Was this the original baggy monster of a novel? It's huge, and quite baggy, and has no place on my shelves now that I've read it, because its vastness is not matched by re-readability. However, some parts are very good indeed, so it's a patchy reading experience. I found myself skipping the rather tedious romance … Continue reading Arnold Bennett, Imperial Palace
I took a while to get into this sturdy family saga: it was blocking the reading pile for weeks while I struggled to pay it proper attention. Then something clicked, and the peculiarities of The Fountain Overflows (1956) began to attract my attention. At first I thought that it was rather like Rose Macaulay’s Told … Continue reading Rebecca West, The Fountain Overflows
We deep-dyed fans of the Peter Grant Rivers of London universe (the Metropolitan Police's 'weird shit' squad who deal with magic) have been waiting impatiently for the next book to come along. Aaronovitch has been writing the interpolated Rivers of London comic strip series for a year or two (I wrote about this here and … Continue reading Ben Aaronovitch’s The Furthest Station
This is a memoir by the first female professor in the UK, Edith Morley, Professor of English Language at the University of Reading. It’s an essential read for anyone exploring the history of women’s higher education in Britain, and for those keen on reliving the struggles of women to make headway in a profession that … Continue reading Edith Morley’s Before and After. Reminiscences of a Working Life
This book has been looking at me for months, sitting on the shelf in an accusing position, in the stack received during and since Christmas and somehow not yet read, because I knew full well it would not be a nice read, not be comforting, not be bedtime reading, not be reading I could prop … Continue reading Ben Judah’s This is London
The stories in this issue of John Lehmann's Penguin New Writing are pretty grim, but the photographs and artwork lighten the mood. In his introduction Lehmann talks about the 'young men and women who for six years had lived on dreams of devoting their time and energies to writing ... I would take a bet that most … Continue reading Penguin New Writing 28: Summer 1946
Sax Rohmer (listen to the podcast of the earlier version of this review here) was obsessed with what he and the lower reaches of the pre-First World War popular British press used to call ‘the Yellow Peril’ (I hope you notice the inverted commas around that phrase). After the war, things began to get … Continue reading Sax Rohmer’s The Mystery of Fu-Manchu
