“Go back to your books, to your armchair. Plant your trees, watch them grow. If more people valued home above gold, this world would be a merrier place.”

— Thorin Oakenshield

Latest Posts


  • My First Georgette Heyer Romance!

    I doubt that Powder and Patch by Georgette Heyer will ever feature on a list of the world’s greatest novels, but it is the greatest fun – and I suspect the same could be said for most (if not all)… Continue reading

  • Tom Tiddler’s Ground

    The ‘lost’ authors who have been re-published by Dean Street Press under the Furrowed Middlebrow umbrella have been generally well received, but I have to admit the first few pages of Ursula Orange’s Tom Tiddler’s Ground left me wondering if… Continue reading

  • The Butcher’s Daughter

    I am sure there is a good novel out there somewhere following the lives of nuns after they are forced to leave their convent home during Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries – but this, alas, is not it. I… Continue reading

  • Hag-Seed

    Oh, this is good, good, good! In all the hooha about the Booker Prize and the follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale (which I HATED, so I have no intention of reading The Testaments), this one seems to have been somewhat… Continue reading

  • Mrs Martell

    It takes courage and skill to write a novel where the central character is thoroughly unlikable, whilst ensuring that the book remains enjoyable, but that’s just what Elizabeth Eliot manages to do in her 1953 story Mrs Martel – and… Continue reading