Dickens
Murder on Grub Street
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Don’t sneer at I’m a Celebrity. The show is teaching us to become model citizens
One of the great benefits of having teenage children is that they force you out of your fuddy-duddy comfort zone.…
This thriller is as good as anything by Hilary Mantel
A few years ago, after a lifetime of wearing white shirts through which the straps of my white bra were…
The fairytale life of Hans Christian Andersen
It has long been my habit, when approaching a new biography, to read the account of the subject’s childhood first,…
Look! Shakespeare! Wow! George Eliot! Criminy! Jane Austen!
Among the precursors to this breezy little book are, in form, the likes of The Story of Art, Our Island…
What a coincidence
If you are going to read a novel that plays with literary conventions you want it written with aplomb. In…
Wilkie Collins by Andrew Lycett - review
In the outrageous 2010 press hounding of the innocent schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies over the murder of his young female tenant…
Wreaking, by James Scudamore - review
An abandoned lunatic asylum, a nasty pornographer in a wheelchair, a bizarre glass-ceilinged viewing dome beneath a scummy lake, a…
