Cairn by Kathleen Jamie
Review by Peter Reason I am sitting under the old apple tree in our Orchard on a sunny summer afternoon, looking over the meadow grass swaying in the light breeze,…
Review by Peter Reason I am sitting under the old apple tree in our Orchard on a sunny summer afternoon, looking over the meadow grass swaying in the light breeze,…
An Epic Friendship, the Rise of Improv and the Making of an American Film Classic Review by Annabel Full disclosure: I saw The Blues Brothers on the first day of…
Review by Liz Dexter Fascinatingly, many of the small towns I found along the way seemed to be stuck in a time warp. I cycled past rusted 1940s Studebakers and…
Review by Annabel Ever since his first two books, Stuff Matters (2012) and Liquid (2018), I’ve been waiting for Miodownik to complete his states of matter trilogy with a book…
Review by Annabel Back in March, Shiny took part in the blogtour for Melville House’s initial books in its ‘Futures’ series. The first books in the series of small format…
Review by Simon Thomas In the past decade, a trend has developed where the lines between biography and autobiography, between non-fiction and memoir, have collapsed in on themselves. The author…
Review by Karen Langley When most people think of the high profile spies of the 20th century, names like Burgess, McLean and of course Kim Philby are probably the first…
Translated by Alexander Booth Review by Karen Langley 2024 is the centenary of the death of author Franz Kafka and the year has seen a flurry of interest focusing on…
Reviewed by Elaine Simpson-Long Queen Elizabeth II had fifteen prime ministers during her reign. Queen Victoria had fourteen. The weekly meetings between Queen Elizabeth and her prime minister were one…
Review by Peter Reason James Bradley, the Australian novelist and essayist, chooses an apt epigraph from Arthur C. Clarke for his book: ‘How inappropriate to call this planet “Earth”, when…
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Thomas James Wise (1859-1937) was a bibliophile and thief’, says Wikipedia. He was indeed. As Joseph Hone puts it in this fascinating exploration of ‘the most sensational…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book is also about me and about why anyone in the right mind would choose to be a psychiatrist. I hope that it serves as…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter I would like to say to the non-African reader of this book that I hope I have demonstrated that Africa has a history, that it is…
Review by Karen Langley Nicholas Borodin (as he is billed here) is something of a man of mystery, at least for the English speaking reader. Apart from his memoir, One…
I am a very critical reader; there are not many books that I unreservedly admire. So it is notable that when I finished reading Thunderclap, I closed the covers, turned…
Edited and annotated by Robert Chandler Review by Karen Langley The last decade or so has seen a resurgence of interest in Russian émigré writing with a host of forgotten…
Reviewed by Harriet Who remembers reading The Eagle of the Ninth? First published in 1954, when Sutcliff was 34, it is set in Roman Britain and tells the story of…
Reviewed by Gill Davies In the summer of 1917 Virginia Woolf was living at Asheham, a house near Lewes in Sussex. She was 35 and hadn’t written anything for two…
Review by Rob Spence Anthony Burgess was, of course, one of the most significant novelists of the second half of the twentieth century, publishing over thirty novels, (a centenary reading…
Reviewed by Harriet I have set myself many tasks for the year – I wonder how many will be accomplished? A Novel called Middlemarch, a long poem on Timoleon, and…
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long When Alexander Larman wrote The Crown in Crisis: Countdown to the Abdication about Edward VIII, he had no idea that it would be the beginning of…
Review by Rob Spence When Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in October last year that the multi-billion pound rail infrastructure programme HS2 would not, after all, be completed, leaving Manchester…
Reviewed by Harriet In the back of my mind I was always sure that wonderful things were waiting for me, but I’d got to get through a lot of horrors…
Review by Karen Langley Back in the 20th century, the world was a very different place to live in if you were female and/or gay. Equal pay was a pipe…