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Tag: Reviewer: Spence R

March 15, 2022

The Former Boy Wonder by Robert Graham

Review by Rob Spence Pete Duffy is having a mid-life crisis. His fiftieth birthday is on the horizon, and his career as a freelance…

March 1, 2022

Into Egypt by Rosalind Brackenbury

Review by Rob Spence This novel, first published nearly half a century ago, deals with matters which still, sadly, resonate today. Our protagonist is…

February 17, 2022

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…

September 28, 2021

The Lifeline by Hugo Charteris

By Rob Spence If you are, as I am, a child of the fifties, then one of your first televisual memories will be of…

July 8, 2021

Broken Lights, by Basil Ramsay Anderson

Reviewed by Rob Spence Years ago, I was teaching an undergraduate class on the topic of the poetry of the bard of Orkney, George…

May 18, 2021

King Arthur’s Death by Michael Smith

Reviewed by Rob Spence Last year, I reviewed Michael Smith’s excellent new version of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He…

May 11, 2021

Anthony Burgess, Collected Poems, edited by Jonathan Mann

Reviewed by Rob Spence Inevitably, when Anthony Burgess is mentioned, people who have heard of him will associate him with the notorious novel and…

May 4, 2021

The Craft of Poetry by Lucy Newlyn

Reviewed by Rob Spence Lucy Newlyn is a intriguing literary figure. She had a career as an Oxford don, publishing well-regarded studies of Romantic…

April 27, 2021

Whitman in Washington by Kenneth Price

Reviewed by Rob Spence Kenneth Price is the co-director of the Walt Whitman Archive, and one of the leading experts on the poet, having…

April 20, 2021

Commemorative Modernisms by Alice Kelly

Review by Rob Spence Modernism has always resisted precise definition, and in recent years it has been normal in literary-critical circles to use the…

December 16, 2020

The Story of Keth by Blanche Girouard

Reviewed by Rob Spence Blanche Girouard, born in 1898,  was a prominent figure in the Anglo-Irish aristocracy of the early twentieth century. Her father…

December 9, 2020

Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural Born Rebel, by Rachel Holmes

Reviewed by Rob Spence I recently watched the Ethiopia episode of Afua Hirsch’s excellent series African Renaissance, in which I was startled to see…

July 21, 2020

My Summer Reading: Gawain and The Green Knight – Michael Smith

Members of the Shiny reviewing team share previously published books from their shelves that they’re reading now… Review by Rob Spence Readers of Shiny…

June 25, 2020

Westwind by Ian Rankin

Paperback review by Rob Spence It comes as a bit of a shock to realise that Ian Rankin has now published well over thirty…

June 16, 2020

James and Nora: A Portrait of a Marriage by Edna O’Brien

Review by Rob Spence Last year, Weidenfeld and Nicholson reissued Edna O’Brien’s 1999 biography of Joyce, an entertainingly idiosyncratic volume, which is reviewed here….

June 11, 2020

Victory For The Slain by Hugh Lofting

Review by Rob Spence When we think of First World War poets, it’s safe to say that Hugh Lofting will not be the first…

March 31, 2020

A Little History of Poetry by John Carey

Review by Rob Spence In 1935, the doyen of art critics, Ernst Gombrich, was a young, unemployed former student with a PhD in art…

March 17, 2020

James Joyce by Edna O’Brien

Review by Rob Spence Edna O’Brien’s position as one of the most significant modern Irish writers is undisputed, and here, in this reissue of…

January 28, 2020

So Brightly at the Last by Ian Shircore

Review by Rob Spence In one important respect, this book was outdated at the moment it was published: its subject, Clive James, having endured…

moonlighting nathan waddell
September 17, 2019

Moonlighting: Beethoven and Literary Modernism, by Nathan Waddell

Review by Rob Spence When the newly-elected Brexit party MEPs took their place at the European Parliament in June, they used the opening ceremony…

June 6, 2019

We, The Survivors by Tash Aw

Review by Rob Spence Malaysian novelist Tash Aw’s fourth novel marks a departure in style for him. Rather than the broad canvas he presented…

baruch gnostic
May 14, 2019

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin, by Geoffrey Hill

Edited by Kenneth Haynes Reviewed by Rob Spence When Geoffrey Hill died in 2016, his monumental Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952 -2012 was still fresh, its astonishing…

Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy
April 2, 2019

Walter Gropius: Visionary Founder of the Bauhaus by Fiona MacCarthy

Review by Rob Spence It probably doesn’t occur to many people as they struggle to fix bolt B to batten F of the Ikea…

Night Tiger Yangsze Choo
March 14, 2019

The Night Tiger by Yangsze Choo

Review by Rob Spence English-language fiction set in colonial Malaya tended in the past to focus on the lives of the Empire types who…

Winterman alex walters
March 5, 2019

Winterman by Alex Walters

Review by Rob Spence East Anglia has quite a lot of previous when it comes to crime fiction: Colin Watson’s chronicles of Flaxborough, James…

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