{"id":3334,"date":"2020-10-22T10:44:06","date_gmt":"2020-10-22T09:44:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/?p=3334"},"modified":"2020-10-22T10:44:06","modified_gmt":"2020-10-22T09:44:06","slug":"jennie-batchelor-on-100-years-of-agatha-christie-for-bbc-radio-kent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/2020\/10\/22\/jennie-batchelor-on-100-years-of-agatha-christie-for-bbc-radio-kent\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennie Batchelor on 100 years of Agatha Christie for BBC Radio Kent"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">To mark the 100th anniversary of Agatha Christie releasing her first novel,\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/english\/people\/78\/www.kent.ac.uk\/english\/people\/78\/batchelor-jennie\">Professor Jennie Batchelor<\/a>, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/english\">School of English<\/a>, was interviewed by Dominic King for BBC Radio Kent this week.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">In the interview, Jennie discusses the appeal of Agatha Christie&#8217;s novels: &#8216;the plotting, the ingenuity, the hours of trying to outwit the detective and other characters in the novel and the humour. There are some quite grim things that happen in [Christie&#8217;s] novels, but they&#8217;re also really rather funny and I appreciate that combination very much&#8217;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">Agatha Christie&#8217;s first novel,\u00a0<i>The Mysterious Affair at Styles <\/i>(1920), introduced the world to her new detective Hercule Poirot. Jennie says: &#8216;people were excited by this new voice, and the character of Hercule Poirot, who is a very different kind of character to come on to the scene; he&#8217;s very pernickety, he&#8217;s very vain, but he&#8217;s also very compassionate, he&#8217;s very eccentric, but he&#8217;s also curiously loveable, in a way&#8217;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">Jennie also speaks about the numerous adaptations and reinventions of Christie&#8217;s novels, which has helped to bring her work to new audiences over the years, and gives some insight into her enduring popularity: &#8216;there&#8217;s something about the characters, something more we want to know about them as readers. There&#8217;s a lot of work we have to do in our own heads to try and make sense of all these people, and why they do the things that they do. And I think that&#8217;s one of the things that we&#8217;re so fascinated with now, it&#8217;s one of the things we keep coming back to and why we keep wanting to revisit her stories and re-read them, adapt them again, think about them again. I think we&#8217;re going to be reading Agatha Christie for a very long time still&#8217;.<\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">The interview, which starts at 39&#8217;45&#8221; can be listened to on BBC Sounds, here:<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sounds\/play\/p08tdwcb\">https:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/sounds\/play\/p08tdwcb<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p class=\"xmsonormal\" style=\"background: white\"><span style=\"color: black\">\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To mark the 100th anniversary of Agatha Christie releasing her first novel,\u00a0Professor Jennie Batchelor, Professor of Eighteenth-Century Studies in the\u00a0School of English, was interviewed by &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/2020\/10\/22\/jennie-batchelor-on-100-years-of-agatha-christie-for-bbc-radio-kent\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":55813,"featured_media":3337,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1,124,9111],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/55813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3334"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3338,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3334\/revisions\/3338"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/english-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}