One thought troubles me greatly. It is entirely possible to be deluded and live your whole life through happily. A clear example is that hundreds of millions of humans believed that the Sun was moving round the Earth daily. They organised their agriculture, society, calendar and religion around this idea. For them it seems to […]
The Believing Brain by Michael Shermer Read More »
How well can you really know another person? And how far would you go to find out the truth about him or her? S.J. Watson’s (http://www.sjwatson-books.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._J._Watson) successor to his super-selling debut novel Before I Go To Sleep (2011) turns on a girl who is gone. A young woman called Kate Plummer has been murdered in Paris in
Glass is the first novel of London based writer Alex Christofi (http://alexchristofi.com/) The outline is as follows. Günter Glass, ex-milkman and aspiring window-cleaner, is certainly pure. And he’s pretty transparent. But the jury’s still out on how sharp he is. What naïve young Günter does have is a head for heights and, ever since he
It was only the other night that I was luxuriating in the sounds of the Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Symphoniae-Spiritual-Songs-Hildegard-Bingen/dp/B000026NDI/ref=tag_dpp_lp_edpp_ttl_in) by Hildegard of Bingen. Hildegard was in the charts in the 50s. The 1150s, that is. It occured to me that her monophonic compostions would be the ideal background for a recent publication by Robyn Cadwallader (http://robyncadwallader.com/) – ‘The Anchoress’.
What does it say about our world that the fantasy genre is so much in the ascendant? Fiction, television and film are full of it. Has technology acted as a booster to the human imagination? Are everyday conditions so mundane that escapes into weird, wonderful and colourful worlds become irresistable? Whatever the answers to these questions Victoria
A Darker Shade of Magic Read More »
It takes some chutzpah to publish an autobiographical novel in 6 parts over 3,500 pages with the title ‘Min Kamp’ (Norwegian for ‘My Struggle’) with the obvious resonance of a darker figure from twentieth century history. Yet that is exactly what Karl Ove Knausgaard (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Ove_Knausg%C3%A5rd) has done. In this 4th instalment – Dancing in the Dark – Knausgaard
Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard Read More »
Harry Patterson (a.k.a. Jack Higgins) (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/cr-100380/jack-higgins) has been thrilling us now for 40 years since his breakthrough novel ‘The Eagle Has Landed’ in 1975. With 84 novels under his belt he resides in Jersey, Channel Isles where the climate is conducive, with over 2000 hours of sunshine per year. In this latest frontal lobe trembler, Sean Dillon
To play snooker at the highest level you would think you’d need an icy, ultra sober, ‘frame’ of mind. To execute shots with millimetre precision for hour after hour – well don’t you need to be someone like Steve Davis? Apparently not, because the sport has offered us wild and flamboyant characters. One was Alex
Jimmy White: Second Wind Read More »
David Lodge (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lodge_(author) and http://literature.britishcouncil.org/david-lodge) novelist, English Literature Professor and literary critic offers a most interesting memoir here. One of the principal themes is inhibition, how you overcome it and the moral and practical consequences of that conquest – a sexual (and also a social and at times an intellectual) journey with, Lodge implies, many
Quite A Good Time to be Born: A Memoir: 1935-1975 Read More »
