Tonight (Sunday 4th September 2016) sees the screening of the second series of the newly made Poldark historical drama on BBC TV. Many of us will remember the 29 episode TV adaptation with Robin Ellis and Angharad Rees which ran from 1975-1977. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075560/?ref_=nv_sr_2) Forty years on, and it’s Aidan Turner and Eleanor Tomlinson who are […]
Commuters in Clydesdale could be forgiven for thinking that the train service has gone a belly up in the last 18 months. Cancellations and delays have plagued the daily journey. If one is lucky, a seat and the opportunity to read a newspaper or novel whilst being conveyed to work are on offer. What one
Racial tensions in America have not gone away 50 years after the Civil Rights Movement (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_Civil_Rights_Movement_(1954%E2%80%9368)), and there is much talk in the media and among pundits about the enduring legacy of slavery. The 2013 film 12 Years a Slave (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2024544/?ref_=nv_sr_2) was an adaptation of the 1853 slave narrative memoir by Solomon Northup, a New York State-born free African-American man who
Novelist Susan Barker (http://susanbarker.co.uk/about/) has gained an appreciative readership over the last 10 years. Her third novel is about a taxi driver in contemporary Beijing and is interwoven with tales from the Tang Dynasty, the invasion of Genghis Khan, the Ming Dynasty, the Opium Wars, and the Cultural Revolution. Whilst writing The Incarnations Barker spent several years
Navigating through human life is, as we all realise, a tricky business. One of the persistent suspicions that may beset us is that people are not all they seem. They may be offering us a persona which conceals hidden motives, desires, tastes, values etc. How well do you really know those that are closest to
Fancy a holiday in Cyprus? A holiday in the imagination which does not involve that early morning trip to the airport or any of the disagreeable hassle of travel? Take flight instead with the latest novel by Irish writer Lucinda Riley (http://www.lucindariley.com/home/4591002983). The Olive Tree will transport you to the Eastern Mediterranean from your armchair
In the dappled late May sunshine of South Lanarkshire, it may just be possible to detect the live murmur of a summer’s day. Your day will not be out of the ordinary. In the background the servants are busy with their morning tasks, and the clatter of pots and pans drifts over the policies to
The Penguin Book of the British Short Story, edited by Philip Hensher Read More »
Graham Swift is an English novelist who has been influenced by the magic realism of Borges, Marquez and Grass. His successful fiction Last Orders and Waterland have both been filmed. He has been the winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, The James Tait Black Memorial Prize and The Booker Prize. In Mothering Sunday, Swift takes
Have you ever been in a relationship, or even upgraded the bond into the social institution called marriage? How is it going? Every relationship has a history as it meets inevitable stresses, external and internal. Alain de Botton’s (http://alaindebotton.com/) new novel charts the marriage of Rabih and Kirsten from the first flowering of attraction and the
The Course of Love Read More »
