Reviews

Mar 11, 20221 min read

955. Sathnam Sanghera - Empireland

Very good, but difficult at times, maybe just as a mid-week read being busy at work. A kind of psycho-analysis of English culture and...

Mar 4, 20221 min read

952. Hallie Rubenhold - The Five

The first book group book. About the five victims of Jack the Ripper. Not the sort of thing I would normally read. Written by a feminist...

Dec 17, 20211 min read

923. Lucy Worsley - Jane Austen At Home

This is really good – I expected a rather frothy and lightweight book from a woman who likes to prance around in period costume in her TV...

Oct 18, 20211 min read

908. Helen Lewis - Difficult Women

Sub-titled ‘A history of feminism in 11 fights’ this is very good, a mix of intelligent journalism and at times scholarly text. The...

Sep 17, 20211 min read

895. James Robertson - News Of The Dead

Book of the year, so far. Beautifully written. About a single location – Glen Conach – in the Scottish highlands over several centuries....

Dec 3, 20201 min read

831. Stephen Fay & David Kynaston - Arlott, Swanton And The Soul...

The full title continues ‘of English cricket'. But I couldn’t really work out whether it was a parallel biography of these 2 cricket...

Nov 3, 20201 min read

824. Evie Wyld - After The Fire, A Still Small Voice

Bought this after indexing this blog and remembering 177 & 8. Didn’t enjoy it at all, 2 obscure narratives about young men in Australia...

Oct 13, 20201 min read

820. Charlotte Hobson - The Vanishing Futurist

I found this hard going; it was dramatised on Radio 4 but maybe their adaptation was better than the book. About an English governess who...

May 21, 20201 min read

780. Lawrence Durrell - Balthazar

I think I summarised this quite well when I first read it (no.352), nearly 5 years ago. (no.779 above is a better summary of Justine than...

Apr 9, 20201 min read

764. Francesca Wade - Square Haunting

One of Paddy’s. A rather severe academic book about 5 women (Virginia Woolf, the poet HD, Dorothy Sayers, Jane Harrison, a Cambridge...

Mar 4, 20201 min read

752. Penelope Fitzgerald - The Beginning of Spring

Recommended on BBC’s A Good Read, and I had never read any of hers before. Good, but I struggled to understand the underlying theme. Set...

Oct 17, 20191 min read

723. Tracey Chevalier - Girl With A Pearl Earring

This is a wonderful book by a wonderful writer. A real discovery for me. The theme is very obvious from the Vermeer reproduction on the...

Oct 12, 20191 min read

721. Colson Whitehead - The Underground Railroad

Heard an extract on Radio 4. This is a shocking book about slavery in the deep south in the 19th century, but it is not a very good book....

Oct 8, 20191 min read

720. Tracey Chevalier - The Lady And The Unicorn

Remarkably, there was another book of hers in the house, which obviously belonged to my Dad. This was totally different, although the...

Sep 30, 20191 min read

717. Jessie Burton - The Muse

This is by the author of ‘The Miniturist’ which I have seen on television if not read. Not in the George Eliot class (well what would...

Aug 25, 20191 min read

705. Douglas Murray - The Strange Death Of Europe

Certainly non -fiction book of the year so far. I disliked it at first as I thought that he was writing from a right wing perspective, a...

Apr 25, 20191 min read

678. Jaroslav Hasek - The Good Soldier Svejk

Obviously having my own Prague spring as this was inspired by 677 above, and apart from Kafka, Hasek is the major Prague writer from the...

Apr 8, 20191 min read

674. Anita Anand - The Patient Assassin

A book by an Indian BBC presenter about an Indian guy who murdered in 1940 the British colonial administrator responsible for the...

Mar 14, 20191 min read

667. Stacey Halls - The Familiars

Reluctant to spend more with Amazon, in view of all the crappy marketing material on my new kindle (this can have a negative effect,...

Oct 13, 20181 min read

632. Nell Stevens - Mrs Gaskell And Me

A library book of Paddy's. Couldn’t entirely make this out – an eponymous (Nell Stevens) PhD student in London has a love affair which...