Books

For various reasons I’m not a great reader of biography. Most are so long that they take up a month’s reading, they tend to detail day by day the life of the subject rather than provide a full picture of him/her and I do not remember much of the content. However I greatly enjoyed Andrew [...]

Junichoro Tanizaki is one of the Japanese literary giants of the twentieth century. I was invited to a book club where the book under review was his The Makioka Sisters. This is the story of 4 sisters, the daughters of an Osakan merchant, whose family wealth and status is dwindling in the 1930s. I [...]

One thing we don’t do on the Rust is product endorsement for financial gain. Readers may not realise that when, for example, a celebrity is recommending somewhere or something in a newspaper he/she is expecting a high payment. So when I recommend the Moleskine range of journals it is because [...]

One discovers the death of someone one knows in all sorts of ways. Normally somebody closer to the deceased than I informs me. Yesterday I learned of the passing of novelist Justn Cartwright aged 73 from his obituary in the Telegraph. A few years ago I saw quite a bit of him. I was a consultant to [...]