The Gift of a Radio by Justin Webb
Review by Annabel The TV news came on and a lugubrious looking chap in a light-coloured suit with a deep, plummy voice said something about the balance of payments. ‘That’s…
Review by Annabel The TV news came on and a lugubrious looking chap in a light-coloured suit with a deep, plummy voice said something about the balance of payments. ‘That’s…
Reviewed by Annabel Dr Andrew Lees is a neurology professor at the National Hospital in London the first English hospital dedicated exclusively to treating the diseases of the nervous system….
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long The second volume of these diaries was delivered by my postman, who was visibly having difficulty handing it over as he had a huge pile of…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century’ is the subtitle of this joint biography by Stephen Galloway. The author, previously executive editor of the…
Review by Liz Dexter In this extraordinary book, Richard King takes the voices of a hundred Welsh people who were active in various forms of culture and politics over the…
Review by Terence Jagger This is a lively and compelling biography of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, who has somehow escaped the notice of the general…
Review by Karen Langley We readers have never been able to get enough of crime fiction, it seems, and in the 21st century the genre is as popular as it…
Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’, is supremely concerned with the subject…
Review by Liz Dexter While he’s now a publisher and editor with his own imprint, Hodkinson grew up in a terrace house in Rochdale with one book in the house…
Reviewed by Harriet When you see the title of this book, you may think, as I did initially, that it was going to be about friendships between writers (Pope and…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies One review of this book has come on quite strong against Roberts’ view of Stalin – prominent among the twentieth century’s most publicised murderous dictators and…
Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be attempted only by the brave or…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Covid-19 chronicles. My favourites of the twenty-some I’ve read thus far have come from the…
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies As E. H Carr’s masterly introduction to the study of history, What Is History?, explains, the idea of a fully objective, neutral and truthful history is…
Review by Liz Dexter As a child, I was taught that Britain had been the first nation to abolish slavery, that the effort had been led by the politician William…
Review by Peter Reason What does it mean to see the world, and life on Earth, as sacred? How might this change our approach to life? These are questions that…
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small child at primary school, we celebrated Empire Day. Children were invited—expected—to take a Union Flag to school and wave it around….
Review by Liz Dexter Nightingale was the first female DJ on Radio One, having been a journalist and live TV presenter before then and ready for the tough time she…
Review by Karen Langley The bicentenary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky has seen a flurry of books about the man and his work. I covered Alex Christofi’s Dostoevsky in…
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies What a prodigious event this book is. Highsmith was an assiduous note-keeper and diarist. The calendar spread is 1941-1995. The editor has condensed ‘an estimated eight…
Reviewed by Harriet I’m a great admirer of Ann Patchett’s novels. I read Bel Canto when it first came out and have loved her writing ever since – here’s my…
Review by Hayley Anderton The first book I met when I started working in the wine trade was Jancis Robinson’s The Oxford Companion to Wine. Every shop I worked in…
Review by Liz Dexter “If I had any moral principles to declare, I came to realize, they were extremely simplistic. First, there was the supreme importance of kindness as a…