by Jane Austen Having finished my review of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe with the words of Jane Austen, I can do no better here than allow Sir Walter to introduce this one: '[Jane Austen] had a talent for describing the involvements and feelings and characters of ordinary life which is to me the most wonderful …
Category: Books
My body is not my own!
Female 22 by David Hulett Wilson A Review What would it be like to live part of your life in a body of the opposite sex? How would you cope with the little everyday details of being a woman, or a man, as the case may be? Not only would the anatomy be strange but …
Harper Lee 1926-2016
Obituary The literary world is mourning tonight the death of one of its most illustrious yet enigmatic authors. It is a sadness that will be shared by lovers of good literature everywhere. Nelle Harper Lee was a literary phenomenon. For a novelist whose body of published work consisted -until last year - of only one …
Do you know what your books do when you're sleeping?
Thanks to Anastasia at 'Read and Survive' for this gem! https://youtu.be/SKVcQnyEIT8
Imagined Light
All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr The market in literature never ceases to amaze me. One moment, we can be in the dark, hidden corners of the human imagination, inhabited by nightmare monsters, the next in a sunlit park, on a wave-lapped beach, or wherever delight and fancy take us. Then, we …
Storm Island
Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett I used to devour thrillers, sometimes two or three a week. Stories by Alistair McLean, Ian Fleming, Desmond Bagley, Hammond Innes, Jeffrey Archer, Michael Crichton and others were often read at a sitting. That being so, it is strange that I waited nearly twenty years after seeing the …
Dreaming the Impossible
‘If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. If you want them to be more intelligent, read them more fairy tales’ [attributed to Albert Einstein] We live in a universe of wonders and possibilities. The ancients looked up into the night sky and saw bright lights formed into the shapes of …
Jane's History
The History of England from the reign of Henry the 4th to the death of Charles the 1st by Jane Austen [Henry the 8th] ' . . . [his] last wife contrived to survive him, but with difficulty effected it.' [James the 1st] '. . . had some faults, among which & as the most …
Gaia Revisited
Lovelock - where is our species headed? When James Lovelock sprang to the attention of the wider public in the 1970s with his Gaia hypothesis, not all mainstream scientists were enthused. The idea that the Earth, its atmosphere and all life upon it is a self-regulating mechanism was, for some, too like science fiction. Other …
Getting Away With Murder (3)
The Retired Cop My third (and last) fictional detective of the week is not exactly a 'classic', but he has been around for a few years now. John Rebus, creation of Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin, was born in 1947 (we are told on Rankin's website). However, he did not make his appearance on the …
Magda Green Books 