Books

It’s good to be back in Menabilly – the estate that Daphne do Maurier occupied for some 20 years and the inspiration for Rebecca, The Birds and Don’t Look Now. Yesterday I organised a trip to Fowey and Bodinnick to visit the places that shaped her life. Daphne du Maurier, whom I [...]

The espionage novel has taken on many forms and genres in the years I have read these with enthusiasm. As a child I loved Erskine Childers and John Buchan and each dare-devil adventurer normally from public school taking on international conspirators on his own. Then came Ian Fleming and James [...]

I very much enjoyed Sleep in Peace Tonight by James MacManus , built around Harry Hopkins, envoy of President Roosevelt’s trip to London in 1941. So when the helpful people at Amazon as part of their “If you liked X ,  you would like Y ‘ service, recommended his Midnight in [...]

Novels set in both Ireland and the USA like Brooklyn (now a film) are all the rage. Colm Toibin the author of Brooklyn leads the genre but Colum McCann runs him close. I very much enjoyed his Let the Great World Spin as did many as it became an international bestseller. Transatlantic had been lying [...]

I  discovered Anthony Quinn a few years ago when he wrote a first rate novel Half the Human Race about a depressed Edwardian cricketer. I very much enjoyed too Curtain Call a novel set between the wars in bohemian and theatrical London. At the heart of the novel is a relationship between society [...]

There is a certain and deliberate irony in the title of this Norman Lewis work on the Sicilan Mafia as the distinguished travel writer clearly regards the Sicilan mafia as dishonourable. His observation of them runs from 1943 to 1962. In 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily. The Canadian and British [...]