“With enough determination, any bloody idiot can get up this hill,” observed Rob Hall, the leader of a commercial expedition, on his eighth tour of Mount Everest. ”The trick is to get back down alive.” The particular descent ahead of those on the ”hill” on May 10, 1996, resulted in the greatest loss of life […]
Josephine Cox hails from Blackburn and she has built a career as a highly successful novelist, frequently being cited as one of the top three most borrowed authors from public libraries. In this story from 2012 eight-year-old Casey’s mother Ruth is a cruel woman, with an appetite for other women’s husbands. His father is quiet
No less than a panorama of post-war US history from the 50s to the 90s. Through fragments and interlaced stories—including those of highway killers, artists, celebrities, conspiracists, gangsters, nuns, and sundry others—DeLillo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DeLillo) creates a fragile web of connected experience, a communal Zeitgeist that encompasses the messy whole of five decades of American life. A huge, baggy
In this novel of 1935 two children, strangers, wait in a well appointed house in Paris: Leopold for his mother, whom he has never seen, and Henrietta for a train. Upstairs an old woman lies dying and her daughter flutters round her. Little does Henrietta know what fascinations this Fisher house contains. There are secrets that have the potential
The House in Paris Read More »
Aldous Huxley spares no one in his ironic, piercing portrayal of a group gathered in an Italian palace by the socially ambitious and self-professed lover of art, Mrs. Aldwinkle. Here, Mrs. Aldwinkle yearns to recapture the glories of the Italian Renaissance, but her guests ultimately fail to fulfill her naive expectations. Among her entourage are:
Those Barren Leaves Read More »
Andrew Marr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Marr) is a much admired journalist, author and broadcaster with a talent for making serious subjects accessible. Happily, as of April 2013, he is recovering from a heart attack, and has appeared back on our television screens. When it comes to a history of modern Britain he is shrewd enough to know that yet another irenic
A History of Modern Britain Read More »
From its source in The Lowther Hills to the sea the River Clyde runs through 109 miles in three distinct areas: Clydesdale, The Clyde Valley and ‘Clydeside’. This volume (1999) deals with first of these. Moving from prehistoric and Roman through medieval and Covenanting to industrial and modern times, the book offers an account of
The study of Darwinian theory has attracted many of the brightest minds and best writers during the past twenty years. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1996), Daniel Dennett http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Dennett) attempts to integrate an enormously diverse range of research into a coherent but popularly understandable defense of neo-Darwinian thought. Darwin’s ‘dangerous idea’ is clearly held forth
Darwin's Dangerous Idea Read More »
On first reading this at school in 1978, it took me a while to get fully involved in the narrative. By half way through I wondered if there could ever be a more subtle and penetrating novelist than Mary Ann Evans. 35 years later I’ve not read any fiction finer than that of George Eliot
Middlemarch by George Eliot Read More »
