The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde

The Eyre Affair is the first in Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, set in an alternative reality. It currently runs to five novels, with the sixth due out in hardback this year. Jasper Ffordes’s world is very much like ours, but also completely different. Society is dominated by over-mighty corporations, (in this case, Goliath) overweening [...]

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The Other Queen by Philippa Gregory: a tale of two women, if not more …

Philippa Gregory’s dazzling new novel looks at the captive years of Mary Queen of Scots. Mary, in flight from rebels in Scotland, has trusted her cousin Elizabeth I’s promise of sanctuary; but she finds herself imprisoned as the enforced guest of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his dominant wife, Bess of Hardwick. The newly [...]

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Just My Type. A Book About Fonts, by Simon Garfield

This book was a Christmas present from a friend who was inspired to give it to me after a deeply sympathetic conversation we’d had last summer about our shared hatred for a gigantic capital P. It was a nasty, curly, tasteless, bloated thing, with a flashy exaggerated serif at the foot and a meaningless blob [...]

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Chinese Painting by James Cahill

In honor of Lunar New Year, celebrating the Year of the Rabbit We all have an image of what Chinese painting is; a willow tree by a stream with craggy mountains behind, but the reality is that Chinese painting has gone through almost as much evolution as Western painting. In fact, some of the goals [...]

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