After the Romanovs by Helen Rappaport
Reviewed by Rob Spence If you were tired of aimless flânerie in the Paris of the twenties, and fancied seeing Josephine Baker dancing at the Folies Bergère, you might be…
This Sporting Life: Sport and Liberty in England, 1760 -1960, by Robert Colls
Review by Rob Spence Last November, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, strikes by essential workers, transport chaos, a cost-of-living crisis and the continuing devastation of the war in…
Seven for a Secret by Mary Webb
Review by Rob Spence If you know Mary Webb’s work at all, it’s likely that you do so through her most successful novel, Precious Bane, published in 1926, and later…
H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe
Review by Rob Spence 2022 is a significant year in modernist studies: it marks the publication centenary of two of the definitive examples of literary modernism, James Joyce’s Ulysses and…
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 rock music journalist is in freefall….
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 an idealistic young English woman, Jo…
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…
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 the ITV series The Adventures of…
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 Mackay Brown. I made a passing…
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 has now turned his attention to…
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 then film A Clockwork Orange. Often…
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 poets as well as collections of…
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 published widely on his work. This…
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 plural form in order to emphasise…
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 was the Marquess of Waterford, and…
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 an interview with Sylvia Pankhurst’s daughter-in-law,…
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 New Books will be aware of…
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 novels since his début in 1986,…
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. Now, the same publishers have revived…
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 name that springs to mind. The creator…
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 history. He was commissioned by an…
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 her 1999 short biography, she tackles…
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 a terminal illness for ten years,…
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 as a stunt, turning their backs…