Wild for Austen by Devoney Looser
Reviewed by Harriet ‘A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane’ promises the subtitle of this new book by Austen scholar Looser. I wonder how many people still think of Austen as…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Ecology & Environment, Natural World
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
Love, Anger & Betrayal: Just Stop Oil’s young climate campaigners, by Jonathan Porritt
Review by Peter Reason Sir Jonathon Espie Porritt, 2nd Baronet, CBE, Eton and Oxford; one might imagine him as a pillar of the British Establishment. Then you remember he was…
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark by Frances Wilson
Reviewed by Harriet It has always been my intention to practice the arts of pretence and counterfeit on the reader. So wrote Muriel Spark in an unpublished Author’s Note to…
Cloistered: My Years as a Nun by Catherine Coldstream
Reviewed by Harriet In my mind I am still running. Running towards the road. Running, running, running. The darkness is fresh around me, the air slicing across my face in…
Conversations with Rilke by Maurice Betz
Translated by Will Stone Review by Karen Langley Aside from his verses, Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke is probably best known to the English-speaking world for his prose work, The…
Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gaugin by Sue Prideaux
Reviewed by Harriet Before I started this very interesting and comprehensive book, I probably knew as much about Gauguin as most people. I’d seen countless reproductions of his powerful, imaginative…
Emile Zola: Writing Modern Life by Rachel Bowlby
Reviewed by Karen Langley The My Reading series from Oxford University Press takes as its premise that the best book recommendations come from someone who cares for the work in…
EL CID: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Mercenary, by Nora Berend
Review by Michael Eaude Exposing Fake History – FRANCO’S MURDEROUS FANTASIES El Cid is a legendary hero, a fearsome warrior who decisively defeated the Moors in the fight for a…
A Man of Few Words by Carlo Greppi
Translated by Howard Curtis Review by Karen Langley, 6 Mar 2025 Italian author and chemist Primo Levi is possibly one of the best-known commentators on the Holocaust; he began writing…
Colette, My Literary Mother by Michèle Roberts
Reviewed by Victoria Best, 13 Feb 2025 Colette is, I think, a very special writer. She writes with such beguiling charm, such seductive cleverness that she gets under your skin….
Birds, Beasts and Bedlam: Turning My Farm into an Ark for Lost Species by Ben Gow
Review by Liz Dexter If you wish to bludgeon badgers or beavers or remove peregrine falcons and hen harrier chicks from their nests, a way can be found. If you…
Portrait of the Art Dealer as a Young Man: New York in the Sixties, by Michael Findlay
Review by Annabel My fascination with the 1960s (the decade in which I was a child), will never die. Add in the world of art and a New York setting…
The Ghost Lake by Wendy Pratt
Review by Peter Reason Ghost Lake is a paleolithic, extinct lake that lies between the Yorkshire Wolds and Scarborough. In prehistoric times it was a real lake, the centre of…
Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation by Emily van Duyne
Written by Victoria Best There’s a lot going on in Emily van Duyne’s intriguingly hybrid work on Sylvia Plath, a book that has its feet in scholarship and its head…
The Blues Brothers by Daniel De Visé
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…
All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District by Esther Rutter
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…
Parallel Lives by Maryam Diener
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…
Completely Kafka by Nicolas Mahler
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…
You Don’t Have to be Mad to Work Here by Benji Waterhouse
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…
One Man in his Time: A Memoir, by N.M. Borodin
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…
Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death, by Laura Cumming
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…
And Time Was No More: Essential Stories and Memories, by Teffi
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…
Blue Remembered Hills by Rosemary Sutcliff
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…
Rural Hours – The Country Lives of Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Rosamond Lehmann by Harriet Baker
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…