This book (2008) has wonder in the title and is wonderful to read. Richard Holmes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Holmes_(biographer) is a biographer to trade and married to novelist Rose Tremain. This was his first major work of biography in over a decade. Holmes immerses us into the world where the Romantic spirit was being thrilled by the discoveries of science […]
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Flight Behaviour (2012) is the latest novel from Barbara Kingsolver (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Kingsolver and http://www.kingsolver.com/), who grew up in eastern Kentucky. It is in running towards a rendezvous with a lover that the principal character, Dellarobia Turnbow, a farmer’s wife, encounters what looks like a hillside on fire. In fact it is the sight of clouds of orange
This ultra-modernist tale of jazz age America from 1925 is much in the glare of publicity at the moment (May 2013) due to the release of another Hollywood film version (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1343092/), this time with Leonardo diCaprio as Jay. F Scott Fitzgerald’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Fitzgerald and http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/index.html) famous work regularly tops polls of ‘best American novel ever written’ or even ‘best
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Man, Beast and Zombie (2000) by Kenan Malik (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenan_Malik) investigates the historical roots, philosophical assumptions and alleged methodological problems of contemporary theories of human nature, in particular evolutionary psychology and cognitive science. Malik argues that, ‘The triumph of mechanistic explanations of human nature is as much the consequence of our culture’s loss of nerve as
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Possession: A Romance is a 1990 bestselling novel by Antonia Byatt, sister of Margaret Drabble. It won the Booker Prize in 1990. Part historical as well as contemporary fiction, the title ‘Possession’ refers to issues of ownership and independence between lovers, the practice of collecting historically significant cultural artefacts, and to the possession that a biographer feels for
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A long time ago my Grandfather presented me with a hardback copy of Cosmos (1980, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cosmos-Carl-Sagan/dp/0394502949/ref=sr_1_1_twi_har_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1517153106&sr=1-1&keywords=cosmos+sagan) by Carl Sagan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Sagan), the great American popularizer of science and cosmology. With over 250 full-colour illustrations, many of them never before published, it was based on the author’s thirteen-part television series. I was mesmerised and spent many hours
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Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two betrothed Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love
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Mrs Bridge (1959) is an inspired novel set in the years around World War II that testifies to the sapping ennui of an unexamined suburban life (in Kansas City, in this case). India Bridge, the eponymous character, has three children and a meticulous workaholic lawyer husband. She defends her dainty, untouched guest towels from son Douglas, who has
Traffics and Discoveries (1904) is a collection of short stories, mostly South African or technological in emphasis, and with accompanying poems. ‘The Captive’, ‘A Sahib’s War’, and ‘The Comprehensions of Private Copper’ reproduce the flavour of Kipling’s early stories about the lower ranks in the context of the Boer War. The same knowing narrator who recorded
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Staying On (1977) is about post colonial India. Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return ‘home’ when Tusker, once a Colonel in the British Army, retired, they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pangkot, with its eccentric inhabitants and archaic rituals left over from the
The Lost Weekend (1944) is the story of a man in the grip of alcohol; it moves forward with speed, force, and heartbreaking truth. Don Birnam is someone you know and care about. His loneliness, his craving for drink, his dangerous hangovers, his daydreams of himself as a genius and actual nightmares are unforgettable experiences. Perhaps the only
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The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) celebrates the romance of even the most ordinary lives in the course of tracing the passage of time over three generations. It tells the story of the two Baines sisters, placid stay-at-home Constance and rebellious Sophia, from their girlhood to their last days. They move from the family drapery shop
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Mrs. Dalloway (1925) follows a set of characters as they go about their lives on a normal day. The eponymous character, Clarissa Dalloway, does simple things: she buys some flowers, walks in a park, is visited by an old friend and throws a party. She speaks to a man who was once in love with
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After a chance encounter on a train the English teacher William Bradshaw starts a close friendship with the mildly sinister Arthur Norris. Norris is a man of contradictions; lavish but heavily in debt, excessively polite but sexually deviant. First published in 1935 Mr Norris Changes Trains piquantly evokes the atmosphere of Berlin during the rise
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After a decade in one South Seas mission, a London bank-clerk-turned-minister sets his heart on serving a remote volcanic island. Fanua contains neither cannibals nor Christians, but its citizens, his superior warns, are like children—immoral children. Still, Mr. Timothy Fortune sets out for Fanua. After three years, he has made only one convert, and his devotion
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