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A Nazi Conspiracy/Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch

This is an account of an alleged Nazi conspiracy to assassinate the Big Three (Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin) at the Tehran Conference in 1943. I say “alleged” as there may have been no conspiracy but a ruse by the Soviets to scare President Roosevelt into staying not at the US [...]

September 6, 2023 // 0 Comments

A Very English Deceit/Malcolm Balen

This is an account of one of the biggest financial scandals in England’s history – The South Sea Bubble – and well told, briskly but informatively by Malcolm Balen. In brief when George I acceded to the the throne as the first Hanoverian at the start of the eighteenth century the [...]

August 4, 2023 // 0 Comments

Thunderclap & The Man who made Vermeers

Thunderclap by Observer Art Critic Laura Cumming is the story of the life and death of Dutch 17th century artist Carel Fabritius. In fact much more is known about his death in 1654 when his house collapsed after a gunpowder  depot explosion in Delft. As for his life, he was born in the village of [...]

July 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

University Challenge’s New Quizmaster

In its 70 year history University Challenge has only had 3 quizmasters: Bamber Gascoigne, Jeremy Paxman and now the BBC’s media editor Amol Rajan. He made his debut last night in a contest between Trinity College and the University of Manchester which ended in a tie with 175 points respectively. [...]

July 18, 2023 // 0 Comments

Tender is the Night/F. Scott Fitzgerald

I tend to read in themes and this year these have been contemporary Irish authors like Colm Toibin, Sebastian Barry, Joseph O’Connor and John Banville and classic American writers of the early twentieth century like Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway and now Scott Fitzgerald. My other reason for [...]

July 12, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Age of Innocence/Edith Wharton

Having enjoyed The Reef I moved onto Edith Wharton’s best-known work The Age of Innocence. Published in 1920 when she was 58 it won her the Pulitzer prize , the first woman to achieve this. The central character is Archer Newland, a young and rich lawyer, and the novel is set in the Gilded Age of [...]

May 25, 2023 // 0 Comments

April in Spain/John Banville

John Banville is an Irish writer who has won the Booker Prize for The Sea and written murder mystery novels under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. This novel has a double narrator – psychopath hitman Terry Tice and retired Dublin pathologist John Quirke – and a double setting – [...]

May 9, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Reef / Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton the first female writer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Age of Innocence is a novelist of whom I have heard but not read. The Reef was written by her in 1912. The story is of George Darrow , a 37 year old diplomat , travelling to see his fiancée the widow Anna Leath in France. She [...]

April 19, 2023 // 0 Comments

The Heath /Hunter Davies

The Heath is a vade mecum by writer and journalist Hunter Davies of a year in the life of Hampstead Heath (2019-2020). The author, born in Cumbria, has lived most of his life in Hampstead and is therefore well-qualified to give this well written, enthusiastic and informative account. He covers the [...]

April 19, 2023 // 0 Comments

Manderley Forever/Tatiana de Rosnay

My immediate reaction upon reading Tatiana de Rosnay’s biography of Daphne du Maurier is do we need another one? Margaret Forster has written the definitive biography. Justine Picardie’s Daphne covers a critical period in her life when the latter was under time pressure to produce a biography [...]

March 29, 2023 // 0 Comments

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