How I learned about love and sex in the sixties
Information was not easy to come by at my Girls’ Grammar School. Biology lessons focused mainly how rabbits reproduced and raised more questions than they answered. At one point there was a book in a plain brown wrapper (yes, really!), called something like Married Love, though I don’t think it can have been exactly that. […]
The moon was a ghostly galleon
Stepping outside our house the other evening, I saw the moon riding high among turbulent clouds and I spoke out loud the line from Alfred Noyes’s ‘The Highwayman’: ‘The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas.’ I’ve just looked up the poem and what a poem it is, with a terrific driving rhythm. Strange […]
A marvellous painter that I’d never heard of . . .
. . . even though I did History of Art and taught it at degree level. Giovanni Battista Moroni was a sixteenth century Italian artist, a contemporary of Titian. There is an exhibition of his work at the RA until 25th January. I was entranced by it. It is mostly portraits with a few altarpieces and it […]
10 Books that have made me laugh
Today Moira at ClothesinBooks.com and I are posting our list of books that have made us laugh. Mine are, in no particular order: Three Men in a Boat, by Jerome K. Jerome. A classic. I particularly love the part where they try to open a tin of pineapple without a tin-opener, and Uncle Podger hanging a picture, […]
An Officer and a Spy
Robert Harris’s novel, An Officer and a Spy, has won the CWA Ian Fleming Gold Dagger for the best thriller of the year and deservedly so. It is a masterly fictional account of the Dreyfus affair, one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in history. I have been intrigued by it since I came across it […]
This novel made me laugh out loud
‘Mrs Grindle-Jones in a very emotional state this morning. She stormed into my study and clapped down her register, hissing that “Those Widmerpools are away again, every one of them . . . Her eyes were brimming and her neck was a peculiar mottled red. . . At the time I was in the middle […]
Crimewriter Sarah Rayne is my guest
I love a theatrical mystery, so Sarah Rayne’s Ghost Song, set in the vividly realised Tarleton theatre on London’s Bankside, has been on my TBR pile for a while. I’ve just finished it and loved all the details of the old music hall shows, the terrific creepiness of the old theatre at night, and the can’t-stop-reading suspense. Sarah […]
Why writers are becoming extinct
The Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society recently did a survery of writers’ earnings and discovered the median income of British professional writers is now £11,000, down from £15,540 in 2005. I am not surprised by the drop in earnings: writers are earning less per sale than in the past. Amazon slashes prices and this in […]
Known Unto God
The First World War poets – Wilfred Owen in particular – were still very much read when I was at school. And I must have been in my teens when I read Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That. Most moving of all was Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, which I read in my late twenties […]
How to play crime fiction bingo
Award yourself a point for each cliché spotted. 1. The protagonist is separated/divorced/widowed/has just emerged from a toxic relationship. 2. Their new love interest turns out to be the villain or winds up dead or possibly both. 3. They had a traumatic childhood (abusive father, alcoholic mother, or whatever). 4. They drink too much (regularly […]