Okay, Christie and Allingham at least brought modern geopolitics into a theme that was usually about clean young Englishmen restoring the RightWise King of Ruritania (when they weren't themselves the RightWise King or reasonable semblance of same).

I don't suppose there were any Ruritanian romances in which the exiled leader of the People's ( Read more... )

What I read

Mercedes Lackey, Home from the Sea. Don't really find the Elemental Masters series one I like most, but this was readable.

Melina Marchetta, Finnikin of the Rock: okay, things I liked about this included morally grey (quite dark grey) female lead, although the male lead was - I dunno, pretty much a viewpoint character rather than a ( Read more... )

Capa and Taro lived, loved and died on the frontline, becoming the most famous war photographers of their time. As a new novel about them is published, we explore their real relationship.

This is fascinating - and also distressing about the way the relationship is sentimentalised and monogamised in the forthcoming novel - but I don't think O'Hagan ( Read more... )

I was thinking (no idea why, go figure) last night about how very annoying the end of Casablanca is, and All About Rick, and then this came to me.

( This is spoiler for end of Casablanca should there be anyone out there who doesn't know it )

( Non-fiction )

Thinking further about people faking it and telling stories that diverge from the strict truth, and family myths as embodied in a conversation I had yesterday about doing genealogy and hearing the family story that one forebear was descended from a long line of army officers, but whose father, on investigation, turned out to be a sergeant (who had ( Read more... )

Ulp, two months plus or minus since I last did one of these - even if one was a short month and even if I did do some posts on particular books.

Biographies, memoirs, lives, diaries

( Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn )

Thinking, following comments yesterday about Janet Vaughan's minced raw liver treatment for pernicious anaemia, about forgotten diseases, or diseases we think are gone and forgotten.

I was reminded of this only recently when a colleague rang into to work to report that her offspring had scarlet fever.

And we were both rather WTF about it, because ( Read more... )

One thing about being off for several days last week, it gave me an opportunity to get stuck back into this. I began watching before Christmas, and then got distracted by various things (like watching the Brass DVDs with partner).

What strikes me about it is how leisurely and spacious a production it is. 13 episodes of c. 50 minutes, i.e. almost ( Read more... )