Ghost Stories
On Christmas Day we watched ‘The Tractate Middoth,’ an M. R. James ghost story adapted and directed by Mark Gatiss. It was enjoyable, but I don’t think M. R. James is all that easy to adapt. So much of the pleasure of reading him is in the tone of the writing. More interesting for me […]
Reading resolutions
This is a good time to take stock of the previous year and plan for the next one. For me the reading highlight of 2013 had to be Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate. It towered above everything else. What a book, and what a man.The crime novel that’s stuck in my mind is one that […]
Birthday
It was my birthday on the 18th December – and also that of my Italian friend, Daniella, who informed that we share a birthday with Brad Pitt. Apparently it is his 50th and that is hot news in the Italian media. Brad Pitt? Fifty? It seems just the other day that he was the young […]
Low Spirits
It’s that time of year. It’s dark when I wake up and dark again by the time my daughter gets home. A succession of grey days when it never seems to get properly light sends my spirits plummeting. My friend Sue has been been feeling low, too: no secret as she has been blogging about […]
Lost in a Book
I had a day in London yesterday and travelling on the tube between Piccadilly and King’s Cross I sat opposite a young man who was totally engrossed in his SF novel, Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune. He was far away, on another planet. One of the consequences of people reading so much electronically is that […]
Endings
I’ve just read Norwegian by Night, by Derek B. Miller. It won the CWA John Creasey Dagger for best debut novel this year and it was a worthy winner. Sheldon Horowitz, elderly watch-repairer and Korean veteran, suffering from dementia, is living in Oslo with his grandaughter when he witnesses the murder of a young woman […]
Penelope Fitzgerald
I am well into Hermione Lee’s biography of Penelope Fitzgerald and I am riveted. I’ll be blogging about it when I have finished it. It is particularly fascinating to read a biography when the subject is someone you’ve known.I first met Penelope when I was curator at the William Morris Society at Kelmscott House in […]
The Seven per Cent Solution
Or to give its full title, The Seven Per Cent Solution Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D., as edited by Nicholas Meyer (published 1975). It is of course a Sherlock Holmes pastiche and a clever and enjoyable one. Given recent news headlines, this is a somewhat timely blog for the […]
A Moral Issue
I don’t usually read a Sunday paper, but yesterday a friend who was here for the week-end bought The Observer. There was a superb article by journalist Carole Cadwalladr who spent a week working undercover for Amazon at their Swansea warehouse. It made sobering reading. Long hours, poor pay, employment rights avoided by hiring through […]