“They’re so tender, those pictures. Scenes of us all at Burghclere and private portraits of you that he probably shouldn’t have shown me. There’s so much love in all of them. It’s as if his art’s got more sense than he has”, said Elsie. I’ve not studied 20th Century art in any detail but Nicola […]
I am slightly wary of posting this review on 1 April as I recognise that some people might wonder whether the book is genuine. It is indeed an authentic history of the use of pigeons by the intelligence services during the war. At the behest of MI6, thousands of carrier pigeons were dropped in small […]
The Wall is John Lanchester’s fifth novel, and I would happily place three of the previous ones (The Debt to Pleasure, Fragrant Harbour, and Capital), all of which are completely different in style and content to each other, within my personal top fifty books. Given that since I started formally listing the books I read […]
I have always had a particular fondness for meta-fiction, and love reading books about writing books. This is a particularly delicious example of the genre. The book opens with celebrated author Erich Ackerman returning to West Berlin in 1988 to promote his latest novel, Dread, which had recently won a prestigious literary award (known simply […]
LAPD Detective Renée Ballard teams up with Harry Bosch in the new thriller from #1 NYT bestselling author Michael Connelly. Renée Ballard is working the night beat again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find a stranger rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is retired detective Harry Bosch, working […]
Dr Loretta Lawson is a successful academic, teaching English literature at one of the colleges making up the University of London in the late 1980s. She is also a founding member of Fem Sap, an academic European journal that had been set up to espouse radical feminism. In this latter capacity, as the book opens […]
Review by Ian James Brydon As I grow older the years seem to race by faster than ever, and it can be difficult to look back and pick out any one of them as being more significant than any of the others. Obviously, some stay in the mind more poignantly than others, perhaps as a […]
This novel finds Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch still working as a private detective following his enforced departure a couple of years previously from LAPD. He is not entirely comfortable with this status, and still hankers for the sense of establishment that came from being part of the formal law enforcement structure. He has managed to mitigate […]
Book Review by Sara McKee A whole new perspective on Doctor Zhivago “You and I, it’s as though we have been taught to kiss in heaven and sent down to earth together to see if we know what we were taught.” Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak My experience of Doctor Zhivago was primarily watching the […]
“They’re so tender, those pictures. Scenes of us all at Burghclere and private portraits of you that he probably shouldn’t have shown me. There’s so much love in all of them. It’s as if his art’s got more sense than he has”, said Elsie. I’ve not studied 20th Century art in any detail but Nicola […]
