Welcome to British Isles Friday! British Isles Friday is a weekly event for sharing all things British and Irish — reviews, photos, opinions, trip reports, guides, links, resources, personal stories, interviews, and research posts. Join us each Friday to link your British and Irish themed content and to see what others have to share. The link list is at the bottom of this post. Pour a cup of tea or lift a pint and join our link party!

Last week, I reviewed the documentary The Romantic Revolution, learning way more than I expected about British, French, and other European writers, painters, and musicians plus their impact in the modern world. Tina read and compared two books about two teachers in Great Britain, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark and To Sir, With Love by E.R. Braithwaite.

For the past several years, I’ve celebrated Agatha Christie’s birthday in September with a series of posts about her life and times, as well as her stories. I’m busily preparing those posts and didn’t have time to come up with a post for this week, the last Friday in August.

So, I thought I would give you a sneak peek of what’s coming up next month.

For the first two posts, I read two novels that were published 100 years ago, in 1926. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie is the fourth of the Hercules Poirot novels. Clouds of Witness by another of the Queens of Crime, Dorothy L. Sayers, was the second of the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Can you imagine the time when these two books would be new on the bookshop shelves simultaneously?

Fifty years ago, Sleeping Murder: Miss Marple’s Last Case was published posthumously. Rather than read the book, I took advantage of my BritBox subscription to watch both the Joan Hickson (1987) and the Geraldine McEwan (2006) versions of this story. It’s fun to compare these very different takes on the same story.

When I saw that my favorite British actor of 2026, Anjana Vasan (Wicked Little Letters, We Are Lady Parts) was in an adaptation of Christie’s novel Towards Zero, I decided that I had to watch it, but saved it for September as part of my annual Christie-a-thon.

I hope you’ll join me in September for a deep dive into the Queens of Crime.

On another topic, since there is nothing more British than a uniformed, tall-hatted band in front of Buckingham Palace, we can honor Dolly Parton’s legacy with this version of “9 to 5.”