The factual stories and prose-poems of The Dance at Mociu chronicle Peter Riley’s travels through Transylvania, Romania with their carefully crafted portrayals of the scenery, people, traditions and above all the music of the region. Through diligent wording and description, Riley brings to life a world we almost certainly have never experienced, and assuming we Read More
From its title, Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone might give the impression of being some solemn self-help manual or brooding biography; instead, it is an honest and heart-wrenching exploration into one of life’s inexplicable plagues: loneliness. Finding herself alone in an altogether unfamiliar and alienating city, Laing Read More
Iain Bamforth’s A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Medicine and Culture is a collection of essays, written by a doctor-cum-poet, which at first seems to offer little in the way of enticement to the reader: it contains copious amounts of enumeration and, as a consequence, lengthy sentences that are interlaced with heavy but necessary levels of Read More
Having missed hearing Linda Cracknell’s recent offerings on Radio 4, I was delighted to have the chance to review the book. Doubling Back is an account of ten walks undertaken by the author, in the footsteps of various famous writers as well as those of her own relations. These take place all over the world: Read More
“'[…] Do you realise what’s going on? There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.’ Her words were chilling. Could they be true?” In reviewing this title, I must declare an immediate disclosure of interest, having being diagnosed at the age of three as occupying a place on Read More
John Hemming is an explorer and writer especially interested in the Amazon region and its indigenous peoples. In Naturalists in Paradise, his focus falls upon the mid-19th century collecting exhibitions of three important British naturalists: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce. Wallace is well-known to biologists, but is eclipsed in popular memory Read More
Published 150 years after the publication of Alice in Wonderland, this biography is a real treat of a read. Following his award winning biography of Charles Dickens, Douglas-Fairhurst takes us on a marvellous journey through the mind of the quiet academic Charles Dodgson and his alter ego Lewis Carroll. “‘Who in the world am I?’ Read More
John Aubrey (1625-97) has done it again – namely, got someone else to write his book for him. An odd chain of events is thereby generated. Aubrey – endlessly busying himself in retrieving, preserving, and collating other people’s work, whether contemporary or in England’s recent past – left himself little time or energy to do Read More
German history of the 20th century is an ugly and twisted story to tell . Thomas Harding’s narrative of The House by the Lake takes a personal yet critical approach to this subject. He tells the story of a weekend house at Lake Glienecke, built and once owned by Harding’s Jewish ancestors at the edge of Read More
An award winning journalist, Marian Pallister is based in Argyll. Her mother inherited cottages which were ‘drowned’ for the reservoir in the Cruachan area, binding her family to this location and community. Her previous works often focus on Argyll and the socio-economic and political changes which have affected this area. It is, then, informed by Read More