Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer

This podcast scripts catch-up from Really Like This Book is on the first of Gene Wolfe’s epic science-fiction & fantasy tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, The Shadow of the Torturer (1981), the only one of the four I have been able to finish. It is EPIC, a tremendous, sprawling feast of fantastical invention slathered over … Continue reading Gene Wolfe’s The Shadow of the Torturer →

Gender performativity at its best: Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders

Swordfights and petticoats from Georgette Heyer, the grande dame / mother superior of all things swashbuckling, in this week's podcast scripts catch-up from Really Like This Book, with The Masqueraders, from 1928. Georgette Heyer wrote a very large number of novels. To those who haven’t read them, and simply judge them by their covers, from all their … Continue reading Gender performativity at its best: Georgette Heyer’s The Masqueraders →

Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel

Continuing to swash buckles in the Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up, we're still in wigland, in the eighteenth century, crossing the Channel and diddling the enemy in disguise, with The Scarlet Pimpernel. First off, what IS a scarlet pimpernel? It’s a flower, a straggling long-stemmed weed-like plant, that grows in boggy places. It comes in … Continue reading Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel →

Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda

Antony Hope's invention* of the cardboard kingdom in The Prisoner of Zenda is the subject of this week's Really Like This Book podcast scripts catch-up. Hope was a respectable Victorian London lawyer, but he had a secret passion for the romantic and dramatic, and wrote many novels. His most famous is The Prisoner of Zenda, from … Continue reading Antony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda →