LITERARY DAY, October 18th, 2009 Bury St Edmunds Thanks to our hosts, the Luptons, over 20 TARS enjoyed a splendid day in the excellent surroundings of the URC Meeting Room, Bury. We had a short introduction to the plans for the IAGM to be held at Shotley in May 2009. This was followed by the first talk, by Hugh Brogan, on "Arthur Ransome: a Biographer's Reflections."  Hugh spelt out how he had come to be spurred on to write the Biography, by an overheard  remark in a Cambridge College Common Room: "what a frightful old tory Arthur Ransome was"!  Hugh reflected that there could  be "no such a thing as a definitive biography", and went on to explain that he wrote it for himself!  His audience did not agree, any more than Arthur's readers. Convincingly, Hugh went on to reflect on how it is that the Foreign Office in Arthur's time - and now - was so incompetent at not heeding advice and information from those on the ground, including of course AR. Why are the S&A series so good?  Not only do you learn about how to sail, camp and fish, but more subtlely, AR set scenes that "make you turn the page".  Fostering imagination was the key. Finally, Hugh considered that Dick and Dorothy represented the two sides of AR: the scientist and the writer! After lunch, Gilbert Satterthwaite gave a fascinating talk on "An astronomer Might be Useful: an illustrated talk on AR's Astronomy".   This covered a great deal of ground, including the history of the Royal Observatory, Greenwhich, in which Gilbert had served as Astronomer and had taken the last reading with the Aries telescope before the ROG moved to Herstmonceaux.  Next, he made a convincing case for the  illustration of the night sky in Winter Holiday fitting with the astronomical facts for January 1929, the year the Lakes froze over.   Finally, Arthur is commemorated in the heavens by the naming of a minor planet/asteroid, half a mile in diameter,  "Ransome", discovered photographically by the Klet Observatory in the Czech Republic in 1988 and named internationally in 1995.