Once Upon a Time by Marina Warner

EGGHEAD CHOICE - Crack open for a hard boiled think

Distinguished academic Marina Warner (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Warner and http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html) offers a short history and analysis of the fairy tale. I was alerted to this by the Guardian review (http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/nov/20/once-upon-a-time-a-short-history-of-fairy-tale-marina-warner) which turned out to be a splendid summary. What is a fairy tale? Where do they come from and what do they mean? What do they try and communicate to us […]

Once Upon a Time by Marina Warner Read More »

Mr Weston’s Good Wine by T.F. Powys

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Mr. Weston’s Good Wine (1927) by Theodore Francis Powys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.F._Powys) is a strange and delightful book. The story and the style are unfathomably simple. Accompanied by an assistant called Gabriel, a woolly-haired wine-seller drives into a small Dorset town called Folly Down. Time stops, and the sign on the battered van appears in the sky. Some

Mr Weston’s Good Wine by T.F. Powys Read More »

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

LITERARY BENT - Writing at its best

Jenny Offill’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Offill and http://jennyoffill.com/) slender and cannily paced novel, her second, assembles fragments, observations, meditations and different points of view to chart the course of a troubled marriage. Wry and devastating in equal measure, the novel is a cracked mirror that throws light in every direction — on music and literature; science and philosophy; marriage and

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill Read More »

On Immunity

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

In this spellbinding blend of memoir, science journalism and literary criticism, Eula Biss (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eula_Biss and http://eulabiss.net/) unpacks what the fear of vaccines tells us about larger anxieties involving purity, contamination and interdependency. Deeply researched and anchored in Biss’s own experiences as a new mother, this ferociously intelligent book is itself an inoculation against bad science and superstition,

On Immunity Read More »

The Sixth Extinction

EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE - Science & Technology

Elizabeth Kolbert (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Kolbert and http://elizabethkolbert.com/) reports from the front lines of the violent collision between human civilization and our planet’s ecosystem — from the Great Barrier Reef to her own backyard — in this, her third, book. Traveling to some of the world’s remotest corners, she examines how man-made climate change threatens to eliminate 20 to 50

The Sixth Extinction Read More »

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life

LIVES WELL LIVED? A pick from biography and memoir

Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penelope_Fitzgerald ) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower (first published 1995), was acclaimed as a work

Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life Read More »

The Good Life

CRIMINALLY MINDED - Tales of the behaviourally challenged, FANTASTIC FICTION - Escapes to other places and other times

Martina Cole (http://www.martinacole.co.uk/) was born and brought up in Essex. She is the bestselling author of fourteen novels set in London’s gangland, and her most recent three paperbacks have gone straight to No. 1 in the Sunday Times on first publication. Total sales of Martina’s novels stand at over eight million copies. The summary of her

The Good Life Read More »

Scroll to Top