Reviews 

3rd purchase from Smith’s at Gatwick, her new book which Paddy devoured before I did! Not as good as many of her books, a bit...

A very slight novelette, written as a film script when Greene was contracted to Hollywood post war as he couldn’t fund life from writing....

A pretty atrocious book about a pretty atrocious person (Princess Margaret). Subtitled ’99 Glimpses of’ her, not one of these was...

This was clever and perhaps one of the first (? I have no idea) books to debunk conventional historical knowledge; no that is not right...

A virtuoso feat of writing, but maybe not much else? Set in 18th century London, written in an (I assume) genuine working class London...

I thought I would read some Dickens, partly because Susan Hill (568) likes him, and chose this as I don’t like the novels. Dickens does...

Still not certain whether I have read this before. The central figure, Logan Mountstewart, sounds very familiar, but I had no memory of...

Obviously the author’s last book, as she died not long after completing it. She says, in an afterword, that she likes writing about the...

Benjamin Black is the non de plume of John Banville, not that I have heard of him either. This is a slightly picaresque quasi-historical...

Juliet Nicolson is the 4th generation of the Nicolson daughters; granddaughter of Vita Sackville West. Her great great grandmother was a...

Possibly her first (famous or actual first?) book. Good, but difficult and hard work. The main narrative is a Tristram Shandy like...

I gave up on this before even discovering what Tennyson’s Gift was. A tedious reconstruction of a (possible or actual, I never got that...

Read this, untypically, in parallel with 460 above. I have enjoyed Rankin recently but found this a little low grade and predictable,...

I have read this before (no 372), but it is far better on a 2nd reading. There are three plot lines: The murder of the archaeologist...

The sequel to 'The Raj Quartet', and very different in lots of ways. I suppose essentially a tragi-comedy, about Tusker and Lucy Smalley,...

Book of the year so fay, and by a long stretch. I have read this before, and we have watched and enjoyed the Granada DVD many times, but...

Another library book via P. I am not reading at all fluently at the moment; this was quite a good book but I didn’t really enjoy it at...

Bought in February 1977 from the 2nd hand book store in the town where we then lived, but never as far as I can tell, read until now. One...

Another one from Bristol. I had read this years ago. Found it quite hard going; she doesn’t write very fluently about people so the...

I think this guy is good. Hard to summarise this thematically, as there a multiple strands – Richard I’s attempt to recover the Cross...