I sent off for free delivery vouchers some weeks ago, but when they turned up, whoever was delivering our neck of the woods was over capacity and no longer taking any more customers. But idly checking the site last week I saw that it is now possible to set up delivery (and I also have prepay vouchers), though not whether this is with same supplier ( Read more... )

But really, this new bio of Mrs Delany is either being badly misrepresented in this review, or just BAD: Mrs Delany: A Life by Clarissa Campbell Orr review - an 18th-century late bloomer. Mary Delany found fame for her flower ‘mosaiks’ in her 70s, but this followed decades of turbulence. I may not know that much about Mrs D, but I do know that she ( Read more... )

(Maybe there ought be a self-help group for people who, reading the name 'Will Self' on a column or a review, are powerfully moved to heave out a codfish? Or is this an entirely understandable shared reaction?)
Anyway, Mr W.S. has writ a memoir, entitled Will, reviewed here, and as, in the sidebar, there is a link to Mr Self's interview in which he ( Read more... )

I suppose it is possibly a good thing that there is a popular-type biography of Anne Lister just out: Gentleman Jack: A biography of Anne Lister, Regency Landowner, Seducer and Secret Diarist by Angela Steidele and Katy Derbyshire, though the word 'secret' there makes me cringe. Keeping a diary was, after all, in most cases a private practice (and ( Read more... )

Dept of, I keep feeling they're desperately avoiding the obvious analogy like the elephant in the room: I keep seeing reviews and articles about this young writer - which invoke the phrase the [X] writer for/of the Now Times - this invocation of Some Other Writer of the past is present in this review of her latest. I haven't read the books, but ( Read more... )

But I must say I was quite chuffed to see somebody expressing a certain tiredness with the narrative of exquisitely rendered female suffering that ends in obliteration.
(Also I am really not sure that I want to go anywhere near a novel that is described as 'in the manner of John Fowles's eponymous Collector'.)
Maybe I'm prejudging, but having ( Read more... )

Looking through the latest Literary Review, I see there is a review of Claire Tomalin's autobiography.
Tomalin is an excellent and respected biographer, but the reviewer seems under some misapprehension that her biography of the actress Dorothy Jordan uncovered the secret* of her 'clandestine' relationship with the Duke of Clarence, later William ( Read more... )

What I read
Barbara Hambly, Murder in July (2017). Well up to the usual standard.
Tanith Lee, Nightshades (1993): these were my on the go thing on the ereader, and really, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to read them in a bunch. Though very good: fairly early Lee, in horror mode.
Simon Green, Tales from the Nightside (2015), which I'd somehow missed. ( Read more... )

I am not sure, dr rdrz, whether you recall the saga of Orlando Figes posting pseudonynmous knocking reviews of the works of other historians of the Soviet Union, which took place longer ago than I thought, in 2010: links from that time: Historian Orlando Figes admits posting Amazon reviews that trashed rivals. And a fairly bizarre column by one of ( Read more... )

So, it was the bus back to O'Hare, where I don't think the driver gave me the most accurate advice on which terminal I should debark at for the Bus/Shuttle Center, but I got there, and didn't even have to wait an undue while until the relevant shuttle turned up.
Once at the hotel I was about the business of checking in and booking the shuttle at ( Read more... )