason and truth set people free. It was a world where standards of educational excellence were not the property of only one political faction, where the humane education of the whole person was taken to be the highest ideal of the best teachers, and where the purpose of educational democratisation was to pass on the best that has been thought and said to everyone. Every page of the book is informed by Farrington s breadth and depth of culture, expressed with self-deprecating humour and eloquent grace. Lindsay Paterson Professor of Educational Policy, University of Edinburgh. --Prof Lindsay Paterson, University of Edinburgh

Brian, elder brother of Conor Farrington, the Irish actor, playwright and broadcaster, was born in Dublin in 1925 of distinguished and unusual parents. Most of his life has been spent as an ex-pat Irishman in France (16 years) and Scotland, with brief interludes in places like Manchester and Hungary. His memoir: A Rich Soup. with additional material the title is explained in the last sentence - is far from being the sort of autobiography made up of sentences that should only figure in Xmas letters to neglected cousins (Roy Hattersley). Rather is it a concatenation of anecdotes, descriptions, stories and ideas, some moving, some hilariously funny, being by-products of a long and on the whole enjoyable life spent exploiting an awkwardly heterogeneous set of talents and fitting them into a teacher s career. Pyrenean and Alpine mountains, Irish caverns, life in a left-wing commune in Paris figure in the book. Also, entertainingly described, are Paris in the nineteen fifties, the experience of being on the jury for a French doctorate in Applied Linguistics, orating from a soap-box, and travelling the length and breadth of the winter Highlands as an examiner in French. A pioneer in the use of computers for language learning, Brian ended up running the Language Centre of Aberdeen University. He has also published two collections of poetry one with Dolmen in Dublin and a short book on W B Yeats, as well as designing and programming several innovative software packages. Among the variegated throng of personages whose paths have very briefly crossed his are the Yeats scholar Peter Allt, Simone de Beauvoir, Brendan Behan, the artist Christian Boltanski, Brian Boydell, Noam Chomsky, Maud Gonne, Oisin Kelly, the Belfast folk-singer Frankie McPeake, Georges Pompidou and W B Yeats.