The Poisonous Solicitor, by Stephen Bates
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies Back when I aspired to write crime fiction but realised I was a lousy plotter, I used to buy used true-crime magazines on Preston market to…
The Lives of the Saints by Sebastian Barry
Reviewed by Harriet Anyone who knows me or reads my reviews will know that I’m a great admirer of Sebastian Barry. I’ve reviewed three of his novels on Shiny (here,…
The Gift of a Radio by Justin Webb
Review by Annabel The TV news came on and a lugubrious looking chap in a light-coloured suit with a deep, plummy voice said something about the balance of payments. ‘That’s…
Brainspotting: Adventures in Neurology by A. J. Lees
Reviewed by Annabel Dr Andrew Lees is a neurology professor at the National Hospital in London the first English hospital dedicated exclusively to treating the diseases of the nervous system….
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon: The Diaries 1938-1943 – Volume 2, edited by Simon Heffer
Review by Elaine Simpson-Long The second volume of these diaries was delivered by my postman, who was visibly having difficulty handing it over as he had a huge pile of…
Truly Madly by Stephen Galloway
Reviewed by Harriet ‘Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier and the Romance of the Century’ is the subtitle of this joint biography by Stephen Galloway. The author, previously executive editor of the…
Brittle With Relics: A History of Wales 1962-1997 by Richard King
Review by Liz Dexter In this extraordinary book, Richard King takes the voices of a hundred Welsh people who were active in various forms of culture and politics over the…
The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya
Review by Terence Jagger This is a lively and compelling biography of one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century, who has somehow escaped the notice of the general…
After Agatha: Women Write Crime by Sally Cline
Review by Karen Langley We readers have never been able to get enough of crime fiction, it seems, and in the 21st century the genre is as popular as it…
The Science of Life and Death in Frankenstein by Sharon Ruston
Review by Annabel Gaskell Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, her novel conceived during that momentous trip to Geneva in 1816 during ‘the year without a summer’, is supremely concerned with the subject…
Biography & Memoir, Diaries
Books About Books, Publishing
History & Politics, Feminism, Sociology
Non Fiction
No One Round Here Reads Tolstoy: Memoirs of a Working-Class Reader by Mark Hodkinson
Review by Liz Dexter While he’s now a publisher and editor with his own imprint, Hodkinson grew up in a terrace house in Rochdale with one book in the house…
Great Literary Friendships by Janet Phillips
Reviewed by Harriet When you see the title of this book, you may think, as I did initially, that it was going to be about friendships between writers (Pope and…
Stalin’s Library, by Geoffrey Roberts
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies One review of this book has come on quite strong against Roberts’ view of Stalin – prominent among the twentieth century’s most publicised murderous dictators and…
Living and Dying With Proust, by Christopher Prendergast
Review by Rob Spence Like Joyce’s Ulysses, Proust’s A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu is seen as a kind of literary Everest, to be attempted only by the brave or…
Everything is True: A Junior Doctor’s Story of Life, Death and Grief in a Time of Pandemic, by Roopa Farooki
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster I don’t know about you, but I can’t get enough of Covid-19 chronicles. My favourites of the twenty-some I’ve read thus far have come from the…
1942: Britain at the Brink, by Taylor Downing
Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies As E. H Carr’s masterly introduction to the study of history, What Is History?, explains, the idea of a fully objective, neutral and truthful history is…
White Debt by Thomas Harding
Review by Liz Dexter As a child, I was taught that Britain had been the first nation to abolish slavery, that the effort had been led by the politician William…
This Sacred Life: Humanity’s place in a wounded world by Norman Wirzba
Review by Peter Reason What does it mean to see the world, and life on Earth, as sacred? How might this change our approach to life? These are questions that…
The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis by Amitav Ghosh
Review by Peter Reason When I was a small child at primary school, we celebrated Empire Day. Children were invited—expected—to take a Union Flag to school and wave it around….
Hey Hi Hello: Five decades of Pop Culture from Britain’s Broadcasting DJ Pioneer by Annie Nightingale
Review by Liz Dexter Nightingale was the first female DJ on Radio One, having been a journalist and live TV presenter before then and ready for the tough time she…
The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky, A Crime and Its Punishment by Kevin Birmingham
Review by Karen Langley The bicentenary of the birth of Fyodor Dostoevsky has seen a flurry of books about the man and his work. I covered Alex Christofi’s Dostoevsky in…
Everybody: A Book About Freedom by olivia laing
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Olivia Laing has established herself as a group biographer par excellence, taking as her subjects alcoholic writers for the superb The Trip to Echo Spring (2013,…
Her Diaries and Notebooks, by Patricia Highsmith, edited by Anna von Planta
Review by Basil Ransome-Davies What a prodigious event this book is. Highsmith was an assiduous note-keeper and diarist. The calendar spread is 1941-1995. The editor has condensed ‘an estimated eight…
These Precious Days by Ann Patchett
Reviewed by Harriet I’m a great admirer of Ann Patchett’s novels. I read Bel Canto when it first came out and have loved her writing ever since – here’s my…