October 7, 2014 Behind The Sea Garden by Deborah Lawrenson The heroine of the Resistance may have been rising ninety, but she was still wearing racy red shoes. “Not so many years,” she said,…
July 31, 2014 To Come Back Increased: Hild by Nicola Griffith Written by Nicola Griffith For me a good novel is one that draws me in and puts me right there, right then, with the…
July 31, 2014 Nick Rennison talks about the Victorians… By Nick Rennison What is it about us and the Victorians? Here we are in 2014, in a world of smart phones, Twitter and…
July 24, 2014 ‘The Night Watchman’ and the Dilemma of Living in Portugal by Richard Zimler Imagine a country with the lowest salaries in Western Europe, where about 40 percent of young people are unemployed, and where 50,000 shops went…
July 17, 2014 Jonathan Smith on his book Wilfred and Eileen Written by Jonathan Smith Wilfred and Eileen was well received in the literary pages in 1976. The novel was dramatized on Radio 4 in 1983…
July 17, 2014 The Broken Landscape of Berlin by Ben Fergusson Written by Ben Fergusson Berlin is full of holes. Literally. The moment you notice them, you begin to see them everywhere. Deep starbursts in…
July 4, 2014 Philipp Meyer and Linda Spalding talk to Kirsty Wark at Hay By Linda Spalding The Hay Festival is mythic to Canadians. What I mean is that we all covet an invitation. Mine came by email…
April 30, 2014 On Sisters of Treason by Elizabeth Fremantle I have always been fascinated in the forgotten lives of women in history and Sisters of Treason (the second in my Tudor trilogy) exposes the lives…
April 29, 2014 On Translating Boel Westin’s Biography of Tove Jansson – by translator Silvester Mazzarella I am ashamed to admit that I lived in Helsinki (in Swedish Helsingfors), for more than twenty years during Tove Jansson’s lifetime without ever…
April 29, 2014 The Bookshop That Floated Away by Sarah Henshaw In early 2011 I realised the bookshop I’d been running for the last two years would probably have to close. It operated from a…
April 17, 2014 Why you should read The Runaways, by Adrienne Byrne Winner of the Hesperus ‘Uncover a Children’s Classic Competition’, 2013 I was about ten when I discovered this book in my local library. It…
April 8, 2014 The Genesis of ‘After Me Comes The Flood’, by Sarah Perry Sarah Perry has lived in Cambridge, Manila and London. A winner of the Shiva Naipaul Memorial prize and a Royal Holloway doctoral studentship, she…
