A Proustian moment
Not long ago, with time to spare before a Eurotunnel crossing my daughter and I wandered into the perfume section of the duty-free shop. And what a stroll down memory lane it turned out to be. The story of my life was there. The first perfume that I associate with my mother is Estée Lauder’s […]
Too much information?
The producers of the old Columbo series took a risk when they launched a show that began by showing not only the murder but also revealing the murderer. They got rid of the most obvious source of suspense: not only do we know whodunit, but really we know too that Columbo will uncover the truth. […]
The Time of my Life
I don’t want to read Catcher in the Rye again – or Salinger’s short stories – though I was impressed by them when I was around twenty. Nor am I tempted to reread Wuthering Heights (though Jane Eyre is another matter). I won’t be returning to The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings or Mervyn […]
Emma Lathen: The Agatha Christie of Wall Street
This appears on the cover of one of her books. That might be pitching it a bit high, but I do agree that Emma Lathen is a very good read. She is one of those writers who is in fact two writers. This kind of joint venture mostly happens in the crime-writing world, though my […]
The Red Right Hand
I’m surprised that I’d never heard of The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers (published 1945 and now available as e-book) until recently. What a novel! The author runs full tilt at the plot, pulling the reader along with him, and keeps going, the pace never slackening, until finally, finally, he skids to a […]
What a difference a day makes . . .
I’m reading with great pleasure David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain: Opening the Box 1957-59. There is a particular fascination in reading about the period when one’s parents were young and I have been gripped by Kynaston’s encyclopedic account of just two years in the 1950s, as I was by his earlier work, Family Britain, dealing with […]
Stoner by John Williams
‘[Stoner] felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but […]
An annoying thing that publishers do
There you are, racing towards the suspenseful climax of a crime novel, or maybe you’re enjoying it so much that you’re holding back a little, not wanting it to finish too soon. You gauge how much is left, at least a couple of chapters, time for one more stunning plot twist. But wait, what’s this? […]
Death on a Galician Shore
I am not using my ereader as much as I did when I first had it. On the whole I do still prefer reading a real book, and tend to keep my ereader for travelling. However there is a very useful feature that I do often use, and that is the chapter-sampling. It is a […]