Book Review
Book Review: Death Set to Music
Très bien pour un cadeau gratuity! Having time to sit down and read a book is a bit of a luxury for me, as well as the fact that I don’t have the patience to [more…]
Book Review
18th Century
Book Review: Commander
Edward Pellew is a name which will be familiar to many who have read Giles Milton’s marvellous book, ‘White Gold’, about the Barbary white slave trade. That book recounts the life of Thomas Pellow, a [more…]
Book Review
“Earth’s Most Customer-Centric Company” – more fun and games with Amazon
Being an independent author is a tough gig at the best times: not only do you have to write, edit, proof-read and typeset the manuscript without assistance (unless you have contacts willing to help), but [more…]
Authoritarianism
Book Review: A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth, Part 2
It’s late June 2021; I have a brief face-to-face encounter with former Supreme Court Justice Lord Jonathan Sumption, at the Chalke Farm History Festival, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. He is there to promote his latest work, [more…]
Book Review
Book Review: Imagining A Murder
Once Upon a Moonlit Provence Night . . . author David Sedgwick reveals why he just had to write the story of a brutal, unsolved 1973 murder. Hands up who remembers the name Jeremy Cartland? [more…]
20th Century
Book Review: Silent Village, Robert Pike
There have been a number of books on the disaster that overran Oradour-sur-Glane on Saturday June 10th 1944 but this is the first one that I have read that finely details the lives of the [more…]
Authoritarianism
Book Review: A State of Fear, Laura Dodsworth
Mid-February, 2020: My wife and I stayed at our favourite hotel on the South Devon coast. There was a woman there who was coughing a bit, actually quite a lot; we didn’t think too much [more…]
Arts
Book Review: Honest, Not Invent
Stanislav, a young Polish plumber, in reality a creation of blogger Ismael Smith, now sadly no longer with us. His comments first appeared below the line in the place we don’t speak of, and subsequently [more…]
20th Century
Book Review: Mani, Travels in the Southern Peloponnese by Patrick Leigh-Fermor
It is no secret that I absolutely love the writing of Patrick Leigh-Fermor, a man whose life would have been wonderfully interesting even if he had never published a word. I sketched out something of [more…]