Category Archives: Literature

Book Review: Sven Hassel ~ The Commissar (Translator Tim Bowie)

Posted on December 10, 2018 by

Sven Hassell is very controversial in Denmark where his ‘fact based semi-autobiographical’ novels have been scrutinised and found to be (astonishingly!) fiction. The style Hassel writes in does lead the reader to believe that there is an underlying truth hard … Continue reading →

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Retirement

Posted on December 3, 2018 by

Barbara (anxious colleague): Do you think that you’ll by OK when you retire? Joan: Oh yes. I’ve been reading about life without work and it’s lovely. Barbara: What have you been reading? Joan: Jane Austen Chris

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Book and Film Review: Raymond Chandler ~ The Big Sleep (1939) and (1946- film)

Posted on November 26, 2018 by

The doyen of American pulp fiction is Raymond Chandler. I knew this even though I’d never actually read his work. I relied on the brilliant, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, film The Big Sleep (1946). So I was unprepared for … Continue reading →

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Book Review: David Eagleman ~ The Brain: the story of you

Posted on November 12, 2018 by

I bought this as a make weight on the infamous ‘Buy one get one half price’ desk in Waterstones book shop. Unwanted, unloved and abandoned it was on my shelf for quite a few months before I picked it up … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Martin Cruz Smith ~ The Arkady Renko novels

Posted on October 29, 2018 by

The British Detective Inspector genre has reached new levels of sophistication in its numerous iterations. There is a pretty standard characterisation used by most authors and so thrillers depend almost entirely on ever more ingenious plots. However, no matter how … Continue reading →

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Book Reviews: Sellar and Yeatman 1066 and All That (1930); O’Farrell An utterly impartial history of Britain

Posted on October 22, 2018 by

Sellar and Yeatman invented satire on school-boy history. They mocked history books which were current at the time which mostly created the myth that the British were naturally superior to all other countries. They developed the phrase ‘a good thing’ … Continue reading →

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Book Review: Michael Lewis ~ Flash Boys: Cracking the money code

Posted on September 24, 2018 by

This is a wonderfully entertaining book, which reads like a novel, an incomprehensible techy textbook and a polemic against the US stock market. Parts were beyond my understanding. For example- “Round-trip travel time from Chicago to New Jersey has been … Continue reading →

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