From us to you …

Well that’s it from us for 2009 … After a wild party in which sausages on sticks, fairy cakes and ginger beer will doubtless feature heavily (cough) we’re all retreating to our various foxholes for the festive season. We regroup on Sunday the 3rd of January with our customary trailer for the coming attractions – [...]

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Rehearsal Diary by Edward Petherbridge

Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase, which began life as a radio play in 1972, is being re-staged for the first time in twenty years at the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington, with Edward Petherbridge playing the part of Donner (http://www.oldredliontheatre.co.uk/coming-soon.htm). A brilliant and hilarious satire, the play is also, as Frank Rich of [...]

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Nut Cracker by Jan Pienkowski and David Walser

Last year at Christmas, I wrote a review of Jan Pienkowski’s simply beautiful version of the Christmas story – The First Christmas – and I make no apologies at all for returning to Pienkowski once again this year.  Those who are already familiar with his work won’t need convincing  of his talent, but Nut Cracker [...]

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Today’s post: Apologies

Good Kirsty:  Wait, what are we doing here?  Today isn’t our day. Bad Kirsty:  We’re apologising.  Due to unforeseen circumstances, you see, we won’t be hearing from guest writer David about The Stork Caliph today. GK:  We have no Stork Caliph? BK:  Yes, we have no Stork Caliph.  We have no Stork Caliph today! GK: *headdesk* [...]

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The Feathers of Death, by Simon Raven

Simon Raven is out of fashion now – in that trough of neglect where authors and their works languish for a while after they die (he died in 2001). But he was a legendary figure in his lifetime – a rebarbative character described as ‘[combining] elements of Flashman, Waugh’s Captain Grimes and the Earl of [...]

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Bleak House by Charles Dickens

It’s highly unlikely that I will be able to say anything about this book that hasn’t been said before and better. I am relatively new to Dickens, having never studied any of his works at school or college and I have to confess that it was probably the wonderful BBC dramatisation of Bleak House that [...]

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A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas

Celebrating Christmas on Vulpes Libris Having liked Thomas’ poetry for many years, I was curious as to what his most famous work was like. It was a bit different than expected, less sweet and more meandering. The musings of an adult looking back on his childhood in a seaside town in Wales in the early [...]

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Next week on Vulpes Libris …

It’s Advent*  – but anyone hoping that we were going to go all fuzzy and seasonal and ‘chestnuts roasting on an open fire’-y  before we dispersed to our separate bolt-holes for Christmas, is going to be mightily disappointed.  We have precisely two – count’ em – TWO, seasonal pieces this week.  Other than that, it’s [...]

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Love, Aubrey by Suzanne LaFleur

Oh dear… another crying book from me I’m afraid.  I don’t know why I love books so much that make me work my way through whole boxes of tissues while I’m reading.  I emerge at the end surrounded by piles of soggy scrunchled rags, raw eyed, puffy faced and looking like I’ve just been pummelled [...]

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Into the Twilight Zone

Article by Guest Reviewer, Samantha Tonge. I first entered the Twilight Zone three weeks ago, when my husband went away on business. It was a long time coming. For a year or two my early teen daughter has been pushing me to read Stephenie Meyer’s series of books. Unlike many of her friends who have [...]

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