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Rendezvous Russian Tea Rooms/ Paul Willetts

In  a recent post I referred to Mers el Kebir as an understated event in Winston Churchill’s Premiership and today in reviewing the above I shall be referring to another equally important but uncovered one. Archibald ‘Jock’ Ramsay MP This book is a true and gripping account of [...]

March 11, 2018 // 0 Comments

The Story of the Jews/Volumes 1 & 2 – Simon Schama

Famously during the premier of Exodus the American humourist Mort Sahl stood up and said: “Let my people go.” I felt much the same in reading Simon Schama’s two mighty tomes. There is no doubt that it is work of considerable and detailed scholarship but detailed is the key word. [...]

March 1, 2018 // 0 Comments

A Good Read

For many years the book programme on Radio 4 A Good Read was a source of enjoyable recommendation but like many a broadcast on the BBC its direction has been blown away by the headwinds of feminist dogma. On yesterday’s programme the first contributor Jayde Adams, a comedian, freely admitted [...]

February 14, 2018 // 0 Comments

Keith Waterhouse/ Renaissance Man

I have always been a fan of Keith Waterhouse who passed away aged 81 in 2009. He was a massive talent, a polymath of all forms of writing. He made his name with Willis Hall as a scriptwriter for David Frost forming a collaboration with Ned Sherrin the first producer of  That Was the Week That [...]

January 19, 2018 // 0 Comments

Slow Horses/Mick Herron

The espionage novel is always changing form. We have had the public school adventurer like Bulldog Drummond or Richard Hannay, the glamourous agent James Bond, the working class anti-hero Harry Palmer created by Len Deighton and then John Le Carre. Mick Herron is in the Len Deighton/John Le Carre [...]

January 13, 2018 // 0 Comments

The Dreams of Bethany Mellmoth/ William Boyd

I always read a William Boyd novel after publication – I am not alone as he is one of our most popular writers. Yet he is hard to classify. You could say he is a humorous author, which he is, but he writes espionage too. One of my favourites Any Human Heart is an account of a rich life, [...]

December 25, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Impostor/Javier Cercas

This is a many layered, intriguing “story”. I deliberately use inverted commas as it recounts the life of Enric Marco, who fought with the Republicans and was deported to Flossenburg concentration camp. Except all this was fabricated by Marco who for 50 years was no more than a garage [...]

December 20, 2017 // 0 Comments

Still at it

A while back the Rust featured an appreciation of refreshingly candid and slightly maverick veteran UK neurosurgeon Henry Marsh who had been interviewed on an edition of Radio Five Live’s afternoon show about a second autobiographical book that he had written. He’s evidently got [...]

November 27, 2017 // 0 Comments

The Seville Communion /Artur Perez Reverte

My local bookshop Daunts, which was originally a travel bookshop, recommended this book for the National Rust trip to Andalusia. Arturo Perez-Reverte Reverte is  regarded amongst the best of the modern Spanish authors and I enjoyed his The Fencing Master.  This as the title suggests is set in [...]

November 17, 2017 // 0 Comments

French Riviera And Its Artists/ John Baxter

This is the fourth book I have read on the artistic life on the Riviera. I am therefore tempted to ask John Pargiter to quote me odds on how long it takes any author to cite Somerset Maugham’s description of it as “a sunny place for shady people”. According to John Baxter, a [...]

November 9, 2017 // 0 Comments

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