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The Island by Ragnar Jónasson
It’s 1988, many years before the events recounted in the first of the Hidden Iceland trilogy, The Darkness. A pair of teenagers have headed out to a remote summer house for a weekend of passion – but things don’t go quite the way they’d planned. Next thing, the girl’s father has been arrested and charged…
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The Darkness by Ragnar Jónasson
Following on from the latest Yrsa Sigurðardóttir novel, I thought I’d stay in Iceland and catch up with Ragnar Jónasson who I’ve been meaning to read for a while. His latest series of books are the Hidden Iceland trilogy, and The Darkness is the first of the three novels. Hulda Hermannsdottir is approaching her retirement,…
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The Absolution by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir
The Absolution is the third in the “Children’s House” series of books from one if Iceland’s leading crime writers. A teenager has been brutally murdered, with the perpetrator first capturing some kind of apology and then sharing the video to victim’s friends on Snapchat. The police race to capture the video while it’s still there and…
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NAS Upgrading Fun
I’m documenting this, just in case there’s someone out there for whom it’s useful. I had two NAS drives, both made by Synology. I have a DS210j that I bought back in 2010. It had a pair of 2TB drives in it with a mirror RAID array, and perhaps the most important thing stored on…
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Orchids – Colours of Colombia at Kew Gardens
Somehow it has been years and years since I last visited Kew Gardens. I managed to visit on the penultimate day of their Orchids – Colours of Colombia exhibition, which seems to have proved wildly popular. I got down to Kew just after opening on Friday and the guy at the ticket desk suggested that…
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Reasons to be Cheerful by Nina Stibbe
It’s the early 1980s and our narrator, Lizzie Vogel, is about to leave home for the first time, and move from her village into the city of Leicester. Her first fulltime job is to be a dental assistant working for the awful JP and his partner Tammy. The job comes with its own flat, and…
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BritBox
ITV plc has just reported its annual results, and it was for that reason that we got the announcement of BritBox pretty much simultaneously. Because, from the careful phrasing the in the press release, you can tell that the deal hasn’t quite been done and that there is a final bit of finessing to do:…
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Where Next for ILR?
When LBC launched in 1973, it was the first Independent Local Radio (ILR) station in the UK. Capital Radio was the second station, launching just a eight days after LBC. In due course, there would be more than 200 such stations across the country. Today, we must wonder whether we are beginning to see the…
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Walking in Berlin by Franz Hessel
I picked up a copy of Walking in Berlin over Christmas having become fascinated by the period after reading the first couple of Volker Kutscher’s Gereon Rath novels and watching the superb TV dramatisation Babylon Berlin. A recent trip to Berlin also got me even more interested in the period. This book, newly translated by Amanda…
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IP Contributions on the Radio
This morning I Tweeted this, and it got more than a few likes: (NB. I apologise for the misplaced apostrophe in end’s – it should have been ends’. And using both today and this morning was tautological.) This came after I heard two interviews on Radio 4’s Today programme, and a third on Five Live,…
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The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells
This book lays out the horrifying facts about climate change in a compelling and urgent way. In The Uninhabitable Earth, David Wallace-Wells takes a comprehensive stroll through the very real perils that the world is facing from climate change. He opens with a devastating picture of just how quickly we’re going to see real suffering and destruction,…
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Berberian Sound Studio
Berberian Sound Studio was a very fine 2012 horror film made by Peter Strickland. Set in the seventies, Toby Jones starred as Gilderoy, a sound mixer who has been employed to work on an Italian film called The Equestrian Vortex. He believes that he was employed because of his sound recording and mixing on a documentary about…
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Yellowface/All The Lovers In The Night
Yellowface by R F Kuang I first came across R F Kuang with last year’s very enjoyable Babel, an alternate history of the British Empire told in a world where magic exists and is controlled by an elite group of individuals. Yellowface is very different, but no less enjoyable. It’s a book about books, and…
Hadrian’s Wall
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