The Paris Review Interviews I
I’ve been reading these with great pleasure. All of these interviews with leading writers have been published before – the earliest (Dorothy Parker) in the Paris Review of 1956, the latest (Joan Didion) in 2006, but they all bear reading again. They’ve been selected by Philip Gourevitch and what a selection, Kurt Vonnegut rubs shoulders […]
Bamboo
I enjoyed this collection of William Boyd’s miscellaneous writings. I’ve only read one of his novels, years ago, AN ICE-CREAM WAR. Nothing since. This made me think I might read more. I particularly liked his accounts of his rebarbative public school and his childhood in Africa. And the eulogies to two particular institutions, the British […]
Can Any Mother Help Me?
This marvellous book, edited by Jenna Bailey, is a collection of extracts from the magazines of the Cooperative Correspondence Club. This was simply a group of women, with a somewhat shifting membership, who between the 1935 to 1990 contributed letters and articles to a magazine edited by one of their number and circulated privately amongst […]
Home Fires Burning
I loved Georgina Lee’s Great War diaries, HOME FIRES BURNING, written for her baby son, Harry, and got completely absorbed in her world. She married her solicitor husband when she was 41 and had her adored only child when she was 43 or 44. I identified with her as an older mother, though my life […]
Injury Time
Sometimes the very fact that someone presses a book on you sets up a resistance that makes you disinclined to read it. Contrary, I know, but there it is. This happened to me recently with INJURY TIME. a memoir by poet and all-round man of letters, D. J. Enright. I hadn’t read anything by him […]
The Lincoln Lawyer
Some weeks I just don’t know what I want to read and I’m not happy with anything. I pick at this and that, but can’t settle. Reviewers never come out and say ‘I wasn’t in a very good mood when I read this, so maybe the problem is with me, not the book’ but I […]
I’m Not Scared
i’ve just finished reading this novel by Italian novelist, Niccolo Ammaniti, for my book group. We have possibly the most ethnically diverse book group in Britain: France, Italy, Germany, South Korea, Japan, Columbia are all represented and one or two more. This is because we are a university group – Sheffield has students and staff […]
Forgot to say . . .
that I got my watch back. A kind old lady had picked it up outside the vet’s, but she only goes to the Post Office once a week so it was a while before she saw the notice I’d put up.