The Laughing Policeman
After I’d enjoyed working my way through Magdalen Nabb’s novels early in the year, I thought I’d do the same for Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo. This Swedish husband and wife writing team wrote ten novels over ten years. THE LAUGHING POLICEMAN has probably been the most frequently reprinted of their ten novels and certainly […]
Those Were the Days
The summer holidays are over, school has started, and it is time to start blogging again. There’s a lot I want to blog about, and it’ll take me a while to catch up, but I’ll start with the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters.I read these avidly at least twenty years ago and have dipped into them occasionally […]
Having a Break
I’ve got a busy summer ahead so will be posting only intermittently, but I will be back before too long to blog about my summer reading.
More Dancing To the Music of Time
‘Generals, as a collective rank, incline to be physically above or below, average stature. Aylmer Conyers, notably tall, possessed in addition to his height much natual distinction.In fact his personality flled the room, although without active aggression.At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly,that he would stop at […]
A Dance to the Music of Time
Two or three months ago I decided to re-read Anthony Powell’s A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME. I’d been meaning to do this for a while. I read the first two volumes in the mid 1970s and the other eight between August 1981 and August 1982. I know this because in those days I […]
Back again
It’s a long time since my last blog and I’m sorry for my unexplained absence. There’ve been a number of reasons. My lovely mother-in-law died in April. She was 97 and had had a wonderfully interesting and fulfilling life. She was a GP, qualifying before the war when few women went into medicine. She is […]
Where Have You Been All My Life?
I recently came across a novel so engrossing, so fascinating, and so well written that I was surprised that I had never heard of the writer. I discovered LIGHT YEARS by James Salter, first published in 1976, when Andrew Miller recently picked it for the ‘Book of a Lifetime’ slot in the Independent. It sounded […]
The Love of Books: A Sarajevo Story
Quite by chance I caught this programme in BBC 4’s Storyville slot last Monday and I am so glad I did. It told a gripping story. partly reconstructed by actors, partly told by the people involved. When the young Dr Mustafa Jahic was made Director of the Gazi Husrev-Beg Library in Sarajevo he thought he […]
Crime Fiction Round-up
I’m hoping to get round to blogging more frequently in a few weeks when the renewal period for CWA subscriptions is over. I haven’t been blogging, but of course I have been reading.I was gripped by CROOKED LETTER, CROOKED LETTER by Tom Franklin, a worthy winner of the CWA Gold Dagger. It’s sent in rural […]
What a Life!
Second only to the pleasure of reading a great novel is the pleasure of reading a great biography. I read Claire Tomalin’s biography of Dickens over Christmas and I felt a sense of loss when I’d finished it. For over 400 pages I’d been immersed in someone else’s life and though Tomalin tells us what […]