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…
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 So wrote Muriel Spark in an unpublished Author’s Note to…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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 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…
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…
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…
