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 […]
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, […]
Maigret in Vichy
I’m making it a rule now always to have something French on my ereader. Earlier in the year it was Simenon’s Maigret’s Little Joke, which I blogged about in June, and I have just finished Maigret in Vichy. I loved them both. Simonen wrote over eighty Maigret stories – that is quite some going for […]
More Treasure
In my previous blog I wondered if ebooks would herald a resurgence in the publication of short stories and novellas. What I hadn’t fully realised was the extent to which it is already far easier to get hold of collections of short stories that in the past have been very hard to find or prohibitively […]