Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt

This 1938 memoir by the prolific and highly skilled author Elinor Mordaunt (not her birth name) floats airily between the firm land of fact and history and the boundless seas of improbable possibilities. Mordaunt is an extraordinary character. I commissioned the publication of a collection of her supernatural short stories last year, and I was … Continue reading Sinabada, by Elinor Mordaunt →

Sarah Lonsdale, Rebel Women Between The Wars

I pre-ordered this book because I’ve been waiting for it for a very long time. Lonsdale has been researching women journalists and journalism in British fiction for much of her career as an academic at City University London, and before that was a journalist writing for a variety of papers and magazines. Rebel Women Between … Continue reading Sarah Lonsdale, Rebel Women Between The Wars →

Jan Morris, Hav

Jan Morris is one of the most familiar names in British travel writing, so I was surprised to find a new work by her that I did not know, Last Letters from Hav. The New York Review Books Original edition - Hav - has a stupendous cover image that relates to the sequel, Hav of … Continue reading Jan Morris, Hav →

Enjoyed, with caveats

M C Bolitho, A Victorian Lady in the Himalayas, edited by Jean Burnett Jean Burnett is part of Writers Unchained, a collective of writers from Bristol, and has published novels with Little, Brown about the adventures of Lydia Bennett. She has edited the diary of Maria Bolitho, a Victorian Englishwoman who travelled across the Himalayas … Continue reading Enjoyed, with caveats →

Kathleen Jamie, Among Muslims

Once again, Kathleen Jamie's prose is a deep immersive pleasure, the kind of writing that stays with you for days. She's a poet and knows how to compress emotion and meaning into letters and pauses. I loved her Sightlines and Findings, both collections of essays and short pieces. This, earlier, book is, I think, even better. … Continue reading Kathleen Jamie, Among Muslims →

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 →

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 →

Unpicking a life of glamour: Molly Izzard’s Freya Stark

Today’s letter in the Really Like This Book podcast series A-Z is I, and I have moved out of fiction, and to the intriguing biography by Molly Izzard, of the Middle Eastern traveller and woman of letters, Freya Stark. Stark made her name in the 1930s as the first western woman to travel in some very remote … Continue reading Unpicking a life of glamour: Molly Izzard’s Freya Stark →

Snake healing in Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake

This week is Vonda McIntyre week. Today's post on her 1979 novel Dreamsnake is from my podcast miniseries on feminist science fiction; tomorrow's post on Vulpes Libris is on her new novel, The Moon and the Sun. With Dreamsnake I’m not talking about dragons, but proper hard-edged science in futuristic fiction, even if it’s made-up science, where … Continue reading Snake healing in Vonda N McIntyre’s Dreamsnake →

What Katy Did, Next, and At School

This is another repost from the vaults of Why I Really Like This Book, a round-up of three books I reread addictively all through my childhood and early twenties. You can also listen to the original podcast on Susan Coolidge and the What Katy Did books (1872, 1873, 1886) The origins of my love of 19th-century fiction lie in … Continue reading What Katy Did, Next, and At School →