How I bought a book by accident
I’ll come on to how I did that in a minute. It’s two weeks now since I decided to have a three month moratorium on book-buying. It hasn’t been easy and yesterday I would have probably succumbed if it hadn’t been for the thought of having to own up to the lapse on this blog. I […]
A book on punctuation makes me laugh out loud
‘A couple I’ll call Penny and Jeter come out to my bungalow in Rockaway and proceed to devour the cheries I’ve put out in a bowl on the table. Jeter says, “Don’t put a bowl of cherries in front of Penny and I.” I am not about to snatch the cherries away unless Jeter learns […]
Ten novels set in the theatre
Along with my good blogfriend Moira at http://clothesinbooks.blogspot.co.uk I am posting my list of ten novels with theatrical settings. Theatres are closed communities of people engaged in a very stressful profession and so make wonderful settings – for crime novels in particular. Actors are good at lying. Deceiving people is what they do for living. And […]
Why don’t people close their curtains in crime dramas?
Time for some more crime fiction clichés. Last Saturday’s episode of Beck began with a gangster and his family narrowly escaping being shot. Later, at home at night, he is an easy target standing next to a picture window in a well-lit room and is picked off by a sniper. Surely closing the curtains or blind […]
A great artist
I didn’t expect a great deal from the Ai Weiwei exhibition at the RA, but I happened to be in London on the day of one of the Friends previews, so I thought I’d go. So often I am a little disappointed by contemporary art, but not this time. For me the most moving work […]
Crime fiction clichés
On Saturday night I was watching Beck on BBC4. At one point Beck arrives at the house of a woman whose friends have reported her missing. He rings the bell, no answer, and touches the door which swings open. And I wondered, do killers and kidnappers never think to lock the door when they leave? […]
One of the ten greatest novels in the French language?
That was Gide’s view of Émile Zola’s 1885 novel, Germinal. And what a stupendous work it is. I read the Penguin edition in an excellent translation by Roger Pearson. (Alas my French couldn’t cope with this 532 page novel with its complex – though always accessible – descriptions of mining technology). It tells the story of […]
Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald
This is the first biography I have read of someone that I’ve actually known. Penelope Fitzgerald was an active member of the William Morris Society of which I was curator, and later vice-chair and then chair in the late 1980s and the 1990s. My memories of her include standing with her on a bitterly cold […]