Books & Reviews
Sunday, 24 July 2011
FRANK T Bullen is in the crow's nest, that observation platform high above the mainsail, at dawn. "At such a time, specially if the heavens be one stainless concave of blue, the advent of a new day is so overwhelming in its glory that the soul is...
CELEBRATED for his plays, novels and journalism, Michael Frayn's first work of memoir, My Father's Fortune, has been rewarded with the PEN/Ackerley prize, the UK's only dedicated award for autobiography.My Father's Fortune saw off competition from a...
Sunday, 17 July 2011
JOHN Colville, Winston Churchill's private secretary, went riding at the height of the second world war; his boss went off to the cinema. Harold Macmillan, when prime minister, decamped to Scotland for weeks each August to go grouse shooting. The...
Sunday, 10 July 2011
THE pavement outside a tapas bar in London's Old Brompton Road is a far cry from a bullring in Spain.But that doesn't stop British writer, actor and amateur matador Alexander Fiske-Harrison from leaping to his feet mid-conversation and demonstrating...
IT'S the literary world's version of consequences: from Alexander McCall Smith to Kathy Reichs, 26 bestselling crime writers have teamed up to create the multi-authored mystery No Rest for the Dead. The authors who also include Raymond Khoury, RL...
Sunday, 19 June 2011
IN 1979 China signed a US$50m four-year deal with a UN body designed to help it control its spiralling population through family planning. It was the largest foreign aid package Beijing had accepted in almost 20 years.But the funds became entwined...
HARRY Potter fans have been sent into a frenzy of excitement after the creator of their favourite wizard, JK Rowling, launched a mysterious new website.The website, Pottermore.com, currently only shows the word "Pottermore" on a pink background,...
Sunday, 5 June 2011
JAMES Daunt is not an open book. He is a shy, confident, personable, highly literate ex-investment banker in his late 40s who, next month, will become the new managing director of Waterstone's and, arguably, one of the most important people on the...
Sunday, 15 May 2011
IN A long-forgotten review of a long-forgotten book, Ring of Bright Water by Gavin Maxwell, the much-racked William Golding wrote: "We walk among the layers of disintegrating coral, along the straggling line of 'brown sea-wrack, dizzy with...
br />AT LEAST 20 unpublished stories by Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange, have been discovered by researchers sorting through his papers at a research centre in Manchester, the city in which he was born.The short stories,...
Sunday, 1 May 2011
ON THE day after the Sept 11, 2001 attacks, after helping cover that story for The New York Times, an exhausted Jane Gross was finally able to drop by the nursing home a few miles (kilometres) north of ground zero where her mother had just moved to...
Sunday, 24 April 2011
THE troubled world of book publishing has become almost wearily accustomed to receiving yet more bad news of a critically acclaimed memoir that turns out to have been partly or entirely fabricated.The works of James Frey, J T LeRoy (aka Laura Albert...
SCRIBBLING in the margins of library books will soon be permitted, after Amazon.com announced recently that it would allow Kindle users to borrow ebooks from more than 11,000 American libraries.The deal follows similar agreements from the Kindle's...
Sunday, 17 April 2011
DID you hear about the farmer who hired some mathematicians to help him increase his milk yield? Their report began: "Consider a spherical cow . . . "This is a famous old joke about the disconnect between mathematics, the language of clear...
IT'S BECOME a matter of honour for most reviewers in this country (and many readers) to remind me as often as possible that What a Carve Up! is my best novel. No middle-aged novelist who is still trying to make a living from writing likes to be...
Sunday, 3 April 2011
YOU'LL be swept away by Fairest; it is pure magic!The story is very realistic and is hard to put down.When you read this book you will feel like you are no longer in London, you have travelled to the land of Ayortha.The main character is Aza, she is...
AT THE heart of this fascinating book is one of the central questions of our age rendered more urgent by recent events in the Arab world. The question is this: is the Internet a revolutionary innovation, something that will overthrow the...
BEING a massive Robert Muchamore fan I was really excited to see this book in the shops in February. I bought it straight away and wasn't disappointed. The book was really fast-paced and there wasn't a boring chapter or a part where I thought,...
Sunday, 27 March 2011
THE bestselling children's author Julia Donaldson, whose signature rhyming picture books dominate top 10 lists, has revealed that she vetoed an ebook version of her most famous title, The Gruffalo, because she thinks interactive book apps for...
THE Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 was roundly denounced by western governments caught completely unaware during their Christmas break. The US and UK responded first with overblown rhetoric, then by helping to fund and arm...
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