Tooth and Claw: The Inside Story of Spitting Image by Lewis Chester

Written in 1986, this is not a new book, however it is a sadly overlooked one and now appears, even more sadly, to be out of print. (Hence no picture.) However, in these days of Amazon and Ebay, second hand copies can easily be located on the net and if you are interested in comedy, [...]

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

I am always startled by how short this book is. A cultural icon ought to be the size of Micheangelo’s David or at least, War and Peace. But this story that has been on stage and screen from cartoons (Mr. Magoo, The Muppets) to a modern setting (with Vanessa Williams as a female Scrooge) is [...]

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Wish You Were Here by Phillipa Ashley

Wish You Were Here is Phillipa Ashley’s assured and hugely enjoyable follow up to her entertaining debut novel, Decent Exposure (previously reviewed here ).
It’s a fairly straightforward boy meets girl, boy dumps girl, boy and girl meet again years later tale, but as with Decent Exposure, it’s the getting there that’s three quarters of the [...]

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Publisher Feature: Marion Boyars

The Life and Survival of an Avant-Garde publisher
Rosy Barnes interviews Catheryn Kilgarriff, Managing Director of the publisher Marion Boyars.

Rustling through a box of books in my parents’ house, I came across an old friend, a small slim volume with a distinctive modernist black and white cover. I remember how I found it in a [...]

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Leon Trotsky: My Life

“This book is not an objective photograph of my life,” Trotsky writes in his foreword to My Life, “but a component of it. In these pages I am continuing the struggle to which my whole life is devoted… Recounting events, I analyse and appraise them; telling my story, I defend myself, and even [...]

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Last-Minute Christmas Shopping and Other Stories

I always buy books as Christmas presents. It probably makes me predictable and dull (not to mention the Least Favourite Aunt), but I see it as a sacred duty. I also like to compare notes with others who do the same, and much to my delight other bloggers have been recommending books as Christmas presents [...]

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Favourite Books from the Cradle to the Grave: Picture Books

The start of a new series: Favourite Books From the Cradle to the Grave explores books that we loved at different stages of life. We make no pretence – this is not about dispassionate judgement, about analysis, about how works fit with genre, whether their messages are honorable, whether they are edifying to read. This [...]

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Talking poetry with Nigel Jenkins.

By popular demand we have an interview with poet and haiku practitioner, Nigel Jenkins.
1)Tell us a bit about yourself. And please mention if you’ve been to Patagonia because I keep hearing about it and I’m intrigued.

I was born in 1949 and raised on a farm in Gower. From about the age of fifteen, [...]

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Pablo Neruda: Confieso que he vivido / Memoirs

Memoirs are not necessarily a good idea. At least, it’s often a bad idea to read them if you don’t want your worst impressions to be confirmed. I’ve never fully signed up to the cult of Neruda; his poetry always left me with an oddly antipathetic feeling, even though I could hear that powerful eloquent [...]

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Dubravka Ugresic: Nobody’s Home AND Thank You for Not Reading

Dubravka Ugresic (please imagine the relevant accent marks on top of the s and the c: this blog refuses to show them) is a novelist and academic, born in the former Yugoslavia, officially Croatian but living in self-imposed exile since the early 1990s.
It is clear from these two collections of essays that Ugresic doesn’t take [...]

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