I Capture the Castle

I Capture the Castle is the first novel by the British author Dodie Smith, written during the Second World War when she and her husband Alec Beesley (also British and a conscientious objector) were living in California. She longed for home and wrote of a happier time, unspecified in the novel apart from a reference to living in the 1930s. Smith was already an established playwright and later became famous for writing the children's classic The Hundred and One Dalmatians.

The novel relates the adventures of an eccentric family, the Mortmains, struggling to live in genteel poverty in a decaying castle during the 1930s. The first person narrator is Cassandra Mortmain, an intelligent teenager who tells the story through her journal. It is a coming-of-age story in which Cassandra passes from being a girl at the beginning to being a young woman at the end.

In 2003 the novel was listed at number 82 in the BBC's survey The Big Read.

Plot

The Mortmain family is poor but exotic. Cassandra's father is a writer suffering from writer's block who has not published anything since his first book, Jacob Wrestling (a reference to Jacob wrestling with the angel), an innovative and "difficult" novel that sold well and made his name, including in the United States. Ten years before the novel begins he took out a forty-year lease on a dilapidated but beautiful castle, hoping to find either inspiration or isolation there. Now his family is selling off the furniture to buy food.

Henry Cavill

Henry William Dalgliesh Cavill /ˈkævəl/ (born 5 May 1983) is an English actor. Cavill began his acting career starring as Albert Mondego in the 2002 film adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. He would later star in minor and supporting roles in television shows such as BBC's The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, Midsomer Murders and The Tudors before transitioning to more mainstream Hollywood films such as Tristan & Isolde, Stardust and Immortals.

In 2008, Cavill became the face and official spokesperson of the Dunhill fragrance collection for men campaign. He was also cast in the main ensemble of the 2007 Showtime series The Tudors, starring as Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk until the series' end in 2010. Cavill would gain further prominence and international fame playing the titular superhero Superman in the 2013 reboot film Man of Steel, which became a commercial success and the highest-grossing Superman film of all time, a role that he will reprise in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League Parts One and Two. In 2015, he co-starred with Armie Hammer in the spy film The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Castle

A castle (from Latin: castellum) is a type of fortified structure built in Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages by nobility. Scholars debate the scope of the word castle, but usually consider it to be the private fortified residence of a lord or noble. This is distinct from a palace, which is not fortified; from a fortress, which was not always a residence for nobility; and from a fortified settlement, which was a public defence – though there are many similarities among these types of construction. Usage of the term has varied over time and has been applied to structures as diverse as hill forts and country houses. Over the approximately 900 years that castles were built, they took on a great many forms with many different features, although some, such as curtain walls and arrowslits, were commonplace.

A European innovation, castles originated in the 9th and 10th centuries, after the fall of the Carolingian Empire resulted in its territory being divided among individual lords and princes. These nobles built castles to control the area immediately surrounding them, and were both offensive and defensive structures; they provided a base from which raids could be launched as well as protection from enemies. Although their military origins are often emphasised in castle studies, the structures also served as centres of administration and symbols of power. Urban castles were used to control the local populace and important travel routes, and rural castles were often situated near features that were integral to life in the community, such as mills and fertile land.

Capture

Capture may refer to:

Romola Garai

Romola Sadie Garai (/ˈrɒmələ ˈseɪdi ˈɡæri/; born 6 August 1982) is an English actress. She is known for appearing in the films Amazing Grace, Atonement, and Glorious 39, and in BBC series such as Emma, The Hour, and The Crimson Petal and the White. She has been nominated twice for a Golden Globe Award.

Early life

Garai was born in Hong Kong to British parents. Her mother, Janet A. (née Brown), raised Romola and her three siblings and her father, Adrian E. R. Garai, is a bank manager. Her first name is the female version of the Italian name Romolo, from Romulus, one of the founders of Rome. Romola is also the main character of George Eliot's novel of the same name. Her father's family were of Jewish immigrant background. Garai's great-grandfather, Bernhard "Bert" Garai, an immigrant from Hungary, founded the Keystone Press Agency, a photographic agency and archive, in London, in the early twentieth century.

Garai is the third of four siblings. She moved to Singapore at five, before her family returned to Wiltshire in England when she was eight. She attended an independent boarding school, Stonar School in Wiltshire, and later moved at sixteen to London to attend the City of London School for Girls, where she completed her A-levels. She was fond of drama and appeared in school plays, and also with the National Youth Theatre up until the age of eighteen, where she was spotted by an agent who signed her to play the younger version of Dame Judi Dench's character in the BBC Films/HBO co-production for television, The Last of the Blonde Bombshells.