What a delightfully informative little book! I don’t know how they crammed so much information into just 200 pages (reminds me of Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and this one doesn’t have recipes). (And why not, I ask? Hmmph.) The authors take something called the Julius Work Calendar,…
So, okay, I admit that was more than I ever wanted to know about Raymond Chandler and The Big Sleep. It took me ten months to get all the way through it, partly because I’m not a huge fan of noir. The men are always so Alpha male and the women are always such one-dimensional…
Abi’s dad Theo marries Max and Louis’ mom Polly, Abi’s Granny Grace decamps immediately back to Jamaica, and they need a bigger place to live. They find a tiny, ivy-covered oasis in the heart of London, move in, and then Polly leaves the country for work. This is too much change for Abi, who retreats…
Read more A tale funny enough to make you laugh out loud and poignant enough to make you weep.
The jewel in the crown in this case is not the Crown Jewels, although the Crown Jewels play their part as World War II opens in this novel. No, the jewel in the crown of England in this case is one Caitrin Colline, Welsh and one of the first members of Unit 512, a tippety-top…
Read more More fun to hang out with than the entire cast of Monty Python.
Jill Metcalfe’s brother Henry has just been killed in France on a mission to steal Abwehr documents. The news is brought to her and her father by American Army Captain Jack Strafford, who is on his own mission and not just to inform the bereaved. Henry had discovered a spy transmitting bombing coordinates to Germany…
Read more He wasn’t that sweet little boy from the book, you know.
Talk about a throwback–Tom Mead is channeling basically every Golden Age English crime fiction writer from Conan Doyle on here. Nothing is omitted, including the befuddled detective (named Flint, because of course), the always-smarter-than-everyone-else amateur, and a cast of characters with collectively more motive than everyone in that sleeper in Murder on the Orient Express,…
Director Brendan O’Hea walks Dame Judi through every single Shakespeare character in which she has dwelled, through 58 years, six BAFTAs and one Academy Award (although if there were any justice in the world she would have won something for being the best Bond girl ever). I don’t think there is a woman’s role in…
I reread both of these novels nonstop for the first time since they were published back in the 70s, and they held up remarkably well. US Navy Commander Victor “Pug “Henry is on his way to Berlin, there to take up the post of naval attaché at the US Embassy. It’s not a job he…
A Liaden Universe Constellation Volume 5by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller Sharon Lee & Steve Miller (the latter recently deceased) have been writing a space opera set in their Liaden Universe for 37 years. Think tough, diminutive space elfs with excruciatingly good manners, occasional telepathic powers, and very fast ships they know how to use.…
Read more Tough, diminutive space elfs with excruciatingly good manners
I’m what Barbara Wallraff calls a lexplorer, which means that on the way to looking up occurrence in my Webster’s College Dictionary to see if it’s two c’s or two r’s (both) and an “e” or and “a” (an e) I get sidetracked, first by osmometry (measurement of osmotic pressure), and then of course by osmotic pressure (the force that a dissolved substance exerts on…
