Village School
Lyn over at I Prefer Reading mentioned Miss Read the other day. It reminded me that I saw her obituary (she was the writer, Dora Saint) and was mildly surprised. I remembered reading her years and years ago, when I was at school and had assumed that she was elderly then. I wondered if it […]
Doris Lessing
When I graduated in the seventies from Leicester University, Doris Lessing was the guest speaker. I don’t remember much of what she said, something about how we should make the most of the privelege of our education comes vaguely to mind. Only now do I connect that with the fact that she herself left school […]
A Proustian moment
The other day I got The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen down from the shelf to check something. It must be years and years – maybe even decades – since I opened it and I got a surprise when I saw written inside the front cover the name of a boyfriend that I’d gone out […]
Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case
So at last it’s over. After twenty-four years David Suchet’s magnificent run as Hercule Poirot came to an end last night – and what an end. The last few episodes had been a bit disappointing, but last night’s was a return to form and I loved it. It had an appropriately elegiac and autumnal feel. […]
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Meyer Landsman, the policeman protagonist – hero woud be pitching it far too high – has a drink problem, a failed marriage, and is inevitably taken off the case after maverick behaviour. But that’s where Chabon’s novel parts company with classic noir. Because the mean streets in question are not those of Los Angeles, but […]
The Romance of the Internet
This morning a book arrived in the post, another Michael Gilbert, Body of a Girl, which I ordered through Abebooks. Once I have read this, I think I’ll have read all of his. It was sent from Green Earth books, Auburn, Washington State, not very far from Seattle. Including postage, this cost me only £4.96, […]