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Gleneagles Hotel

Bob Tickler had it right. After the student accommodation, the Rust Group felt they were entitled to some pampering and where better to get it than the Gleneagles Hotel? It’s the place where the Gleneagles Agreement – effectively banning apartheid South Africa from sport – was [...]

July 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Chums/Simon Kuper

The central thesis of Simon Kuper’s book is that a tiny caste of Oxford graduates of the 1980s took over the running of the country and the origins of Brexit are to be identified there. The clear flaws in this theory are that Nigel Farage and the 52% that voted leave were not educated there. [...]

July 6, 2022 // 0 Comments

The Blue Afternoon

The literary and film device of the flashback and/or flash forward often works well provided there are linkage and revelation. In the last novel I reviewed here Bad Relations it worked particularly well. In William Boyd’s latest The Blue Afternoon it works less well. The story begins in Los [...]

June 23, 2022 // 0 Comments

Bad relations/Cressida Connolly

This is an outstanding novel by a writer scaling the heights of British fiction. It begins in the Crimean War when William Gale is tending for his recently slain brother Algernon. He sends a lock of his hair home. Gale returns to his estates in Cornwall but – due to then undiagnosed post [...]

June 8, 2022 // 0 Comments

Resistance/Halik Kochanski

This is a detailed (too detailed in fact) account of the resistance movement in World War Two, principally in France, Norway, the Low Countries and Bohemia. Although the author provides an abundance of statistical information that is difficult to absorb, there is no glossary of the resistance [...]

June 1, 2022 // 0 Comments

The delights of Rottingdean

Whilst I – we – were all so delighted to be travelling abroad again one must not forget the delights Great Britain has to offer. Yesterday I had cause to visit Rottingdean, only a couple of miles from my home. It suffers from too much traffic travelling from the A27 to the coastal road [...]

May 12, 2022 // 0 Comments

Recommending & reviewing books

Yesterday I had a conversation with a fellow Ruster who touched upon a theme which I will explore here and now. He was given a book by a friend who enthused over it. The Ruster, who readily admits to being no bibliophile, wondered whether I knew the book in question which I did not. The point [...]

May 4, 2022 // 0 Comments

A day at Sanary sur Mer

Yesterday the group spent the day at Sanary sur Mer – a charming port town which borders on the more famous Bandol and is more or less equidistant between France’s biggest port cities of Toulon and Marseilles. It has a literary history. Aldous Huxley and Cyril Connolly lived here and during [...]

April 25, 2022 // 0 Comments

He’s back! Grace – but not much favour I’m afraid …

Yesterday saw the return of actor John Simm as Detective Superintendent Roy Grace to our television screens on ITV. There is a long and stout tradition of location-specific fictional sleuths – think Morse (Oxford), Rebus (Edinburgh), Taggart (Glasgow) and Leeds (DCI Banks) to name but a handful [...]

April 25, 2022 // 0 Comments

Two novels set in Florence: Angels of Mud & Still Life

As Venice is for painters so Florence has attracted writers: E. M Forster’s Room With a View and Alex Preston’s In Love and War to name but two. By happenstance the last two novels I have read were both set in post war Florence. Curious too with half the Rust team in Nice. The first – [...]

April 22, 2022 // 0 Comments

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