The Count of Monte Cristo
I asked my friend Moira over at Clothes in Books if she would read Dumas’s novel with a view to our both blogging about it. This is my offering and I can’t wait to read hers. And now here it is: https://clothesinbooks.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-count-of-monte-cristo-will-get-you.html I must have eight or maybe nine when I first read The Count […]
I Was a Stranger
Every now and then I come across a book that I go on thinking about long after I have finished it and I know I will return again and again. One such book is I Was A Stranger (1977) by John Hackett. In September 1944 he was commander of the 4th Parachute Brigade and at […]
Crime for Christmas: Five favourite festive reads
Crime for Christmas: Five Festive Reads: here they are in order of publication Dorothy L Sayers, The Nine Tailors (1934). Ok, so not Christmas exactly, but close enough. It is a snowy New Year’s Eve when Lord Peter Wimsey runs his car into a ditch near the village of Fenchurch St Paul. I regularly reread […]
A good way to spend an autumn afternoon
My last post was about buying new books. It’s a great pleasure, but perhaps not quite such a pleasure as a trip to a second book shop and finding books that you didn’t even know you wanted as well as some that you did. Last Friday I needed cheering up and, as I had to […]
A Wonderful Tribute
Yesterday was the first day of an exhibition at Sheffield University of material from the archive of my late husband: Peter Blundell Jones: Architecture, Landscape and the City. I went to see it with our younger daughter (there will be an official opening later in the year). It covers the whole range of Peter’s work, […]
Josephine Tey, P.D. James – and me
DEATH AMONG THE DONS Part 2 One of my favourite novels with an academic setting is Josephine Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes (1946), which is set in an female physical training college. Hers is in many ways an affectionate portrait. Tey had herself attended just such a college, Anstey Physical Training College in Birmingham, and had […]
Death Among the Dons
A couple of years ago, I gave a talk at Alibis in the Archives at the Gladstone Library and promised to post it on my blog. What with a house move and other distractions, it slipped my mind. But here is a edited version of it – or some of it. It is rather long, […]
Revisiting old friends
Recently I was asked to write about three books or writers that I return to again and again. It was hard to choose just three, because I do a lot of rereading, particularly at times of great stress or illness. And my house move certainly counts as one of those times. Anyway, this is what […]