On 14 June 1940, Paris fell to the German Army. The British author Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote in her diary.…
A recent NYTimes Cooking newsletter from Melissa Clark drew my attention to the article about Raghavan Iyer by Kim Severson …
Two centuries after William Hogarth published his engravings of the decline and fall of Tom Rakewell, Rebecca West wrote a…
Here's a treat for those who relish fiction with off-the-wall cognitive mayhem - The Hearing Trumpet Suddenly it seemed as…
A novel by Kate Atkinson is always something to look forward to and I've just finished reading her latest -…
Together with a whole lot of other readers in the UK in 1976, I read Wilt - the first in…
Hands down, this is the best book I've read all year: All For Nothing by Walter Kempowski. It's the bitter…
I did, in the first weeks of the war, before I got my commission, suffer severely from 'evacuees'.- Evelyn Waugh in…
‘Oh, I know all about goats,’ Sonia was saying. ‘People give them the same recommendation as the billeting officers did…
"What are you doing in the wardrobe?" "Narnia business" C.S."Jack" Lewis spent childhood years in a house in Belfast where…
All our stories begin before we are born. Not Just the blue eyes or flat feet we inherit, but the…
It’s always fun when a tiresome book about the rules of the English language gets debunked and when some clever…
I was first drawn to Anna Kavan’s writing through her collection of wartime stories I Am Lazarus (1945) - the…
“I am not interested in complicated things nor in the commonplace, I like to paint simple things that are a…
Many people know that the poet T. S. Eliot was very fond of cats and indeed created some wonderful cat…