Stirling Moss: Rally Driver by Vic Quayle
He was one of the greatest racing drivers the world has ever seen, and he died earlier last year at the age of ninety. He was so famous in the 1950s and 1960s, that when traffic cops pulled over a ‘boy racer’ for some speeding indiscretion, the admonition would usually...
Trio By William Boyd
Mr Boyd is a consummate storyteller, cleverly knitting together four essential strands, namely Plot, Character, Narrative and Pace, and, adding to that, sharp, witty Dialogue and Descriptive Prose, and you have a novel worth reading. Another element has crept back into his writing canon, and that is humour. Early books...
Hail to the Chief?!
Where would caricaturists be without politicians? Whilst the occasional Kennedy or Obama is blessed with a fairly normal array of facial features, for the most part Nixon, Eisenhower and LBJ set the tone somewhere between ‘bulldog’ and ‘horrific fire at Madame Tussauds’. As a president, Trump very much hewed close...
The Irish Cultural Centre has announced the ICC Digital Literary Festival, launching their 25th anniversary celebrations
The Irish Cultural Centre (ICC) has announced the upcoming Digital Literary Festival – a celebration of contemporary Irish writing, which will form the centrepiece of its autumn cultural programme. The festival will showcase some of the stalwarts of Irish literature, the writers behind many prize-winning works, alongside more recent bestselling...
Entangled Life
The subtitle for this mighty, academic tome is How Fungi Make our Worlds, Change our Minds and Shape our Futures, which is quite a statement in itself. My knowledge of fungi is limited to food and the various mushrooms one chooses at the market. I knew nothing, or very little,...
An Elephant in Rome Bernini, the Pope and the making of the Eternal City
Loyd Grossman is a Renaissance man in a Baroque world. Entrepreneur, broadcaster, TV presenter, musician and author, his main interest is in the arts, and having written one book on the American painter Benjamin West, he has turned his attention to Rome, with his opening lines reading, ‘Rome is a...
Drowning Ruth by Christina Schwarz
This week brought the first in-person book club gathering since our initial session all the way back in that previous era, known as February. Abiding by the amorphous government guidelines to the best of my ability, I decked out the little courtyard in front of my flat (see also: a...
Covid-19: The Great Reset
Covid-19: The Great Reset by Klaus Scwab & Thierry MalleretForum Publishing280pp.paperbackThe most repeated truism about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is that it has accelerated or “exacerbated”, as the authors of this book prefer, societal changes which were already taking place gradually.With the rise of America First, Brexit and...
From Print to Profit
The Unexpected Fortune You Have at Home: 20 Print Items Worth Hundreds of Pounds We tend to make space in our houses by clearing up things that we might consider not valuable anymore, like old books, magazines, pictures, etc. However, you might have been throwing hundreds of pounds away, as...
Lullaby by Leila Slimani
Due to the general lack of, well, anything else to do, our next virtual meet-up came around quickly. One benefit of lockdown seems to be that reading time is up exponentially, especially when one group member’s husband (mine) is reliving his teenage years by hogging the television with an eBay...
