Out in the Midday Sun by Margaret Shennan
Reviewed by Rob Spence The title of this book recalls Noel Coward’s jaunty song about the mad English, of course, and perhaps suggests that this will be a light-hearted romp…
Reviewed by Rob Spence The title of this book recalls Noel Coward’s jaunty song about the mad English, of course, and perhaps suggests that this will be a light-hearted romp…
Translated by Carol Brown Janeway Reviewed by Karen Langley There are many things we have to thank Pushkin Press for (Gaito Gazdanov, Teffi, gorgeously produced books, to name just a…
Reviewed by Rob Spence This book is a companion piece to Feigel’s The Love-Charm of Bombs (reviewed here), which examined the lives of some prominent writers in London during the Blitz and afterwards….
Reviewed by Harriet I was a slow starter where Angela Carter was concerned. I was given what I now think of as her masterpiece, Nights at the Circus, sometime in the…
Reviewed by Victoria The Prison Book Club was one of those books that I had high hopes for, being mildly fascinated by what goes on in your average book club, let…
Reviewed by Terence Jagger ‘Refugees have only been allowed a walk-on part in most histories of the twentieth century, and even then as subjects of external intervention rather than as…
Reviewed by Liz Dexter This book, which won the 2015 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, goes into the history of autism, research on autism and related syndromes over the years…
Reviewed by Harriet I can’t tell you how excited I was when I heard there was finally going to be a proper biography of the great crime writer Josephine Tey,…
Reviewed by Simon I’ve had the privilege of reviewing three different books by Oliver Sacks for Shiny New Books now, but this is the first since his sad death last year….
Reviewed by Anne Goodwin In the decades following the end of the Second World War, social psychology was preoccupied with an attempt to explain how ordinary people could commit such…
Reviewed by Barbara Howard Quoted in this book is Charlotte Brontë’s great aim and ambition in life ‘to be forever known’ as a poet, which she confided in a letter…
Reviewed by Victoria In 1965, shortly before Christmas, a young, ambitious mother of two children on the brink of publishing her first book of sociology let herself into a friend’s…
Reviewed by Harriet The role of King Lear is seen today as the ultimate challenge for the classical actor, the one that provides the supreme test of his abilities in…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton I discovered Gavin Maxwell’s books when newly exiled from a rural Scottish childhood. The first of his books that I found was Harpoon at a Venture. Drawn…
Reviewed by Karen Langley There’s always the danger that when an author becomes more famous than his works, those works will become so eclipsed that we’ll end up with an…
Reviewed by Simon This marks the third biography I’ve reviewed in Shiny New Books that is about a major figure in my doctoral thesis – three out of three of…
Reviewed by Simon This is the reason that small reprint publishers exist. Who else would print this attractive slim volume – only 63 pages – and bring back into print…
Reviewed by Simon Max Beerbohm’s name is known today, if at all, as the author of Zuleika Dobson – a curious sort of modernised Greek myth, where a preternaturally beautiful woman bewitches…
Reviewed by Helen Parry I’ve always loved the Oxford Companions, ever since I first encountered the Companion to English Literature about twenty-five years ago. They’re very easy to use and the alphabetically…
Reviewed by Annabel. As picture books for grown ups go, Mythology is the business. Now available in soft covers, this nine inches square book yields glorious pictorial spreads from the very moment you…
Reviewed by Hayley Anderton It was reading Jancis Robinson’s Confessions of a Wine Lover which initially pushed me to learn more about wine, and the second edition of The Oxford Companion to Wine that…
Reviewed by Simon The premise for My Katherine Mansfield Project is admittedly rather niche. If one is not already a fan of Kirsty Gunn, then one had better be a fan of…
Reviewed by Simon I have to confess that when I picked up Latest Readings, I knew very little about Clive James’ life and work. And, indeed, when I put it down…
Reviewed by Falaise Back in the ancient mists of time – or, at least, 1986 – a youthful version of me (think a bad David Bowie hairstyle perched on top…