Friday, 17 October 2025

Trevor Pateman, Not In The Archives: Personal Letters 1800 -1840

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  For the past year, I've been putting together an anthology of letters written in English in  the period 1800-1840 but not housed in an...
Saturday, 27 September 2025

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  Christmas in Bethlehem December 1995 When in Israel at Christmas the place to go must be Bethlehem, especially in the year when the Is...
Tuesday, 16 September 2025

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   Captain Warner’s Weapon of Mass Destruction:  The Invisible Shell This is not a book review, but an expanded version of an article wh...
Tuesday, 27 May 2025

Why No New Book Reviews?

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I'm working on a book, an anthology of letters written in the  period 1800 - 1840, and nearly all my reading right now is devoted to bac...
Monday, 10 March 2025

Catherine Nixey Heresy

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  It's a long time since I posted a review of a new book but this one is so good that it prompts me to put aside preoccupation with fini...
Thursday, 14 November 2024

Sylvia Townsend Warner and a Proposed Dorchester Effigy

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  This is the full version of a letter of which a small  extract appears in M.C.'s column at the Times Literary Supplement November 15 ...
Tuesday, 8 October 2024

Nick Bradley Four Seasons in Japan

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  This is a very well-conceived and structured book; it kept my attention throughout. Flo Dunthorpe living in Japan decides to translate an ...
Friday, 23 August 2024

Anna Reid A Nasty Little War - Review

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  There are people who reckon that war brings out the best in human beings; no one claims that for civil wars which unfailingly bring out th...
Monday, 19 August 2024

Rebecca F Kuang Yellowface - Review

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  It’s nearly impossible to buy a new novel in a bookshop; unless it’s a Fitzcarraldo edition you have to buy a more-or-less lurid and ludic...
Friday, 5 July 2024

Review: Francis Mulhern and Stefan Collini, What Is Cultural Criticism?

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  I read in the newspapers (and so betray my age) that we are in the middle of world-wide culture wars, fought on multiple fronts by many mi...
Friday, 14 June 2024

The Foyle's Bookshop Strike 1965

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  Edited extract from a 2012 Blog post: I was 17. After A levels in summer 1964 I travelled to Sweden to spend the summer working in a hotel...