Books I wouldn’t buy for myself …
. . . but am very happy to receive as presents. I’ll begin by saying that I do buy a lot of books. But there are certain categories I tend to avoid. I already pay a hefty subscription to the London Library, so I try not to buy books that I can borrow: biographies, non-fiction […]
What to read when you are still not very well
by which I mean still coughing, sneezing and streaming. I know I am not alone: others have been suffering from this exceptionally long-lived virus. Luckily I am not short of reading material. And one book I’ve particularly enjoyed is Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop. ‘November, a dark, rainy Tuesday, late afternoon. This is my ideal […]
What to read when you are not very well
I have got one of those annoying colds that just goes on and on with days when I think I am getting better followed by relapses when I don’t want to do anything but loll around and read something undemanding. So what did I read? This Xmas my brother gave me one of his own books that I have long coveted: […]
Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination
The British Library are on a roll. They’ve followed up an excellent exhibition on book illustration with an equally good one on the Gothic. I absolutely loved it. The range is wide, taking in its origins in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Strawberrry Hill and going right up to the Whitby Goth Weekend, photographed […]
Mat Coward is a guest on my blog
I first came across Mat Coward in a CWA anthology. He is a first-rate short story writer, but he also writes across a wide range of other genre: sci-fi, crime, children’s books (including Dr Who adventures), as well as being a gardening columnist for the Morning Star and a researcher on QI. I began by asking […]
The Assassination of the Archduke
This book by Greg King and Susan Woolmans is subtitled: ‘Sarajevo 1914 and the Murder that Changed the World.’ It was recommended by Elaine at http://randomjottings.typepad.com. I decided that it was something I didn’t know enough about. It did after all set in train a sequence of events that led to the deaths of millions, including my […]
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, […]