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Based on a True Story/ Delphine de Vigan

The other day I was listening to the book programme A Good Read when the presenter Harriet Gilbert took an audible intake of breathe as she was aghast when a contributor confessed he did not feel like finishing one of the recommended novels. It raises the issue not uncommon in book clubs of the [...]

August 3, 2017 // 0 Comments

Fowey and Helford Estuary

Though Cornwall is not the Riviera, for its range of locations and talented characters drawn there, there is still much to do of interest. On Sunday we went to Fowey on the river Fowey and opposite lies Bodinnick where Gerald du Maurier had a chalet style home and introduced Daphne to the locale. [...]

August 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

A Life of Picasso (1881-1905)/John Richardson

John Richardson was the partner of Picasso collector Douglas Cooper and knew Picasso well. He is therefore well qualified to be Picasso’s biographer and has written 3 detailed volumes of his life. I recently read the first. I have to admit immediately that I am not a great reader of [...]

July 28, 2017 // 0 Comments

The French Riviera: a literary guide for travellers/Ted Jones

Travel writing is not one of my preferred reading genres though I recognize the merit of Eric Newby, Patrick Leigh Fermor, and the humour of Bill Bryson. Travel for me is visual and personal not objective and written. However I do enjoy a book on the characters that lived in a region I know well [...]

July 25, 2017 // 0 Comments

Victim/ Sarah Wooley

This play written by Sarah Woolley, broadcast last Sunday on Radio 3, charts the making of the ground breaking film Victim (1961) as part of the Gay Britannia celebration of gay icons. Sarah Wooley The film itself addresses the issue of blackmail of homosexuals. Dirk Bogarde plays barrister [...]

July 11, 2017 // 0 Comments

Southwold: an Earthly Paradise

For many years my second husband Laurie and I had a second home in Southwold. He is an a illustrator and taught in evening classes in Roehampton College. There a Polish student with blue eyes, glossy hair and full young breasts, none of which I possess, seduced him and our marriage broke up. We [...]

June 18, 2017 // 0 Comments

A woman ahead of her time

Dorothy Parker – writer, critic, poet and celebrated wit – died fifty years ago this month. In the 20th Century decades when men were men and women supposedly knew their place, she was one of those females quite capable of holding her own against all-comers irrespective of any sexism or [...]

June 16, 2017 // 0 Comments

Prussian Blue/ Philip Kerr

I have written before on my admiration of Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels. The first three The March Violets were well received but writer and publisher would scarcely have predicted he would go on to write another 14. After all a detective novel set in Nazi Germany is not the stuff of [...]

June 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

Has the age of the female super hero arrived?

In common with some other Rust staffers, I’m sufficiently dinosaur in my attitudes to the world that as a matter of principle I regard ‘positive action’, e.g. the concept of women-only political party shortlists and the BBC’s insistence upon awarding semi-equal coverage to [...]

June 1, 2017 // 0 Comments

Olive Kitteridge/Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Olive Kitteridge and rightly so as it’s a fine novel. The structure is a collection of short stories set in the coastal town in Maine with the common theme of Olive Kitteridge, a former maths teacher in the local school appearing in all [...]

May 23, 2017 // 0 Comments

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