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Biographies

I recently moved from reading fiction to biography.  Why do readers like biographies? The obvious explanation is to knoe more about the subject anf the times he/ she lived in. My own enjoyment lies elsewhere namely would I like to meet the subject? The first biography I read was that of Kevin [...]

January 17, 2026 // 0 Comments

Wisden arrives

The primrose cover of Wisden’s Cricket Almanack does not just herald the start of the cricket season, which is into its fourth round of Championship games, but of summer. John Wisden was the finest cricketer and coach of his age – the 1850s. Through his friendship and business association [...]

April 29, 2025 // 0 Comments

Everyone Brave is Forgiven/Chris Cleave

This book came recommended on A Good Read. Presenter Harriet Gilbert opined that it’s essentially two novels – one a plotted novel – and the other a World War Two account of the Blitz in London and the travails of Malta. Of the two elements “the plot” is, in my own view, [...]

April 21, 2025 // 0 Comments

Judgment at Tokyo/Gary Bass

Gary Bass, a Princeton historian, has written a magisterial and definitive work on the tribunal constituted by Supreme Commander Douglas MacArthur to try the main forces behind Japan’s war crimes during World War Two. The tribunal problems – one might even say flaws – were threefold: [...]

March 21, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Boys Book of Soccer (1957)

At a garden fête last year I bought the above slightly fixed volume and interesting reading it made too. Of most interest were the league tables for 1955/56. In those days you  had a Third Division – north and south – from which only one team was promoted. Brighton, Ipswich Town, [...]

February 21, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Upside Down World/Benjamin Moser

This book is an assessment of the Golden Age of Dutch Art – the 17th century- by an American who relocated from the States to Utrecht. He is not an art historian but an appreciator. I was recommended to it by a friend whose bag was more Renaissance Art but looked for an introduction to Dutch [...]

February 19, 2025 // 0 Comments

El Cid/The book and the film

I was recently given a new biography of El Cid, the Spanish 11th Century knight, by Nora Berend, a Cambridge University historian. Her thesis is that Rodrigo de Viva – far rom being a patriot – was a mercenary. She concedes that many of the primary sources are unreliable. However this [...]

January 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

Foreign detective writing

We tend to assume that only English-speaking writers can write detective novels. In Britain the genre is dominated by women – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjoriec Allingham and recently Val McDiamid. In fact some interesting detective novels have been written by French writers and [...]

January 9, 2025 // 0 Comments

An Officer And A Spy/Robert Harris

This book came heavily recommended by the podcast The Rest is History as a novel about the Dreyfus affaire that you could read in one sitting. In fact it took me a week, largely because the detail of the various trials were so copious. The scandal is seen – not through the eyes of Alfred [...]

January 4, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Atlas of Art Crime/Laura Evans

Laura Evans subdivides her engaging review of art crime into three categories: 1) Theft 2) Vandalism 3) Forgery In regard to theft you have to have quite a lot of chutzpah to steal a painting to enter a gallery, church or museum and appropriate a picture. The motivation is normally financial but [...]

December 26, 2024 // 0 Comments

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