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...
Devolution
Devolution By Max Brooks ISBN-10: 1984820192 Max Brooks, son of Mel, deals in dystopia. With World War Z he managed to take the hoariest of the horrors; the practically antediluvian zombie apocalypse and resurrected it into an urgent new form. For his new tour around the end of the world,...
Sicily: Island of Beauty and Conflict
The author opens his book with a quote from Winston Churchill writing about the Balkans, ‘They produce more history than they can consume,’ underlining the problems facing any writer trying to bottle the essence of Sicily. He cites beauty, conflict, civilisation and chaos as being the four ingredients that define...
Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties
This new book could not have come out at a more apposite time, unlike poor William Sitwell’s The Restaurant, the History of Eating Out, just when you couldn’t. For the past weeks there have been demonstrations, not just in the US, but in the UK, about the brutal killing of...
Turn the page for Independent Bookshop Week 2020
From online events with bestselling authors, to a picture book celebrating key workers, to virtual bookshop crawls, Independent Bookshop Week 2020 (20-27 June) is in full swing this week. Organised by the Booksellers Association (BA) and sponsored by Hachette, the annual celebration of independent bookshops across the UK and Ireland...
Sons of the Waves by Stephen Taylor
The subtitle of this weighty tome is ‘The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail’, which charts the history of Jack Tar from when Francis Drake circumnavigated the Globe on the Golden Hind in 1577, with 166 seamen on board, until the age of steam, when Britain literally ruled...
