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Happy new year from Melanie Gay

I do not rate New Year’s Eve at all and am happy to spend the evening curled up with a good book. I finally ditched Amos Oz’s A Tale of Love and Darkness with its extended and tedious description of his family. Enough already. I began the sequel to Morvern Callar by Alan Warner, These [...]

January 1, 2014 // 0 Comments

Ensuring we will remember them …

Tomorrow heralds the beginning of the year in which the world will be commemorating the First World War – originally called ‘The Great War’ – which began for Britain on 4th August 1914. Already the publication-rate of WW1 books, television documentaries and dramas has begun [...]

December 31, 2013 // 0 Comments

The Writer’s Voice

The relationship between the author and the subject in fiction is always interesting. It’s natural for the writer to draw on his/her personal experience, but I am more impressed by the novelist that can create a character some distance from their own.  This theme preoccupied me in the last [...]

December 28, 2013 // 0 Comments

A salute to two new historical biographies

In March 2009 the Shadow Home Affairs Minister Andrew Rosindell, Tory MP for Romford, introduced a private member’s bill in the House of Commons entitled the Teaching of British History in Schools Bill. His thrust was that the decreasing popularity of history as a choice of subject by pupils was [...]

December 17, 2013 // 0 Comments

The Departure Solution – episode 1

Clifford opened one eye. The digital radio clock on his bedside table flicked to 0213 as, somewhere in the mid-distance, the ‘bee-bah’ siren of either a police car or ambulance passed by. It took him a while to work out whether he’d been woken by the noise, the need for a trip to his bathroom [...]

December 14, 2013 // 0 Comments

Reading Matters

One of the most difficult decisions  for a reader is whether to continue reading book he/she is not enjoying.This rarely troubles a reviewer as to coin a phrase ” you asked me to review the book not read it.” I know of one respected reviewer a historian who has a template on the [...]

November 25, 2013 // 0 Comments

‘Hollywood Left and Right’ by Steven Ross

  This book could have been reviewed by Simon Campion Brown as its as much about politics as films . In it, Ross assesses the impact of 10 activists , 9 of which are Hollywood legends, Republican, Democrat, Independent . Though he does not impose his own ideology he states that the Republican [...]

November 18, 2013 // 0 Comments

Tintin

I suspect that whilst loathing the man, there was a grudging respect for the tagged terrorist who escaped disguised as a woman. However those of us and know and love Herge’s Tintin know this was achieved by Captain Haddock in the Crab with the Golden Claws. Growing up with Tintin was to enter [...]

November 10, 2013 // 0 Comments

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