Showing posts with label england. Show all posts
Showing posts with label england. Show all posts
Friday, February 3, 2023

Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

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  Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse provided the latest foray into the world and mores of the late fifties. It’s yet another novel that resides...

Saturday Night And Sunday Morning by Alan Sillitoe

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“Once a rebel, always a rebel. You can ’ t help being one. You can ’ t deny that. And it ’ s best to be a rebel so as to show ‘em it don ’ t...
Tuesday, November 29, 2022

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  Day by A. L. Kennedy is a complex at times perhaps over a complex novel about an individual’s experience of and response to war. It is set...
Thursday, October 6, 2022

Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham

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  Cakes And Ale by W Somerset Maugham is a profoundly surprising book. Written in 1930, the novel begins its story in the Edwardian age prio...
Tuesday, September 28, 2021

A Postillion Struck by Lightning by Dirk Bogarde

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  A Postillion Struck by Lightning is the first part of Dirk Bogarde’s seven volume autobiography. First published as long ago as 1977, it h...
Tuesday, April 27, 2021

Anglo Saxon Attitudes by Angus Wilson

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This particular reviewer rarely writes a negative review. If it didn’t communicate with me, there ’ s no need to assume that it will not com...
Monday, November 30, 2020

Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble

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  Jerusalem The Golden by Margaret Drabble was published over fifty years ago. Reading it now, for this particular reviewer, is the equivale...
Thursday, September 17, 2020

Crown of Blood, The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey by Nicola Tallis

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When they advance, pawns become queens. But to advance, they usually need support from a bishop or a knight from behind the walls of a castl...
Friday, August 21, 2020

Scott-King's Modern Europe by Evelyn Waugh

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Scott-King's Modern Europe is a short, perhaps over-short novella by Evelyn Waugh. Written in 1946, it visits a fictitious part of Europ...
Wednesday, August 19, 2020

The Children's Book by AS Byatt

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The Children's Book by AS Byatt is a vast, almost rambling novel about several families and multiple lives . It is the  kind of novel wh...
Monday, August 10, 2020

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry

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Reviewing books that one has not enjoyed is a pointless activity. Better just to put them on the shelf and forget them. Perhaps a second exp...
Thursday, July 30, 2020

Elizabeth – The Forgotten Years by John Guy

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Myths are best served exploded, otherwise they can over-inflate and thus hide the substance of any dish. And if that dish be the national c...
Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton

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Gainsborough, A Portrait by James Hamilton is much, much more than a biography of a painter, though if it were only that it would still be ...
Tuesday, January 14, 2014

A Change of Climate by Hilary Mantel

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In A Change Of Climate Hilary Mantel presents what is essentially a family saga, but in settings that add extra dimensions to the expected d...