Twenty of my Unread Classics The Classics Club Spin #8 for November sounds like a bit of fun as well as a challenge, so I decided to have a go. The idea is to take twenty books from my Classics reading list and classify them in groups of five according to the four different criteria: …
Category: Books
The Tiger and the Cauldron
Extract - The Contest " The fight hung in the balance. Attack from either side was followed promptly by counter-attack, both defended ably. Hassan was beginning to tire. The muscles of his arms ached and his right palm was raw and stinging from contact with the sabre hilt. His bruised left elbow was stiff and …
The Literary Estate of Elisabeth of Austria
Sisi's Poetic Diaries In 1951, a mysterious package arrived from Bavaria at the office of the President of Switzerland. The sender, Duke Ludwig of Bavaria, had been in possession of its contents since 1909 as part of the estate of his father, the respected occulist and optometrist Karl Theodor von Wittelsbach, younger brother of Elisabeth, …
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Sisi
Elisabeth: The Reluctant Empress Brigitte Hamann's 1981 authorised biography of the ill-fated Empress, Elisabeth of Austria, does not subscribe to the cult and mythology of Sisi. Instead, she tries to find the real woman, and to separate her from the rumour, speculation and romantic portrayals that have haunted her memory. If anything, she treats Elisabeth …
Jane's Juvenilia
I have been reading (re-reading actually) some of Jane Austen's early works. A few days ago, I blogged about her History of England, written when she was sixteen. That she meant the piece to be be humorous I have no doubt; the description of herself as a very partial, prejudiced and ignorant historian gives the …
Say No To Slavery
Today is Anti-Slavery Day. In spite of the work of William Wilberforce and many others to abolish it, slavery is still alive and well, and not only in the Third World. Across the planet, millions of children are forced to work for a pittance, or for nothing at all, some of them sold by their …
The Legend of the Su-asti
(adapted from my novel The Dark Side of the Fylfot. Fourteen-year-old Gretl is eager to hear the story behind the talisman her grandfather wears at his throat) 'Jemshid, son of Tahmuras, ruled Persia for seven hundred years. He was a wise and just monarch, skilled in forging weapons, weaving fine cloths, and shaping ornaments from …
The Man in the High Castle
Philip K Dick's Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel is a novel without a hero or villain. Instead, the various characters mill around somewhat aimlessly, doing meaningless jobs (or none at all), consulting the I Ching and reading yet another novel called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Several are not what they seem or claim to be. …
Dan's Hymn to Dante
Inferno by Dan Brown In his latest novel, Dan Brown sends his unlikely hero, Harvard professor Robert Langdon on a romp round Florence. Accompanied by Sienna Brooks, a young doctor with an IQ of 208, Langdon embarks on a quest to find and destroy a deadly virus. Planted by a misguided idealist Bertrand Zobrist, the …
It's Not Harry Potter
The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling The death of Barry Fairbrother, a leading citizen of Pagford, a small town "in the West Country", leaves a vacancy on the parish council. Pagford residents are lined up on two sides of a dispute about the future of a crime-soaked estate known as the Fields, and the composition …
Magda Green Books 