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.
Three Chinese Poets
There couldn’t be a much greater contrast between two of the books I read this week: THREE CHINESE POETS: TRANSLATIONS OF POEMS BY WANG WEI, LAI BI AND DU FU by Vikram Seth and WINTER PREY by John Sandford. Seth’s three poets were writing at the time of the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century. […]
Life on Air
I loved David Attenborough’s LIFE ON AIR: MEMOIRS OF A BROADCASTER and didn’t want to get to the end. It is so very English in its particular kind of charm and reticence and modesty, full of self-deprecating humour. I especially enjoyed the story about two doughty explorers of the 1930s, Bill Tillman and Eric Shipton, […]
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
As I said last week I have to be careful about what I read at the moment, so that I don’t muddy the waters for the novel I’m writing. This collection of early detective stories from the decade or two before the first world war fits the bill nicely. It was edited by Hugh Greene […]