Resisting war: Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others

Today’s Really Like This Book's podcast script catch-up about political fiction is about a novel that's 100 years old: Non-Combatants and Others, from 1916. It’s by the British novelist, journalist and traveller Rose Macaulay, and is set in London during the early part of the First World War. I need to pause here to crow (SQUEEE!) and … Continue reading Resisting war: Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and Others →

The hero uses crutches: J J Amaworo Wilson’s Damnificados

The carefully managed outbreaks of magical realism are what I like best about J J Amaworo Wilson’s Damnificados. Wilson’s skills as a novelist are impressive, and his scope in Damnificados is global: his vision of a Latin American city that casually and fleetingly connects to Africa and Japan makes this novel a world myth with … Continue reading The hero uses crutches: J J Amaworo Wilson’s Damnificados →

Suffragette fiction by Constance Maud: No Surrender

Suffragette fiction was written to persuade, as well as entertain. It is essentially polemic, and I've had a tough time persuading students to read it as literature rather than ranting politics from an age long gone. Let me hone my persuasion techniques on you, using another Really Like This Book podcast script catch-up, by enthusing … Continue reading Suffragette fiction by Constance Maud: No Surrender →

Evelyn Waugh’s Remote People

This short account of Evelyn Waugh’s travels in East and West Africa in 1930 is advertised in its new Penguin Modern Classics edition as ‘perhaps the funniest travel book ever written’. The ‘perhaps’ is well placed, because ‘funny’ is a matter of taste, ‘perhaps’ the taste of one who finds colonialism, racism and British Establishment … Continue reading Evelyn Waugh’s Remote People →

Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising

In the last of the Really Like This Book podcast script catch-ups about King Arthur, I’m reading a very old favourite, the series of fantasy novels by Susan Cooper called The Dark is Rising. There are five, and the earliest one - Over Sea Under Stone - is most definitely a children’s mystery quest. Simon, Jane … Continue reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising →

Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ida Cook’s Safe Passage

I posted a partial rant, and a partial wave of enthusiasm over on Vulpes Libris today, on Ida Cook's (reprinted) memoir We Followed Our Stars, now calling itself (annoyingly) Safe Passage. Go there to discover the tangled web of marketing versus editorial, the heroic imaginative rescue of 29 Jews from pre-WW2 Austria and Germany, and a … Continue reading Now posting on Vulpes Libris: Ida Cook’s Safe Passage →

Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle

I happened upon this beautiful Gaiman-Riddell collaboration from 2014 in the Cambridge branch of Forbidden Planet, and was looked upon strangely when I bore it back to my friends in triumph. I explained that since I live abroad I have fewer ways of finding out what is creeping into bookshops without notifying me, and their … Continue reading Neil Gaiman’s The Sleeper and the Spindle →

Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave

We've reached the point in this recap of Really Like This Book podcast scripts about King Arthur when we really have to talk about Mary Stewart. She died in 2014, which came as a shock to me. I had been living in the same time as one of my favourite authors, and never had the gumption to write her … Continue reading Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave →

Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs

Pointed Roofs is the first novel in Dorothy Richardson’s 13-volume sequence Pilgrimage, published between 1915 and (posthumously) 1967. I knew there were 13 novels, but when I was bought the 1938 Cresset Press edition in Brussels’ loveliest antiquarian bookshop, Het Ivoren Aapje, two months ago, I realised that my 4-volume edition only includes the first … Continue reading Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs →

Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern-Bearers

This novel of King Arthur from the Really Like This Books podcast scripts catch-up is Rosemary Sutcliff's The Lantern-Bearers. It begins as one of her Romans in Britain novels, the books for which she is best known, a sequence that traces different periods of Roman rule in Britain, linked by the transmitted family heirloom of a glass … Continue reading Rosemary Sutcliff’s The Lantern-Bearers →