I feel I’ve come rather late to the fair with Kate Griffin’s sorcerers-in-London series, since the first one came out in 2009. I was looking stupidly at A Madness of Angels in a bookshop last autumn, wondering why it wasn’t ringing bells – surely I’d read all the magical-London novels in print? – and was … Continue reading London calling: Kate Griffin’s A Madness of Angels
Month: April 2016
Bad drugs and fast cars: Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise
Getting our knees wet in the sea of this mini-series on great detective classics, this podcast scripts catch-up from Why I Really Like This Book is about that perceptive novel about the advertising industry by Dorothy L Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933). This is a novel about office lives and 1930s high society, with a darkness underneath that comes from … Continue reading Bad drugs and fast cars: Dorothy L Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise
Letters to Tiptree: homage to a ground-breaking author
Update: On 25 September 2016 Letters to Tiptree won the British Fantasy Award for best non-fiction. Well deserved! If you’ve not heard of James Tiptree Jr, the acclaimed author of science fiction short stories and a handful of novels, he was active from 1967 to the late 1980s. He also wrote as Raccoona Sheldon, and … Continue reading Letters to Tiptree: homage to a ground-breaking author
T H White’s Darkness at Pemberley
T H White's Darkness at Pemberley, from the Why I Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, is the second of his two detective novels. Neither did particularly well. He is most famous for The Sword in the Stone in 1938, which he rewrote and expanded into the tetralogy The Once and Future King. Disney made its most … Continue reading T H White’s Darkness at Pemberley
George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier
As an antidote or astringent supplement to the estimable The 1938 Club blogging week, I'm posting the last in my miniseries on British political fiction, from the Really Like This Book podcast scripts. Trouble is, it’s not fiction: it’s a polemic, it’s a historical record, and it’s by George Orwell, from 1937. The Road to Wigan … Continue reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier
The 1938 Club! Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop
This special podcast scripts recap from Why I Really like This Book, is on Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's magnificent satire about newspaper journalism. Scoop is also a member of The 1938 Club, a week of book reviews and blog posts about the reading of 1938, that's taking place between 11 and 17 April 2016. British journalism changed radically at … Continue reading The 1938 Club! Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop
Dorothy M Richardson’s Backwater, and Honeycomb
These are the second and third novels in Dorothy M Richardson’s Pilgrimage sequence, and, like the first - Pointed Roofs (1915) - they are as realist as one could hope for in a modernist novel. The narrative is straightforward, albeit entirely through the perspective of the narrative voice, Miriam Henderson, a girl from Barnes now marooned in a … Continue reading Dorothy M Richardson’s Backwater, and Honeycomb
Domestic politics in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love
Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love (from the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up) is not at all an obvious political novel. She excelled in, and is very famous for, her novels of the totally frivolous and madly eccentric lives of characters based loosely on her life and family. They’re all upper-class glamour and insouciance worn … Continue reading Domestic politics in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love
A history of British utopian living: Utopia Britannica
This remarkable compendium of the history of British radical communities is colourful inside and out: the typefaces change depending on the category of the text (commentary, quotation, reportage), and the stories are astonishingly addictive. ‘Just one more’, as, oblivious to the cold room or the early start next morning, you keep reading past midnight yet … Continue reading A history of British utopian living: Utopia Britannica
Kate Macdonald 