A few days ago, I wrote a short review of Harper Lee's novel Go Set A Watchman. Before reading the book and writing the review, I had made a determined effort not to read what others were saying about it. Having caught some of the press headlines, and noting their negativity, I feared that if …
Category: Book Review
The Satanist
by Dennis Wheatley This is my second post on the recently-reissued novels of Dennis Wheatley. For me, The Satanist is by a margin Wheatley's best black magic story. As well as being an edge-of-the-seat adventure, it utilises a theme that has always had a fascination for me - the sometimes uncanny relationship between identical twins. …
Go Set A Watchman
by Harper Lee A Review 'It had never occurred to Jean Louise that she was a girl: her life had been one of reckless pummeling activity . . . she must now go into a world of femininity, a world she despised.' On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a black woman in Montgomery, Alabama refused …
The Devil Rides Out . . . Again
In 2013, Bloomsbury Publishers announced that they intended to reissue the novels of Dennis Wheatley as e-books. As an avid reader of Wheatley's stories - many years ago! - I was excited at the prospect of their being on the market again, and indeed at possibly seeing some of them again in print. Out …
The End of an Age
Hotel Savoy by Joseph Roth A Review It is 1919 or 1920. World War I has only recently ended. After three years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, Gabriel Dan makes his way to the West across Russia, taking casual work as he goes. However, he needs money and breaks his journey in an Eastern …
The Woman in White
by Wilkie Collins A Review Published in 1860, The Woman in White, in its language and style, is very much a novel of its time, adopting first person multiple narratives, melodrama and bizarre coincidences in its telling. It is a mystery thriller, almost gothic in tone, combining themes that resonate even today: the equality of …
Lucky Strike
The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith In her second novel in the persona of Galbraith, JK Rowling's war hero detective Cormoran Strike takes on a case involving missing writer Owen Quine. Quine has written a novel entitled Bombyx Mori in which he seems to have maligned and slandered most of his colleagues in the book industry. …
Rich And Over Here
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James The Portrait of a Lady is one of those classics I always meant to read but never got around to it. It came up at last as essential reading on a lecture course on the English novel, so I felt obliged to tackle it. Though it has …
The Theory of Everything
Travelling to Infinity by Jane Hawking A few weeks ago, I went to see the award-winning James Marsh film, The Theory of Everything, with Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking and Felicity Jones as his wife, Jane. I don't know Stephen Hawking personally but have been an admirer of Hawking the scientist for a long time …
Gone to London to see the Queen!
The Heart of Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott 'On the day when the unhappy Porteous was expected to suffer the sentence of the law, the place of execution, extensive as it is, was crowded almost to suffocation.' Edinburgh 1737: Captain John Porteous, King's officer, is confined in the Tolbooth prison for firing on a crowd …
Magda Green Books 