Homer nods, but copy-editors should be ever vigilant
We readers will swallow virtually anything. Talking animals? Fine, and not just in children’s books: what about Animal Farm and Watership Down? Ghosts, monsters, stories set far in the future or on other planets, novels set in the unknowable past such as Golding’s The Inheritors? Fine, fine, fine. Of course they won’t be to everyone’s […]
A Proustian moment
Not long ago, with time to spare before a Eurotunnel crossing my daughter and I wandered into the perfume section of the duty-free shop. And what a stroll down memory lane it turned out to be. The story of my life was there. The first perfume that I associate with my mother is Estée Lauder’s […]
Too much information?
The producers of the old Columbo series took a risk when they launched a show that began by showing not only the murder but also revealing the murderer. They got rid of the most obvious source of suspense: not only do we know whodunit, but really we know too that Columbo will uncover the truth. […]
The Time of my Life
I don’t want to read Catcher in the Rye again – or Salinger’s short stories – though I was impressed by them when I was around twenty. Nor am I tempted to reread Wuthering Heights (though Jane Eyre is another matter). I won’t be returning to The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings or Mervyn […]
Emma Lathen: The Agatha Christie of Wall Street
This appears on the cover of one of her books. That might be pitching it a bit high, but I do agree that Emma Lathen is a very good read. She is one of those writers who is in fact two writers. This kind of joint venture mostly happens in the crime-writing world, though my […]
The Red Right Hand
I’m surprised that I’d never heard of The Red Right Hand by Joel Townsley Rogers (published 1945 and now available as e-book) until recently. What a novel! The author runs full tilt at the plot, pulling the reader along with him, and keeps going, the pace never slackening, until finally, finally, he skids to a […]
What a difference a day makes . . .
I’m reading with great pleasure David Kynaston’s Modernity Britain: Opening the Box 1957-59. There is a particular fascination in reading about the period when one’s parents were young and I have been gripped by Kynaston’s encyclopedic account of just two years in the 1950s, as I was by his earlier work, Family Britain, dealing with […]
Stoner by John Williams
‘[Stoner] felt himself at last beginning to be a teacher, which was simply a man to whom his book is true, to whom is given a dignity of art that has little to do with his foolishness or weakness or inadequacy as a man. It was a knowledge of which he could not speak, but […]
An annoying thing that publishers do
There you are, racing towards the suspenseful climax of a crime novel, or maybe you’re enjoying it so much that you’re holding back a little, not wanting it to finish too soon. You gauge how much is left, at least a couple of chapters, time for one more stunning plot twist. But wait, what’s this? […]