Tag: http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post
-
Cookery and Crime – Venetian Style
The return of the Bucentaur to the Molo on Ascension Day,by Canaletto shows an 18th century view of Venice. I’m a vegetarian, and whilst I do cook meat for people, it takes a lot to make me feel that I’d like to eat it – but that’s exactl what Donna Leon’s Wilful Behaviour did. Now I know it may…
-
This Book is Bonkers but Brilliant
A book featuring Sherlock Holmes living in retirement in rural Sussex, keeping bees, and taking as his apprentice a stroppy, super-intelligent, American girl of 15, sounds bonkers, especially when you realise is set firmly in the 20th century. It won’t work, I thought. It can’t work. But, amazingly, it does work, and The Beekeeper’s Apprentice…
-
Haunting Horrors of WWI
So much has been written – and continues to be written – about the First World War that sometimes it’s difficult knowing what to say about a book, especially when the volume in question has become a classic, but Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth remains one of the most definitive accounts of the war that decimated…
-
The Nine Tailors
The opening of The Nine Tailors, by Dorothy L Sayers, has to be one of the most atmospheric of any novel. Here we are in the wintry, bleak, isolated East Anglian fens with Lord Peter Wimsey: Coming a trifle too fast across the bridge, blinded by the bitter easterly snowstorm, he had overshot the road…
-
Love and Secrets of a King and his Mistress
Sex, love, murder, revenge, betrayal, ambition and hidden secrets are key components of all good sagas about feuding families – and England’s Plantagenet Kings provide enough drama for an entire library of such books. So here’s a round-up of three, which I haven’t got round to writing about before now. All are set in the…
The Book Trunk 