The White Woman on the Green Bicycle by Monique Roffey

This story begins at the end of the love story. At the close of the happy ever after when day-to-day routine takes over from the passion. And I do think that this is a love story. The traditional love story of a man and a woman, but also the love story of a man and [...]

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Cassatt by Nathalia Brodskaia

Mary Cassatt is one of the few women artists in history who is as famous as her male counterparts. She was a fully fledged member of the Impressionists, despite being an American and a woman(Berthe Morisot was the only other woman, but was French, as were the male Impressionists). This book takes a slightly different [...]

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This week on Vulpes Libris …

One of the Foxes got a wee bit – well – argumentative this week up in Edinburgh.  She says she was just making her points enthusiastically – but it probably depended a bit where you were sitting at the time.  Anyway, you can read all about it on Saturday. Before then we revisit a classic [...]

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One Day at a Time: A play by Phil Fox. Outside Edge Theatre Company.

Riverside Studios, Hammersmith.  November 2010. “I’ve not come here for you;  I’ve come here for me.” It’s tough being a god – especially when you’re a middle-aged, chain-smoking, recovering alcoholic whose chronic womanizing has driven your wife to a heart attack.  Such a  man is Bill Wilson: an icon to millions as the co-founder of [...]

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A Class Act by Kate Lace

A Romeo and Juliet set-up with a class divide built in – he a council estate boy, she living in an over-taxed, under-heated stately home – A Class Act is already off to a fairy-tale-ish start.  Add in all kinds of improbable twists and turns (all of which could well, I suppose, happen in real [...]

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Strange Meetings: The Poets of the Great War, by Harry Ricketts

This is a thoughtful, reflective book on the poets of the Great War, a group of writers that has been so extensively studied and documented that one wonders what else there is to learn from a new study. As a literary phenomenon, the poetry of the First World War is unique, in that it has [...]

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A Glass of Blessings by Barbara Pym – of quiet amusement and kindnesses

Wilmet Forsyth is well dressed, well looked after, suitably husbanded, good-looking and fairly young – but very bored. Her sober husband Rodney, who works at the Ministry, is slightly balder and fatter than he once was. Wilmet would like to think she has changed rather less. Her interest wanders to the nearby church, where she [...]

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White Is For Witching by Helen Oyeyemi

The mazy house on the cliffs near Dover has been home to generations of Silver women – and it never lets them go. Reeling from the sudden death of her mother Lily, Miranda Silver is newly resident, young and bright and vulnerable. In this place where apples grow in the depths of winter and secret [...]

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The Cloths of Heaven by Sue Eckstein

The Cloths of Heaven is a wry, dust-dry character-observation-rich gem of a book with one of the most refreshing comic voices I’ve read for a long while. Set in a ex-pat community in West Africa, the book begins with Isobel and Patrick: a couple who love one another, yes, but whose love is complicated, established, [...]

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The Torch is Passed and Nov. 1963

My first clear memory is of a funeral. Not of a family friend or relative, but the funeral of a president. My first memory is of watching the funeral of John F. Kennedy. I was three years old. I don’t even want to surmise how that affected my views on death, on politics, on world [...]

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