Thanks to Salt for sending me this collection, the latest eclectic volume in their series. It’s very much the mixture as before, with well-established authors rubbing shoulders with newer names, with stories garnered from a variety of sources, from the august (Granta, The Edinburgh Review) to the obscure (Willesden Herald New Short Stories 6) and… Continue reading The Best British Short Stories 2013
The second volume of the Bracewell mysteries is very much the mixture as before. The familiar figures of the Earl of Westfield’s players, presided over by the calm and commanding presence of Nick Bracewell, encounter a series of baffling events that threaten their livelihood. Our hero’s wit, persistence and fortitude allow him to engineer the… Continue reading The Merry Devils
I came across Edward Marston, a new-to-me author the other day, and was impressed enough by his prolificity to have a go at one of his period detective stories. Marston has published over forty detective novels, all historical, as befits someone whose background is as a historian. What attracted me particularly to The Queen’s Head… Continue reading The Queen’s Head
What to do about the rising tide of human population? It’s quite simple, really. Here’s a neat solution, to be applied in a Utopian future republic: Procreation is the triumph of the living being over death; and in the case of man, who adds mind to his body, it is not only in his child… Continue reading Exterminate All The Brutes
To the Burgess, for an excellent adaptation of the master’s rather obscure early novel, the film rights to which were once held by Francis Ford Coppola.Here’s my review, posted at the IABF site.
The footnotes – and there are plenty of them – in Kevin Jackson’s brilliant account of Modernism in 1922 are printed in a fetching purplish shade. I wondered, as I read, enthralled, whether this was a subliminal allusion to Eliot’s phrase from The Waste Land, when Tiresias observes the assault by the clerk on the… Continue reading Constellation of Genius
To Cromford, in the Peak district, largely to visit the excellent Scarthin Books, a rambling, old-fashioned second-hand bookshop, crammed with bibliographic treasure, and a very pleasant café to boot. Acting on instructions from ‘er indoors, and taking account of the overcrowded bookcases Chez Topsy, we emerged with just one book – City of Ravens by… Continue reading City of Ravens
Slack blogging around here of late, but I haven’t been completely idle. There was a blog for my Modernism students, which is still current, and available here. New posts to follow shortly.
Back in November last year, my birthday weekend was spent in Amsterdam. We chose Amsterdam because we’d never been there, and because my friend Dipika Mukherjee was hosting the European launch of her novel Thunder Demons there. Dipika is professor of linguistics at Chicago and Shanghai universities, an affiliated Fellow at the International Institute of… Continue reading Thunder Demons
Yesterday was graduation day at Edge Hill for students in my department. It was great to see them all together, in their academic robes, and to be part of the ceremony. This year’s ceremony was different to most, in that we awarded an honorary degree to Mayer Hersh. As a survivor of Auschwitz, he would… Continue reading Mayer Hersh