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A Little Excitement
I was sitting down earlier, finishing off The Life of Pi in the heat of my living room, when I heard an argument through my open back window. I listened a little, and it sounded like someone was going to do some serious injury to someone else. There were at least two pleading voices saying…
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The Life of Pi
This was the Booker winner earlier this year, and I wasn’t totally sure about it. It had received good reviews, but since it’s the story of an Indian boy (not Greek as maybe the title suggests) travelling across the ocean in the company of various animals including a Bengal tiger, I took the book to…
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Aftermath
My book reading is playing its usual game of jumping around a little, but having quite enjoyed slugging back the last Inspector Banks book I read, I picked up another at the weekend. In Aftermath, the crime – a very grisly one – has already been committed and the killer is fighting for his life…
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Alexander Walker
Sadly Alexander Walker, film critic for over 40 years at the Evening Standard has died at the age of 73. You didn’t always take his side of things with films, but he always remained an excellent and never less than fascinating film reviewer – one that I’d always read. The Standard’s obituary is here, The…
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Old Bailey Trials – 1674 to 1834
This is amazing! A group have taken about 150 years of Old Bailey transcripts (well summarisings), scanned, catalogued, databased, and put on a website. And it’s all free with seemingly no catches. A few weeks back I visted the London 1753 exhibition at the British Museum a few weeks back (entry seems to be sadly…
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L’Alpe d’Huez
What a superb day for the Tour today! I know it was a gloriously sunny day, but I spent all afternoon indoors watching Le Tour on TV. Now obviously the whole world has slipped into some kind of parallel dimension at the moment because ITV were showing live coverage of the race today with commentary…
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Soapbox
Yes of course this is a soapbox. This is my personal soapbox. I can write what I want! Does that make it worth reading. Umm… no. Not the fact that I’m writing it, just the fact that I might have something interesting to say.
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The Cutting Room
I suppose here’s an example of advertising getting a sale. I think that I only really picked up this because I’d seen it advertised quite a lot in the Guardian Review. It’s an interesting crime novel set amongst the world of antiques in Glasgow – with barely a policeman in sight. It has a promiscuous…
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Cold Is The Grave
The second Inspector Banks novel I’ve was probably slightly better than the first and I rattled through it at a rate of knots. I’m reasonably taken with this detective, although sometimes you do feel that there aren’t enough dead ends. Everything in this book lead in the same direction – but I suppose the same…
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ID Cards Once More
Well the Sunday Times reported last weekend that everyone in the UK is have to carry an ID card and will have to pay 39 pounds for the privilige! I’m sure that the story is phrased in as rabble-rousing a manner as possible, since I can’t see for the life of me that people will…
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Spooks
Well Tim Henman forced Spooks off our screens, with BBC 3 repeating the previous week’s claustrophobic episode. Once again, we had no actual “incident”, rather the ramifications of a Presidential visit to the UK. The episode seemed reasonably realistic, although any kind of personnel officer who behaved as the MI5 one did wouldn’t last long.…
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Any Human Heart
Any Human Heart reminds me a lot of a previous William Boyd book, The New Confessions, in that it’s a life story. A couple of years ago, William Boyd published a book that I’ve yet to read called Nat Tate – an American Artist which is fake biography. I believe that when it was originally…
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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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