Just in

Books

Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont

This 1971 novel by Elizabeth Taylor – her eleventh – short-listed for the Booker Prize [images herein taken from the 2005 US-produced movie version of the same name directed by Dan Ireland with a largely-British cast list headed by Joan Plowright as Mrs Palfrey and Rupert Friend as [...]

October 24, 2022 // 0 Comments

Calling the shots/David Dein

David Dein is one of the most successful figures in football in the last 50 years and here he tells his story and his recipe for achievement. He acquired and subsequently lost a fortune in the sugar trade, went onto the Arsenal board where he formed – with Arsene Wenger – one of the [...]

September 27, 2022 // 0 Comments

Reflections upon the death of HM The Queen

I suspect like many Rusters over the past week, I have taken the news of the Queen’s death last Thursday – and watched all the resulting consequences, including the carefully-rehearsed-down-to-the-last-detail administrative and ancient (and some not so ancient) preparations, traditions, [...]

September 15, 2022 // 0 Comments

Act of Oblivion/Robert Harris

Critics have hailed Robert Harris’ latest novel as his best since Fatherland.   It’s historical fiction. Charles II, on being restored to the throne, issued a blanket pardon to all who fought for Parliament except those responsible for his father’s death known as the Regicides. Two such [...]

September 13, 2022 // 0 Comments

Sense and Sensibility (1995)/director Ang Lee

My comment that Jane Austen is better enjoyed by film than book were tested by this 1995 film directed by the esteemed Korean director Ang  Lee. It had a strong cast of Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, Imelda Staunton, Elizabeth Spriggs, Robert Hardy, Harriet Walter, Tom Wilkinson, Alan [...]

September 9, 2022 // 0 Comments

Persuasion/Jane Austen

Reading this classic novel raises the question of the extent to which any reader can appreciate a book of little relevance to our times. Jane Austen’s world is the one of the genteel aristocracy – privileged, snobbish, devoid of work – where ambition is social and gossip peddled. It [...]

September 2, 2022 // 0 Comments

Michel Houllebecq and Jane Austen

I have just finished Lanzarote by Michel Houellebecq. It’s a novella of less than 80 pages and contains his normal themes of sex obsession and mass tourism. The story – such as it is – is that Michel, refusing to go to a Muslim country, decides on Lanzarote the Canary Island for a [...]

August 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Mercury Pictures Presents/Anthony Marra

I was disappointed by this book, which promised to be about a B-movie Hollywood studio in the late 1930s and early 1940s, a subject of great interest to me. In fact, but it was more about a film executive Maria Lagana, whose father – a Roman human rights lawyer – was exiled by [...]

August 17, 2022 // 0 Comments

Ancestry: A Novel/Simon Mawer

Since publication of The Glass Room, a novel based less on people than a modernist villa in Czechoslovakia, Simon Mawer has had a loyal readership. In his latest Ancestry he recounts the stories of Abraham Block, who goes to sea from the Suffolk village of Kessingland, and Corporal George Mawer [...]

August 10, 2022 // 0 Comments

An Army at Dawn/The Day of Battle – Rick Atkinson

Army at Dawn and Day of Battle are the first two parts of the Liberation Trilogy by Rick Atkinson which chronicle the American entrance and input in the Second World War. The first covers the Torch landings (1942) in North Africa, the second the Sicily and Mainland Italian campaign (1943-44). [...]

July 29, 2022 // 0 Comments

1 … 3 4 5 6 7 … 33

Copyright © 2024 The National Rust | Design by Premonition