This is the third instalment in Mick Herron’s series featuring the inimitable Jackson Lamb and his team of ‘slow horses’. Lamb himself is an extraordinary creation, reminiscent of Reginald Hill’s burly and crass Superintendent Andy Dalziel, only far more dishevelled and boorish. His ‘slow horses’ are cast-offs from the elite world of MI5, each having […]
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 […]
When I was at school in the mid 80s, we used to talk about what we’d do in the event of the three minute warning. Our school was only a couple of miles out of the centre of Manchester, a big city, and it had practised the sirens. It was a time when Reagan was […]
It has been a good summer for forensics expert Dr David Hunter. His relationship is going well and he’s in demand again as a police consultant. His life seems to be on an even keel. But not for long. The call comes from an old associate: a body has been found, and she’d like Hunter […]
Where Ink Meets Imagination: Victor Hugo and the Synergy of Art and Writing Visiting the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Victor Hugo’s drawings and watercolours felt like stepping into the subconscious of a writer who saw no boundary between the visual and the verbal. Best known for his towering literary achievements, Hugo was also a visionary […]
featuring American Locomotive (1944) by Edward Hoppper a short story by Curator Sara McKee FRSA The train hums beneath me, a steady rhythm that has become as familiar as my own heartbeat. Every morning, I take the same seat by the window, watching the city blur past in muted greys and browns. And every morning, […]
A short story created to envision an art emporium, now a reality with the opening of Celf Palas. Many years ago, I had a dream of curating art exhibitions and having my own gallery. I took the plunge in 2018 with an online blog which grew into Life: Full Colour our yellow art gallery. Always […]
