Home - News ArchivePreviously in Dogsticks... |
18/02/2019:
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11/02/2019:
- A review of Olijfje
by Helga Ruebsamen
"Helga Ruebsamen was born to a German father and a Dutch mother in the Dutch East Indies. Her family was in the Netherlands when the Second World War broke out, and was unable to return home..." More
- A guest review of L'ordre du jour
by Eric Vuillard
"I read this Goncourt Prizewinning work in the original French, in which it is entitled L'ordre du jour. This term can also be rendered as 'The Agenda', which, as I hope to show, might in some respects be a better translation..." More
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What sort of thing happens on a Thursday? Now you can find out with the "Days of Week" Photos Statistics widget:
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28/01/2019:
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22/01/2019:
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13/01/2019:
- A review of Adrian Mole: The Wilderness Years
by Sue Townsend
"I continue my non-chronological journey through Adrian Mole's adult diaries. The Wilderness Years was the first full volume of Mole's journals to be published after the narrator hit his twenties, and Sue Townsend had the challenge of supplanting the humour of the first two books, which derived substantially from their naive teenage perspective, to a more sophisticated adult context..." More
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05/01/2019:
A review of Titaantjes
by Nescio
"JHF Grönloh was a Dutch businessman who secretly wrote short works of fiction and published them under the pen name of Nescio (Latin: "I don't know"). He is famous in the Netherlands, but virtually unknown in the English-speaking world - hardly surprising since no English translations of his work existed until 2012..." More
04/01/2019:
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30/12/2018:
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26/12/2018:
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20/12/2018:
A review of Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction
by Sue Townsend
"It's autumn 2002, the New Labour Government is threatening war on Iraq, and Adrian Mole has nervously cancelled a holiday in Cyprus after Tony Blair's announcement that Iraq could pound the island with weapons of mass destruction within forty-five minutes. Eternally naive, Mole writes to the Prime Minister asking for proof of the claim, required by the travel agency to redeem his deposit of £57.10..." More
15/12/2018:
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18/11/2018:
- A review of Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
"In Joseph Conrad's most famous novella, the narrator Marlow recounts a journey he made as the captain of a small steam boat up a large central African river. Not knowing in advance the purpose of the boat's journey, he had a strange intuition that this region unpenetrated by civilisation would yield up to his inquisitive mind dark but fascinating secrets..." More
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11/11/2018:
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28/10/2018:
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07/10/2018:
- Book review: Selected Short Stories
by Guy de Maupassant
"*** NOTE: This review contains spoilers *** A small selection of works by the prolific and influential master of the French short story. Containing just twelve pieces, most of them under ten pages long, this is an easy volume to get through, that conveys the preoccupations and range of this interesting author..." More
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30/09/2018:
- Book review: Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain
by Matthew Engel
"Matthew Engel is probably best known as a cricket journalist, writing for The Guardian and then being editor of Wisden Cricketers' Almanack for twelve years, which surely means that he belongs to the high priesthood of cricket journalists. His writings have always been marked by trenchant criticism, not least of the follies of the game's administrators, and by humour; he once suggested that the England Test player Philippe Edmonds, not known for the cricketing equivalent of football's "work rate", if there is one, would have liked a contract involving "no heavy lifting"..." More
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15/09/2018:
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Book reviews:
- Map Addict
by Mike Parker
"A fascination with maps feels, to those who have it, a vaguely embarrassing thing to admit to. Yet once you've taken the leap, it's surprising how many fellow cartophiles come out of the woodwork..." More
- The Making of an Englishman
by Fred Uhlman
"I have to begin this review of the autobiography of the artist and writer Fred Uhlman (1901 - 1985) by adding the sub-title "Erinnerungen eines deutschen Juden" (Memoirs of a German Jew) of the German edition, which I was obliged to read, as the out of print English original (Gollancz, 1960) proved inaccessible. This represents an ironic reversal because initially, in keeping with prevailing attitudes in the early years of the Federal Republic, no German publisher was interested and the first German edition only appeared in 1992 thanks to the Municipal Archive of Uhlman's native city of Stuttgart..." More
- The Reunion
by Fred Uhlman
"This short work belongs to the genre of the novella, which means, in the German tradition at least, as countless lecturers have told countless undergraduates, that, to follow Goethe's precepts, it should be marked by an out of the ordinary event and, towards the end, by a significant turning point. The Reunion certainly fulfils these criteria..." More
- Map Addict
by Mike Parker
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04/09/2018:
When you view chronological statistics from the Photos - Places pages -
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31/08/2018:
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31/07/2018:
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21/07/2018:
Review: What a Plant Knows
by Daniel Chamovitz. About plants.
"Plants respond to light, odour molecules, gravity and electricity. Does this imply that they have senses, or even that they possess a rudimentary form of consciousness? The title of this book, and its chapter headings - "What a Plant Sees", "What a Plant Feels", "The Aware Plant" etc..." More
18/07/2018:
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10/07/2018:
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07/07/2018:
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05/07/2018:
You can now view chronological statistics in the Photos - Places pages:
01/07/2018:
- A review of The Story of Oosterhuis
by Belcampo.
"Belcampo was the pen name of Herman Pieter Schönfeld Wichers, a Dutch author of H G Wells-style fantasy stories. Het Verhaal van Oosterhuis is the tale of a Dutchman who, on a professional expedition to the Indian subcontinent, falls down a ravine, miraculously survives, and is nursed to recovery among a tribe that lives in the bottom of the ravine..." More
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30/06/2018:
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02/06/2018:
Review: Other Minds
by Peter Godfrey-Smith. About octopuses.
"The cephalopods are a class of molluscs with two members - octopuses and cuttlefish - that have developed sophisticated nervous systems and high levels of intelligence, the only invertebrates to have done so. What makes them so interesting is that this intelligence developed along a separate evolutionary line from that of mammals and birds..." More
31/05/2018:
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20/05/2018:
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08/04/2018:
- There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. But the camera never lies. Where does that leave the new Photos Statistics page? Don't ask me.
- Guest review of Invicta: The Life and Work of Daphne Caruana Galizia
, edited by Joseph A Debono and Caroline Muscat
"In the immediate post-war period, in Britain at least, Malta was known as the plucky colony which had withstood against the odds the aerial bombardment inflicted upon it by the Axis powers and been rewarded with the George Cross. This award was even recognised by the newly created British Railways in 1948 with the addition of the initials GC on the nameplate of the locomotive named after the island..." More
03/04/2018:
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15/03/2018:
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01/03/2018:
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27/02/2018:
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18/02/2018:
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11/02/2018:
- A review of Beast
by Paul Kingsnorth
"A hermit living in a deserted building on a West Country moor wakes up one day out of a dream or trance, to find himself lame and scarred by marks that seem to have been made by a large animal. After recovering his powers of movement, the hermit, Edward Buckmaster, wanders about the moor, with the vague feeling of being in search of something..." More
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06/02/2018:
A review of France: A Nation on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
by Jonathan Miller
"This volume, written by a former Sunday Times journalist resident in France, consists almost entirely of short entries on a variety of topics relating to contemporary issues. These are presented alphabetically and in French, with the exception for no clear reason of 'European Union', since 'Union Européenne' would have hardly been more taxing to non-speakers of French than, for example, 'Professions Protégées', especially as there is always an English sub-heading to provide an explanation of the French term..." More
03/02/2018:
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31/01/2018:
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22/01/2018:
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09/01/2018:
- A review of My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs
by Kazuo Ishiguro
"Just how short can a book be that readers will part with £5 for it? My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small Breakthroughs is the text of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nobel Literature Prize acceptance speech, and comes in at just 36 small pages. It's a good speech, characterised by the restraint and decency that are hallmarks of Ishiguro's persona..." More
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07/01/2018:
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02/01/2018:
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30/12/2017:
- A review of How to Read Water
by Tristan Gooley
"This is a good idea for a book, but I'm not sure Tristan Gooley was the right person to write it. Gooley is an adventurer and "natural navigator", an expert at finding his way in the wilds..." More
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24/12/2017:
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27/11/2017:
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20/11/2017:
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15/11/2017:
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08/11/2017:
- Update to "Cars I Have Known"
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02/11/2017:
A review of Changer l'oubli
by Yvette Z'Graggen
"Yvette Z'Graggen was a Swiss author and broadcaster, born in 1922 to a German-speaking father and a Genevan mother. In this fascinating and moving memoir, she traces the family history of her father, Heinrich..." More
28/10/2017:
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17/10/2017:
A review of Ein Jahr in London
by Anna Regeniter
"The German publisher Herder has a series of books, "Reise in den Alltag" ("Journeys into Everyday Life"), that go deeper than traditional travel writing by tasking their authors with year-long diaries of their time in foreign countries. I'm fascinated by the differences between inside and outside perspectives on countries - the essence of a nation is often best appreciated by those from elsewhere - so I snapped up this interesting-sounding account by a young German woman of her first twelve months in England..." More
15/10/2017:
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09/10/2017:
Guest review: Die Hauptstadt
by Robert Menasse
"At least two major German-language writers have written extensively about the European Union. One is the poet, essayist and occasional novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger, probably best known outside Germany for his writing on the media and his coinage "consciousness industry" to describe them..." More
08/10/2017:
A review of The Unexpected Professor
by John Carey
"John Carey is a literary polemicist, a grammar school-educated Oxford don whose bêtes noires are academic and intellectual elistism. In his career as an English Professor at various Oxford colleges, he put his money where his mouth was, actively soliciting undergraduate applications from state schools, fighting to get the English curriculum updated to include more modern literature, and (as chair of a pan-University board) attempting to bring in line colleagues who refused to lecture on anything but their pet subjects..." More
01/10/2017:
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24/09/2017:
- A review of What's for Tea?
by Claudia Hunt - a German book about English.
"A book in German, for Germans, about English. Claudia Hunt spent fourteen years in the UK, and here educates her compatriots in the nuances of English idiom - "English as you didn't learn it at school" is the book's German subtitle..." More
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20/09/2017:
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17/09/2017:
- A review of Master and Commander
by Patrick O'Brian.
"Patrick O'Brian wrote twenty novels featuring Jack Aubrey, an English sea captain in the Napoleonic Wars, and his ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin. The novels were slow to find a readership, but are now widely regarded as among the best historical novels in the English language..." More
- For the first time, a guest review - of Vernon Subutex, Part 1
by Virginie Despentes.
"Having read on the German cultural website perlentaucher.de that Virginie Despentes is the author frequently regarded as capturing the reality of contemporary France, I managed on a recent visit to find the volume named above in the bookshop at Marseille Airport. The back cover of the Livre de Poche edition I bought even makes an implicit comparison with Balzac by taking about a "comédie inhumaine"..." More
12/09/2017:
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30/08/2017:
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17/08/2017:
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07/08/2017:
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03/08/2017:
- A review of Geological Structures
by Chris and Helen Pellant.
"An excellent introduction to geology. Starting with descriptions of the three main rock types - igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary - it goes on to explain the structural effects of folding, faults and unconformities..." More
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23/07/2017:
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09/07/2017:
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02/07/2017:
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25/06/2017:
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19/06/2017:
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11/06/2017:
- A review of Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years
by Sue Townend.
"The Secret Diary of Adian Mole, Aged 13¾ was a publishing phenomenon of the early 1980s. Its subject - the daily tribulations and anxieties of an awkward, introspective teenager - was so rich in humorous potential that it's surprising nobody thought of it earlier..." More
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30/05/2017:
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15/05/2017:
- A review of Monsignor Quixote
by Graham Greene.
"Father Quixote, a lowly priest in a tiny Spanish town, helps out an Italian monsignor whose car has broken down, and is rewarded by being made a monsignor himself. While the church authorities consider where to move him to, he takes a road trip with the town's recently-deposed Marxist mayor, who is also at a loose end..." More
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05/05/2017:
- A review of Mothering Sunday
by Graham Swift
"Jane Fairchild, a housemaid in the 1920s, is given the day off by her employers on Mothering Sunday. Being an orphan, she has nothing particular to do - until a telephone call from her lover summons her to a rendez-vous at his parents' house..." More
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27/04/2017:
A review of Keeping On Keeping On
by Alan Bennett
"The third installment of Alan Bennett's miscellaneous non-fiction. About half of it is diary extracts; the rest consists of introductions to plays, articles and speeches written for miscellaneous occasions, and two scripts for plays that were never performed as intended..." More
17/04/2017:
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09/04/2017:
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26/03/2017:
- A review of What Are You Looking At?
by Will Gompertz.
"Will Gompertz is the BBC's slightly offbeat Arts Editor - that enthusiastic bald guy who cultivates an image so unapologetically and ironically unhip that it's almost hip. A sense of irony is no bad thing for a writer on modern art, and What Are You Looking At? is a well-pitched guide to the visual arts from the late Nineteenth Century to the early Twenty-first..." More
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12/03/2017:
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14/02/2017:
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30/01/2017:
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22/01/2017:
A review of Beethoven for a Later Age
by Edward Dusinberre
"Memoirs by non-professional writers can be shapeless and fragmentary, owing to the glut of potential material that competes for inclusion in a short space. Edward Dusinberre, first violin of the Takács Quartet, deals with this challenge by using Beethoven's string quartets as the framework for an account of his twenty years as a chamber musician..." More
08/01/2017:
- A review of Don't Sleep, There are Snakes
by Daniel Everett.
"Daniel Everett spent thirty years, on and off, living with his family among the Pirahã Indians of Brazil. He was an Evangelical missionary, tasked with learning the Pirahã language so that he could translate the Bible into it..." More
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04/01/2017:
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01/01/2017:
- A review of Kafka
's The Castle
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"Kafka's masterwork? Some critics think so. It's unfinished, full of internal inconsistencies, and difficult to read, but in conception it is certainly Kafka's most ambitious novel..." More
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27/12/2016:
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24/11/2016:
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03/07/2016:
Reviews of:
- The Hare with Amber Eyes
by Edmund de Waal. (Strictly speaking, a review of the bit I read before giving up.)
"I try to finish every book I start, but sometimes the task is beyond me. There are some books that, while fascinating to dip into, are too long to contemplate reading in their entirety if I'm not to abandon every other reading project for months or years..." More
- One on One
by Craig Brown.
"Craig Brown is a humorist, best known for his spoof celebrity monologues in the British satirical magazine Private Eye. Against type, in One on One he adopts a restrained journalistic approach, describing 101 real-life meetings between famous people from the late 19th Century to the early 21st..." More
20/06/2016:
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04/06/2016:
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29/05/2016:
- A review of European Intellectual History from Rousseau to Nietzsche
by Frank M Turner.
"Frank M Turner was a Professor of History at Yale University. This book consists of fifteen of his lectures from a course for undergraduates..." More
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07/05/2016:
A review of The Testament of Mary
by Colm Tóibín 
"Note: Since writing the review below, I've learned that The Testament of Mary was written after Tóibín's play Testament. In the play, I gather that the lack of context for Mary's monologue is deliberate: her identity, and her son's, are initially withheld to create suspense..." More
28/04/2016:
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26/03/2016:
- A review of City of the Mind
by Penelope Lively
"Matthew Halland works for a firm of architects that is designing an office block in London's Docklands in the late 1980s. Visits to the grandiose new development, and to the sites of smaller-scale renovation projects, have Halland criss-crossing London daily, and give him the impetus to ruminate on the character of his city with an insider's eye..." More
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12/03/2016:
- A review of Wide Sargasso Sea
by Jean Rhys
"A flawed but powerful novel. The first thing you need to know about it is that its protagonist, Antoinette Cosway, is the "mad woman in the attic" from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre..." More
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28/02/2016:
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25/02/2016:
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06/02/2016:
A review of Le Chapeau de Mitterrand
by Antoine Laurain
"Daniel Mercier, an ambitious accountant, finds himself alone in his flat one winter evening without his wife and children. Bored, he decides to treat himself to dinner in a fancy Parisian brasserie..." More
31/01/2016:
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17/01/2016:
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05/01/2016:
A review of A Spy Among Friends
by Ben Macintyre
"The story of Kim Philby's exposure as a KGB agent and his subsequent defection to the Soviet Union is one of the most famous in espionage history, and has been related in many books before this one. Not having read those books, I'm in no position to say what Ben Macintyre's adds that is new..." More
01/01/2016:
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30/12/2015:
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08/12/2015:
- A review of England, England
by Julian Barnes
"Julian Barnes' writing can tread a fine line between cleverness and preciousness. Normally his novels incorporate enough of the stuff of ordinary human experience to sustain the reader through the odd stretch of pompous intellectual waffle..." More
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25/11/2015:
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08/11/2015:
A review of Er ist Wieder Da
by Timur Vermes
"Adolf Hitler comes back to life in 21st-century Berlin and, after a brief period of confusion and adjustment, resumes the plans for world domination that he was forced to put on hold in 1945. Mistaken for an ultra-serious method actor, he is courted by a television production company, which lands him a regular slot on a show hosted by a Turkish comedian..." More
25/10/2015:
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11/10/2015:
- A review of Siddhartha
by Hermann Hesse
"(This review contains spoilers, should you care.) The mystically inclined Hermann Hesse was drawn to eastern philosophy, and Siddhartha is - at first sight, at least - his fictional exposition of some of the main ideas behind Hinduism and Buddhism. The novel describes the life of Siddhartha, a Brahmin's son who feels something is missing in the routines and rituals of his privileged family life, and who goes off in search of his inner self..." More
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22/09/2015:
A review of Brief an den Vater
by Franz Kafka
"In his will, Franz Kafka stipulated that all his unpublished manuscripts should be destroyed. It's a dizzying thought that should his executor, Max Brod, have followed his friend's instructions, one of the most influential writers of all time would barely have been a footnote in literary history..." More
14/09/2015:
- A review of The Road to Lichfield
by Penelope Lively
"Don't be put off by the conventional subject matter of this novel. Anne, a woman in early middle age, with two children and a stable but dull marriage, enters into an affair with a man she meets while visiting her father in a care home in Staffordshire..." More
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01/09/2015:
- A review of Life, Love and the Archers
by Wendy Cope
"Part of me objects to collections of previously published articles by well-known writers: my inner cynic says they they've already been paid for their work, so why should they get paid again, and particularly why should these cobbled-together books gain immediate access to the promotional stands at Waterstone's, when so many struggling new writers labour away for years without even finding a publisher? As the flash young journalist Jasper Milvain declares in New Grub Street, "To those who have shall be given." In Wendy Cope's case, some padding was needed to complement the reprintings of her poetry and television reviews, and she didn't need to find the material herself; having sold all her manuscripts to the British Library to raise money to buy a house, she got a call from her editor, who said there was enough workable material in Cope's unpublished memoirs to bring the page count of Life, Love and the Archers up to a saleable level. "I am a lucky woman," writes Cope at one point; she's referring to her love life, but most writers would envy her her professional fortune, too..." More
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22/08/2015:
- A review of Keeping an Eye Open
by Julian Barnes
"In his free-form early novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Julian Barnes included a philosophical-aesthetic appreciation of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa". "Catastrophe into Art" was his first foray into art criticism; it was a wry but informative analysis of the painter's compromises with the historical truth of the depicted scene, a group of desperate sailors on a raft from a shipwreck, hailing the tiny speck of a ship on the horizon: Q::These are men who have drunk their own urine, gnawed the leather from their hats, consumed their own comrades..." More
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17/08/2015:
- A review of Skating to Antarctica
by Jenny Diski
"Novelist Jenny Diski agrees with her publisher to take a trip to the Antarctic, and to use the experience as the framework for her first non-fiction work. After failing to persuade the British Antarctic Survey to let her tag along on one of its voyages, she falls back on a two-week tourist cruise from Tierra del Fuego, via South Georgia, to the edge of the southern ice cap..." More
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26/07/2015:
- A review of The Strength of Poetry
by James Fenton
"This book contains a series of lectures that James Fenton delivered during his time as Oxford Professor of Poetry. Most of it consists of analyses of the work of individual poets: Wilfred Owen, Seamus Heaney, Philip Larkin, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, D H Lawrence and W H Auden..." More
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12/07/2015:
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02/07/2015:
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07/06/2015:
A review of Jane Austen's
Persuasion
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"Anne Elliot, daughter of a snobbish Somerset baronet, falls in love with the naval officer Captain Wentworth. Wentworth proposes, but the disapproval of her father and of an old friend, Mrs..." More
31/05/2015:
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19/04/2015:
A review of A Cursing Brain?
by Howard Kushner
"Tourette's Syndrome is an odd and fascinating psychiatric condition. It is a torment for its sufferers, who are subject to involuntary tics that range from blinking and grunting, through jerking of the limbs, to the compulsion to utter swear words, insult interlocutors in the most hurtful terms, and behave in the most inappropriate manner for any given social situation..." More
07/04/2015:
- A review of Making an Elephant
by Graham Swift
"A collection of non-fiction from a successful but self-effacing novelist. Among his generation of British writers, Swift has the most elusive personality; he lacks Salman Rushdie's exuberance, Martin Amis's brilliant way with words, or Julian Barnes' commanding gravitas..." More
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31/03/2015:
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04/03/2015:
A review of Infinite Minds
by John Leslie
"Everything that exists, exists as a thought in a divine mind. There may be more than one divine mind..." More
25/02/2015:
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09/02/2015:
I've translated a German poem - just for laughs, you understand.
02/02/2015:
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25/01/2015:
- A review of Beast and Man
by Mary Midgley
"Mary Midgley argues that human culture and morality should properly be regarded, not as freak developments in the history of life, but as extensions of "animal nature". More particularly, as a moral philosopher and a socialist, she feels we should pay more attention to altruistic behaviour in animals, and question Tennyson's conception of nature as ineluctably "red in tooth and claw"..." More
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07/01/2015:
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20/12/2014:
A review of In Trouble Again
by Redmond O'Hanlon
"After a journey into the heart of Borneo, out of which came a successful book, Redmond O'Hanlon cast around for a companion on a more ambitious expedition to the rainforest of Venezuela. O'Hanlon's aim was to locate and spend time with a feared indigenous people, the Yanomami, whose men are noted for their hobbies of fighting each other with huge sticks, and massacring the inhabitants of neighbouring villages..." More
06/12/2014:
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01/12/2014:
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23/11/2014:
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15/11/2014:
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08/11/2014:
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27/10/2014:
A review of The Fetish Room
by Rudi Rotthier. It's about Redmond O'Hanlon
"Flemish journalist Rudi Rotthier spends 10 days touring southern England in the company of eccentric adventurer Redmond O'Hanlon. O'Hanlon leads Rotthier to the places where he grew up, including his father's old parishes (the latter was a Church of England vicar), and the schools he attended, including Marlborough..." More
.14/10/2014:
- Cars I Have Known
- Photos.
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04/10/2014:
A review of Hallucinations
by Oliver Sacks
"Sacks takes a broad-ranging view of the phenomena of hallucination that can affect all our senses, but most prominently the visual and the auditory. He starts off with descriptions of sufferers of Charles Bonnet Syndrome, who develop hallucinations in apparent response to the loss of sight or hearing..." More
.21/09/2014:
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14/09/2014:
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31/08/2014:
Reviews of some Conrad short stories:
- An Outpost of Progress
- Il Conde
- The Duel
- The Idiots
- The Informer
- The Lagoon
- The Secret Sharer
- Youth: A Narrative
"Two middle-aged Belgians, an ex-soldier and an ex-civil servant, are left in charge of a trading post on the west African coast for six months. In their dealings with local tribes, they are dependent on their taciturn and inscrutable Negro assistant Makola..." More
"The narrator makes the acquaintance an old Eastern European aristocrat in a hotel in Naples, takes a ten-day break, then returns to find the old man shaken by a recent encounter with a thief in a dark alley. The thief turns out to be a member of a deadly gang, and when he discovers that the Count did not hand over all his money, lets it be known that there will be "consequences"..." More
"An excellent novella recounting a long-running feud between two officers in Napoleon's army, the hot-headed southerner Feraud and the phlegmatic northerner D'Hubert. After wounding a civilian in a fit of temper, Feraud is apprehended at a party by D'Hubert on the orders of the general..." More
"A peasant Breton couple have four idiot children. The father loses the plot and becomes violent towards his wife, whom in his malicious simplicity he blames for his misfortune..." More
"A group of anarchists printing seditious material in a house in London discover that they have an informer in their midst. Various characters are not what they seem, and there is much subtle manipulation going on..." More
"A very short story about violence and romantic love in an Indonesian tribe. Can't remember much about it..." More
"Though short, this is a very clever and intricate story. The narrator relates his experience as a young sailor taking on his first captaincy in the East Indes, at short notice and working with a crew with which he is unacquainted..." More
"A simple but well-written short story in which Conrad's favourite nautical raconteur Marlow describes his first voyage to the East Indies, as a ship's second mate. The ship's departure is delayed repeatedly, for a total of several weeks; just before it leaves England, the rats desert it..." More
27/08/2014:
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21/08/2014:
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16/08/2014:
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04/08/2014:
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31/07/2014:
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21/07/2014:
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15/07/2014:
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01/07/2014:
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23/06/2014:
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01/06/2014:
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25/05/2014:
- A review of The Nigger of the "Narcissus"
by Joseph Conrad
"Joseph Conrad was that rare type, a man of action with the sensibility of a poet. The Nigger of the "Narcsissus" was the first fictional work based on his experience in the Merchant Navy, and it is a remarkable piece of writing: a gripping adventure story that is also a profound meditation on the human condition..." More
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24/05/2014:
Stuff about Mozart's Clarinet Quintet.
23/05/2014:
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18/05/2014:
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17/05/2014:
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10/05/2014:
- Reviews added of books I couldn't finish .
- I finally dragged the site into the 21st Century and added submenus to the main menu items.
01/05/2014:
- A review of The Bostonians
by Henry James
"It's a long time since I read this, and I'm not sure how I'd rate it if I read it today. It's a book I found more impressive than compelling - but certainly, unlike The Portrait of a Lady, it has a lot to say, and for the most part it says it well..." More
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26/04/2014:
- A review of Dr. Johnson's Selected Essays
- Photos.
"Who would you guess is the second most quoted writer in the English language, after Shakespeare? Dickens? Wordsworth? Hardy? Nope, it's Samuel Johnson, compiler of the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language - a second-ranking figure in the fame stakes, but one of the foremost men of letters in eighteenth-century London. Johnson's relatively low literary profile these days is no doubt due to his chosen main medium, the essay: he wrote no systematic philosophical treatises, little poetry and little fiction..." More
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19/03/2014:
More musical night thoughts, this time on Mahler and Debussy.
18/03/2014:
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05/03/2014:
Thoughts on Beethoven and Mahler.
01/03/2014:
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12/02/2014:
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26/01/2014:
- A review of What W H Auden Can Do for You
by Alexander McCall Smith
"Alexander McCall Smith is a writer of (I gather) undemanding detective stories, so it is with some surprise that one learns of his passion for W H Auden - one of the most erudite, subtle, and sometimes obscure, poets of the 20th Century. This is a slim volume in a "writers on writers" series by the Princeton University Press; in it, McCall Smith recounts his relationship with Auden's work, engages in some free-form literary criticism, and relates the inspiration he drew from Auden to his own life..." More
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24/01/2014:
A review of Philip Larkin, the Marvell Press and Me
by Jean Hartley.
"George and Jean Hartley, a young married couple from Hull, founded the poetry magazine Listen in the early 1950s. After three well-received issues, they decided to publish a book, and approached a talented Listen contributor for a poetry collection..." More
13/01/2014:
A review of Stoner
by John Williams.
"This is the life story of William Stoner, a quiet English lecturer in a university in the American Mid-west. After growing up as an only child to poor farming parents, Stoner goes to university, develops a passion for literature, gets an academic post, and proceeds to lead an unassuming, rather sad life..." More
06/01/2014:
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27/12/2013:
A review of Goodbye to Berlin
by Christopher Isherwood.
"Despite its fame, this is rather a cheeky book, consisting of mere fragments of a novel that Isherwood never finished. As a tableau of life in late Weimar Germany, it was guaranteed a wide readership when it was published in 1939..." More
05/12/2013:
Photos of autumn trees, etc.:
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29/11/2013:
A review of The Longest Journey
by E M Forster
"This early novel by Forster is his most overlooked, but it is surprisingly interesting - more so than A Room with a View, which, finding it insipid and contrived, I gave up on after 30 pages. At the same time, I found The Longest Journey quite disturbing on some levels..." More
17/11/2013:
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10/11/2013:
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13/10/2013:
- A review of The Practice of Writing
by David Lodge
"As a fan of David Lodge's novels, I thought I'd check out his criticism. The Practice of Writing is a compilation of literary reviews, texts of lectures, and reports on his personal experiences of writing for television and the theatre..." More
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30/09/2013:
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27/09/2013:
- A review of Paradise News
by David Lodge
"Part-time theology lecturer Bernard Walsh learns that his aunt in Hawaii is dying, and at her request drags his elderly father to the other side of the world for a final reunion. Once in Hawaii, things are thrown out of kilter by his father's admission to hospital after a traffic accident..." More
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21/09/2013:
- A review of The Radetzky March
by Joseph Roth
"Joseph Roth's longest and most ambitious novel follows the life of Carl Joseph von Trotta, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, as he moves from post to post in Eastern Europe in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trotta is the grandson of the "Hero of Solferino", an infantryman who saved the life of the Emperor in battle..." More
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08/09/2013:
A review of Deaf Sentence
by David Lodge
"David Lodge started losing his hearing in his mid-40s, and by the start of his 70s, his affliction was beginning to detract significantly from his quality of life. Ever a resourceful writer, Lodge drew on his experience for this novel, which describes the daily ordeals of Desmond Bates, a retired Professor of Linguistics whose progressive loss of high-frequency hearing makes communication, and therefore living, increasingly difficult for both himself and those around him..." More
01/09/2013:
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27/07/2013:
Updates to the Classical Reviews page:
- Mahler's Resurrection Syphony added.
- Notes on recordings of Mahler's 4th Symphony updated.
- Notes on recordings of Schubert's Piano Sonata D. 959 updated.
17/07/2013:
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07/07/2013:
Photos of Norfolk:
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02/07/2013:
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28/06/2013:
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09/06/2013:
A review of The Wild Rover
by Mike Parker
"Hard on the heels of his quirky bestseller Map Addict came this, Mike Parker's homage to the British footpath network. Aimed squarely at the same readership as the earlier book - most map lovers are walkers, and vice versa - The Wild Rover is an informative and witty volume, though it is somewhat disjointed, and its tone is occasionally soured by snide comments about those whom Parker regards as stuffy or boring..." More
04/06/2013:
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07/05/2013:
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20/04/2013:
Book reviews:
- Yehudi Menuhin: Unfinished Journey
- Julian Barnes
: Levels of Life
"The great violinist's autobiography is thorough and thoughtful, if somewhat lacking in flair. Menuhin recounts his career, as a musician, mentor and teacher, in plenty of detail; but don't come to this book expecting incisive self-revelation..." More
"This book is in three very different parts: the first describes early balloon flights by three nineteenth-century Europeans; the second part an affair between two of the latter, the famous French actress Sarah Bernhardt and the maverick balloonist Frederick Burnaby; the third part is a meditation on the author's grief at the death of his wife. Barnes tries to stretch themes across all the three parts - flight, height, wind-powered versus machine-powered aviation, photography - and to imply a hidden intricacy to the work that belies its somewhat dislocated aspect..." More
14/04/2013:
Review of books read a long time ago:
- Hermann Hesse: Der Steppenwolf
- Hermann Hesse: The Glass Bead Game
- Robert Musil: The Confusions of Young Törless
- Benjamin Constant: Adolphe
- Madame de la Fayette: La Princesse de Clèves
- Peter Handke: The Left-handed Woman
- Peter Handke: Short Letter, Long Farewell
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) I read this over twenty years ago, and can't remember much about it. Harry Haller is a disillusioned man living in Berlin who (if I recall correctly) is recently divorced..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) This is Hesse's longest and most ambitious novel, but I would struggle really to recommend it. It is set in a fictional European country that, if I recall correctly, is built on vaguely feudal lines..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) I can't remember much about this novel, and I recall I found it difficult to read at the time. Musil is an erudite writer whose long sentences and large vocabulary make reading him in the original German quite a challenge..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) An early exemplar of the French psychological novel. Adolphe is a young man who engages in an affair with an older woman..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) An extremely early psychological novel. I can't remember much about it, but it centres on a young princess who falls in love with somebody or other, and emotional intrigues throughout the court..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) A woman leaves her inadequate and sometimes abusive husband. Though she feels sorry for his distress at the break-up of their marriage, she is happier living alone, something that none of her friends can understand..." More
"(Qualifier: ages since I read this.) I can't even remember if I finished this novel. I think I did..." More
13/04/2013:
A review of Flight Without End
by Joseph Roth
"Franz Tunda is an officer in the Austrian army, who gets captured by Russians in the First World War, escapes, spends a couple of years living with a Polish fur trader in Siberia, then slowly makes his way across Asia and Europe to Paris. His self-instigated mission is to find his old fiancée; though he knows she is married to another man, she represents a vague ideal to him that he acknowledges, on one level, to be arbitrary and delusional..." More
30/03/2013:
- A review of The Lemon Table
by Julian Barnes
"An assured collection of short stories that all deal, directly or obliquely, with old age and its attendant themes: regret, disappointment, physical and mental decline, loneliness. In terms of craftsmanship and insight, this book is definite four-star material; but in terms of enjoyability it has to be marked down to three..." More
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23/03/2013:
Thoughts on bad descriptive passages in novels.
20/03/2013:
- A review of Of Mice and Men
by John Steinbeck
"George and Lennie are itinerant workers moving among the ranches of northern and central California. George is small, quick-witted and articulate, Lennie stupid, gentle and strong..." More
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09/03/2013:
A review of Job
by Joseph Roth
"Roth tells the story of Mendel Singer, a poor, pious Russian Jew who makes a meagre living teaching the Bible to children. His life is hard and joyless, his marriage without passion, and his children a cause of endless worry: his eldest son turns his back on Judaism and joins the army; the second son leaves the country to avoid conscription, and is not heard from for years; his daughter sleeps with Cossacks from the nearby barracks; and his youngest son is a retarded cripple..." More
24/02/2013:
A review of Effi Briest
by Theodor Fontane
""A story of adultery no different from a hundred others" is how Theodor Fontane described this, one of his best-known novels. His modest assessment of the work may be disarming: but it does, indeed, lack the sweep and penetration of the best realist literature..." More
23/02/2013:
- Short reviews of more books I read as a student, aeons ago:
- Les Mots
by Jean-Paul Sartre
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) Sartre's autobiography. It's very short, and rather than being a chronological narrative of the events of his early life, is an account of his relationship with literature and language - how, in short, he became a writer..." More
- A volume of Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography
- Les belles Images
by Simone de Beauvoir
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) A book about a woman working in an advertising agency in the 1960s, who comes to question her choice of career and why she lacks the enthusiasm for superficial things that she finds in her colleagues. I can't remember much about this novel, but it offered a fairly interesting insight into the advertising world in the 1960s, as well as being a semi-philosophical critique of the rising consumerist culture in general..." More
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) Another book I read as a student, this is the first volume of de Beauvoir's autobiography. It is a readable, straightforward and honest-seeming book that evokes fairly vividly the writer's early life and education, and includes an account of her early relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre..." More
- Les Mots
by Jean-Paul Sartre
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13/02/2013:
A review of Joseph Roth
's short story April
"An unnamed narrator describes the few weeks he spent in a small town in late spring, where he observed the locals, engaged in a relationship with a young waitress, and finally "fell in love" with the postmaster's daughter, who would stand at her bedroom window every day and whom the narrator never spoke to, other than to say hello. Subtitled "The History of a Love", this strange short story has no obvious analytical message..." More
03/02/2013:
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29/01/2013:
- Reviews of some books I read decades ago:
- Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) A French historian, Roqentin, hangs out in a fictionalised Le Havre, visits the library, bars and a prostitute, and observes wryly the behaviour of his fellow human beings. He becomes paradoxically fascinated by his own boredom, and by the pointlessness and hypocrisy of all human doings..." More
- America
by Franz Kafka
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) Young Karl Rossman emigrates to America and wanders around searching for somewhere to call "home". It's far too long since I read this novel for me to remember very much about it at all, except that it wasn't as compelling as Der Process..." More
- The Metamorphosis
by Franz Kafka
"(Qualifier: Ages since I read this.) Possibly Kafka's most coherent proper "story". Though short, it is, I believe, the longest piece he finished..." More
- Nausea
by Jean-Paul Sartre
- And one of The Legend of the Holy Drinker
by Joseph Roth
"Alcoholic tramp Andreas Kartak, a Polish émigré living in Paris, receives a mysterious gift of 200 francs from a well-to-do stranger. Initially intent on using the money to get back on his feet, he promises the stranger that he will repay it..." More
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25/12/2012:
- A review of The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
"Narrator Tony Webster splits up with his manipulative girlfriend Veronica while a student; shortly afterwards, she starts going out with a friend of his, the intensely serious and intimidatingly intelligent Adrian. Tony goes on to lead an averagely disappointing but quiet life; things go, to put it mildly, less smoothly for Adrian and Veronica..." More
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04/12/2012:
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18/11/2012:
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06/11/2012:
Some poems, written or completed relatively recently:
- The Venetians: rapacious bandits or curators of civilised values? You decide.
- Music: why it makes sense of life.
- Yosemite Valley: does what it says on the tin.
- Little Gidding: a homage to T S Eliot, or something.
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14/10/2012:
- Thoughts on Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet.
- Photos.
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13/10/2012:
A couple of new things:
- Notes on Big Country's Celt-rock classic The Crossing added to the "Pop CDs" page.
- A new page added containing notes on some poets.
11/10/2012:
Small changes to the site:
- Boxes have rounded corners, at least they do if you are using Firefox.
- The main Poetry page now includes a random poem.
09/10/2012:
A review of Walking Home
by Simon Armitage
"In 2010, poet Simon Armitage walked the Pennine Way, the most famous long-distance footpath in England. The Pennines are a range of hills running for 250 miles down the middle of the north of the country, and are characterised by alternations of bleak, rain-soaked moorland and beautiful, tranquil valleys..." More
17/09/2012:
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12/08/2012:
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05/07/2012:
- A review of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst
- Photos.
"On July 10th, 1969, an unmanned, battered trimaran was found bobbling peacefully in the middle of the North Atlantic by the crew of a Royal Mail ship. It turned out to be boat of Donald Crowhurst, the only remaining competitor in a Sunday Times non-stop round-the-world yacht race that had begun the previous year..." More
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29/06/2012:
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25/06/2012:
- A review of Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
"(Warning: contains slight spoilers.) This is one of those awkward books that falls between a three-star and a four-star valuation. It combines great literary qualities with elements of melodama and cheap adventure fiction..." More
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20/06/2012:
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18/06/2012:
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06/06/2012:
Photos of California:
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18/05/2012:
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09/05/2012:
- A review of La Symphonie Pastorale
by André Gide
"A French country pastor keeps a diary in which he traces his relationship with a blind teenage girl he takes into his family's care, after the death of the deaf aunt with whom she lived. He teaches her to speak and devotes much time and attention to her education, to the extent that his wife's jealousy is aroused..." More
- A review of The Hound of the Baskervilles
- Photos.
"Sir Charles Baskerville dies of a heart attack after being chased by a huge ghostly dog near his Dartmoor home. His friend Dr..." More
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05/05/2012:
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16/04/2012:
A review of An Introduction to English Poetry
by James Fenton
"A bit of a misleading title: this isn't a guide to poetry as such, but an overview of poetic form in the English language, by a highly-regarded poet (if not a very prolific one). As such, it's rather good: it goes through the most common metres and a few standard poetic structures - the stuff most of us were never taught properly at school..." More
25/03/2012:
- A write-up of Nick Lowe's The Impossible Bird added to the "Pop CDs" page.
- Photos.
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10/03/2012:
Updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
05/03/2012:
- A review of The Science Delusion
by Rupert Sheldrake
"This book is long overdue: a high-level critique of scientific dogmatism by a scientist of impeccable credentials. (Rupert Sheldrake has been a Research Fellow of the Royal Society and a Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge.) Sheldrake's method in this book is simple, but highly effective: to take what he calls "the ten dogmas of modern science", and turn them into questions: to ask whether, on the basis of scientific evidence, we are right to take them as assumptions..." More
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18/02/2012:
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02/02/2012:
- A review of How Far Can You Go?
by David Lodge
"Lodge traces the lives of a group of Catholic students who meet at London University in the 1950s, and observes how the growth of the permissive society over the subsequent couple of decades affects their relationships and their faith. As the Catholic Church struggles painfully to modernise itself, the young people find themselves, to varying degrees, simultaneously liberated and disoriented..." More
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29/12/2011:
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06/12/2011:
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25/11/2011:
- A review of Meine Weltansicht
by Erwin Schrödinger
"As a young man, Erwin Schrödinger planned to divide his academic career between theoretical physics and philosophy. Circumstances forced him to drop his ambitions in the latter, with the result that his philosophical output is confined to two essays written in his leisure time..." More
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12/11/2011:
Some philosophical ideas that I have been mulling over for a while.
02/11/2011:
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25/10/2011:
- A review of The Philip Larkin I Knew
by Maeve Brennan.
"Maeve Brennan was sub-librarian at Hull University, and Philip Larkin's "unofficial" lover for most of the time that he worked there. Their relationship, though founded on deep mutual affection, was complicated by three factors: Larkin's ambivalent attachment to another woman, Monica Jones; Brennan's Catholicism, which precluded committed sexual relations outside marriage; and Larkin's belief that his creative talent was dependent on the emotional freedom of bachelorhood..." More
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03/10/2011:
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28/09/2011:
Photos from lunchtime flights from the office:
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25/09/2011:
A review of a book about Wolfgang Pauli
, the physicist.
"Wolfgang Pauli was one of the greats of twentieth-century physics, the original postulator of both particle spin and the neutrino (a chargeless particle produced by atomic decay). He was also a somewhat controversial figure, humorously blunt in his criticisms of colleagues, and in the latter half of his career entertaining ideas about the relationship between physics and psychology that more conventional scientists have found hard to take seriously..." More
11/09/2011:
Updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
28/08/2011:
- A review of Collapse
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07/08/2011:
A review of The Body Electric
03/08/2011:
Given the impending collapse of industrial civilisation, I can't be bothered to submit poems for publication. Here are a few that I wrote several years ago that never saw the light of day - until now, you lucky surfer:
- A Baby: about whether everything is downhill from the moment we're born
- Californian Scenes: about my first trip to California. Written before I found out about Peak Oil, hence imbued with misplaced optimism
- Cast your mind into Precambrian seas: about whether evolution was a waste of time
- The Picture Above Ground: about the deceptive peacefulness of churchyards
- The Stream: about musing pointlessly on the essence of the self
01/08/2011:
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24/07/2011:
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29/04/2011:
Reviews of three stories by Tolstoy :
- Happy Ever After
- The Death of Ivan Ilyich
- The Cossacks
"Following the death of her father, Masha, an innocent young woman from the Russian countryside, marries her guardian, a man twice her age, and for a while the pair are blissfully happy. However, once introduced to the society life of Petersburg, Masha realises what she has been missing out on, and starts to relish the attention she receives from the cosmopolitan townsfolk, particularly its men..." More
"Tolstoy succinctly traces the life and career of Ivan Ilyich Golovin, a conventional but successful lawyer, then describes his slow and painful death and his reflections during it. As much as by physical suffering, Golovin is pained by doubts about the worth of the life he lived: he has been superficially honourable and superficially satisfied with his lot, but emotionally and spiritually his existence has been frigid and lonely..." More
"A wonderful novella that describes the experiences of Dmitrii Olenin, a young Russian nobleman who heads off to join the army in the Caucasus, hoping to find there, in some form, opportunities for an authentic life that he feels denied in the cushy and stifling atmosphere of Moscow. Once stationed in a Cossack village in the plains below the mountains, he finds his minimal military duties give him plenty of time to study local customs, and rather than spend his days with his fellow soldiers, he takes to a life of semi-integration into Cossack life, drinking and shooting with some of the villagers, and ultimately falling in love with his landlord's daughter..." More
11/04/2011:
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21/03/2011:
- Updates to the Pop CD catalogue, though the page is so long now you'll have a hard time spotting 'em.
- Photos.
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12/03/2011:
- A review of Whoops!
by John Lanchester.
"Most of us have little understanding of precisely what caused the 2008 credit crunch, beyond that it had a lot to do with greed and something called toxic loans. John Lanchester was in a similar position when he stumbled upon the subject of high finance during research for a novel; so fascinating did he find the matter that he decided to devote a non-fiction book to it instead..." More
- Book reviews now have clickable star ratings.
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05/03/2011:
- A review of Daniel Deronda
by George Eliot
"This was George Eliot's notoriously flawed final novel. It tells two stories: the one of Gwendolen Harleth, a spoilt, beautiful girl who marries a charismatic and attractive, but emotionally sadistic man, Henleigh Grandcourt; the other of Daniel Deronda, a noble young man brought up as a "nephew" by the affable but conventional Sir Hugo Mallinger, who develops an interest in Jewish culture before discovering its relevance to his true lineage..." More
. - A review of Le Rêve de D'Alembert
by Denis Diderot.
"A set of three philosophical dialogues conducted by imaginary representations of people Diderot knew: D'Alembert, who had worked with Diderot on the Encyclopédie; Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, a well-known salon dame; and the knowledgable Doctor Bordeu. The discussions focus on the workings of the mind and the nervous system, the relationship of mind to body, and the questions of morality and free will..." More
- A blog entry on the types of people who believe, and disbelieve, conspiracy theories.
- Photos.
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12/02/2011:
- A review of Small World
by David Lodge
"Innocent young English lecturer Persse McGarrigle, from Limerick University in Ireland, meets the girl of his dreams at a conference, loses track of her whereabouts, and travels the world in search of her. Meanwhile, elder academics Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp jump from conference to conference in search of intellectual stimulation, career progression, parties and sexual good times..." More
- Photos.
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23/01/2011:
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16/01/2011:
A review of Nothing Natural
by Jenny Diski.
"Self-sufficient single mum Rachel gets involved in a sado-masochistic relationship with a charismatic older man, Joshua - a relationship that brings to the surface old insecurities that she thought she had got over long ago. Initially accepting the relationship as a bit of noncomittal, intense fun, she comes to want more from it - yet also develops suspicions about Joshua's dark side that trouble her..." More
10/01/2011:
A review of The Age of Absurdity
by Michael Foley.
"Grumpy old academic Michael Foley has his shot at the "modern life is rubbish" genre (you'll notice I've been reading a lot of this genre lately). Subtitled "Why Modern Life Makes It Hard to Be Happy", his book attacks the shallowness, narcissism and boredom encouraged by the modern social environment..." More
04/01/2011:
Photos:
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02/01/2011:
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30/12/2010:
- A review of Smile or Die
by Barbara Ehrenreich.
"Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich lays into the "positive thinking" movement that has substantially infiltrated the business, self-help, medical and even academic scenes in the USA. As a cancer patient, she was bombarded with injunctions to see the bright side of her disease, and made to feel guilty about voicing bitterness or fear..." More
- Photos.
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27/12/2010:
- A review of Straw Dogs
by John Gray.
"John Gray constructs a free-form polemic against liberal humanism: the idea that the the story of humanity is - or will be - one of perpetual progess and ever-increasing happiness for ever-increasing numbers of people. As Gray sees it, humanism is effectively an extension of, or a replacement for, Christianity, with its consolations of eternal life and relief from suffering..." More
- Photos.
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21/12/2010:
Photos:
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20/12/2010:
Photos:
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17/12/2010:
Photos:
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07/12/2010:
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21/11/2010:
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06/11/2010:
Photos of:
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26/10/2010:
Photos:
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Plus:
- Updates to the Pop CD catalogue
- The Sisters of Mercy's Floodland added to the favourite pop CDs page
04/10/2010:
Photos of:
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24/09/2010:
Photos of:
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18/09/2010:
- A review of The Shock Doctrine
- Photos.
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15/09/2010:
More old books finally reviewed:
- John Ardagh: Germany and the Germans
- John Humphrys: Devil's Advocate
- Redmond O'Hanlon: Congo Journey
- Redmond O'Hanlon: Into the Heart of Borneo
"This is a 1995 edition of a book originally published in 1988. Though now rather out of date, it offers very piquant insights into post-war German life, society and thinking..." More
"The presenter of Radio 4's Today show casts his eye on the Britain of the late 1990s and finds it, on balance, a pretty rubbish place. People are greedy, materialistic, shallow and mannerless..." More
"Redmond O'Hanlon, accompanied by Lary Shaffer, heads into the Congo jungle in search of some mythical lake monster. As usual, his ostensible mission is really a pretext for throwing himself into extreme situations and, incidentally, studying the local flora and fauna..." More
"Redmond O'Hanlon and the poet James Fenton head up a mountain in Borneo in the steaming equatorial heat, staying with hedonistic natives and followed everywhere by huge butterflies. It's a long while since I read this book, but what sticks in my mind most about it is that it is one of the funniest I have ever read..." More
14/09/2010:
Some reviews added of books I read ages ago:
- Richard P Feynman: The Character of Physical Law
- Eric Hobsbawm: The Age of Revolution 1789-1848
- W G Hoskins: The Making of the English Landscape
- John Julius Norwich: Byzantium: The Early Centuries
- Bertrand Russell: History of Western Philosophy
"This is one of the books that reignited my interest in science as an adult. It's based on a set of lectures that Feynman delivered at Cornell University, aimed at the general public, and exemplifies his ability to explain difficult concepts both clearly and tersely..." More
"It's a long time since I read this book, so I can only convey my general impression of it, rather than analysis of its details. As usual, Hobsbawm's Marxism skews somewhat his take on events, but his panoramic understanding of the forces of history easily outweighs this limitation..." More
"The classic account of how England's landscape acquired its character. The book covers both the urban and the rural landscapes, and is written with passion and an appealingly personal touch..." More
"It's a long time since I read this, but I remember it being an exceptionally readable account of the early history of the eastern Roman Empire. Some critics have called into question its accuracy - John Julius Norwich was a diplomat, not a historian..." More
"In my experience, many philosophers take a single interesting idea and make it seem as boring as possible by repeating and refining it to fill out whole books (or their careers). Philosophy therefore lends itself well to summary, and I can't imagine a better summary than this..." More
11/09/2010:
Photos of:
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08/09/2010:
Old photos from:
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05/09/2010:
A review of Deep Rivers
by José María Arguedas added.
"José María Arguedas is held by some critics to be the unsung master of South American literature. Born in Peru of European descent, but brought up among Quechua-speaking Indians, he certainly has a different cultural perspective from most Latin American literati..." More
04/09/2010:
Yet more old photos:
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And some new ones:
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03/09/2010:
More old photos:
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02/09/2010:
More old photos:
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01/09/2010:
More old photos:
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31/08/2010:
Some very old photos added:
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28/08/2010:
Search terms are now highlighted in the full text of Book Reviews .
27/08/2010:
Language field added to Book Reviews search.
26/08/2010:
Photos:
24/08/2010:
Book reviews are now searchable.
20/08/2010:
Photo thumbnails added to the home page.
15/08/2010:
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13/08/2010:
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04/08/2010:
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24/07/2010:
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28/06/2010:
Photos of:
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12/06/2010:
Photos of:
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16/05/2010:
Photos of:
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08/05/2010:
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25/04/2010:
- A review of QED
by Richard P Feynman
"This book derives from a series of lectures given by Nobel laureate Richard Feynman that introduce the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED). QED is one of the pillars of modern quantum theory, and describes the probablistic interactions of electrons and photons..." More
. - Photos.
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18/04/2010:
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11/04/2010:
Photos of:
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05/04/2010:
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29/03/2010:
Finally, finally, I finish the second novel of Die Schlafwandler
by Hermann Broch
"As mentioned in my review of Pasenow oder die Romantik, I am working my way slowly through this large and weighty modernist doorstep, and reviewing each individual novel as I finish it. Esch oder die Anarchie is the second novel of Broch's trilogy..." More
.28/03/2010:
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20/03/2010:
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17/03/2010:
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14/03/2010:
Photos:
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28/02/2010:
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27/02/2010:
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22/02/2010:
Photos of:
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30/01/2010:
Photos of:
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23/01/2010:
- Dogsticker page updated to reflect my current circumstances.
- Photos.
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17/01/2010:
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16/01/2010:
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15/01/2010:
Photos of:
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04/01/2010:
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01/01/2010:
Photos:
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25/12/2009:
Photos:
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23/12/2009:
Photos:
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18/12/2009:
Photos of:
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12/12/2009:
- A review of Chronicle of a Death Foretold
by Gabriel García Márquez
"A short novel describing the events surrounding the murder of one Santiago Nasar, falsely accused by Angela Vicario of taking her virginity before her marriage to Bayardo San Román. On learning of her impure past, San Román returns her, disgusted, to her family, and her twin brothers vow to avenge the shame brought upon her, by killing Nasar..." More
. - Photos.
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07/12/2009:
A review of the first part of Die Schlafwandler
by Hermann Broch
"Broch's trilogy of novels Die Schlafwandler is meant to be read as one work; however, it took me long enough to read the first novel, and I'm not sure how soon I'll get around to the others, so I'm reviewing it now while it's still fresh in my mind. The theme of Die Schlafwandler is the decline of values in late 19th-Century and early 20th Century Europe..." More
.25/11/2009:
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19/11/2009:
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15/11/2009:
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31/10/2009:
- A review of The Grand Chessboard
- Photos.
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26/10/2009:
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26/10/2009:
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22/10/2009:
Photos of:
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12/10/2009:
- A review of The Art of the Novel
by Milan Kundera
"Milan Kundera muses on the novelist's craft via a series of essays and self-instigated interviews. There is no central thesis; or rather, there are several central theses, which often contradict each other..." More
. - Photos.
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05/10/2009:
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04/10/2009:
A review added of Graham Famelo's biography of Paul Dirac
.
"Paul Dirac was one of the central figures in the development of quantum mechanics, yet for most of us his name is less familiar than those of his peers Bohr, Heisenberg and Schroedinger. To account for this is partly the fact that he never lent his name to theorems or concepts that found their way into popular discussion..." More
01/10/2009:
Photos:
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15/09/2009:
A review added of See No Evil
12/09/2009:
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07/09/2009:
Many years ago I tried to write a thesis on the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard. Reviews of most of his novels , based on hazy memories of them, are now here.
02/09/2009:
A review of The New Rulers of the World
31/08/2009:
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29/08/2009:
- A review of Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
- Photos.
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26/08/2009:
- Several reviews of books added that I read aeons ago.
- Photos.
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21/08/2009:
-
A review of Evelyn Waugh's Sword of Honour
.
"Waugh wrote a trilogy of novels set in the Second World War, chronicling the deflating military experiences of the well-meaning, put-upon upper class Catholic, Guy Crouchback. These novels were Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen and Unconditional Surrender..." More
- Photos.
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10/08/2009:
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27/07/2009:
Photos:
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22/07/2009:
Photos:
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15/07/2009:
That R S Thomas knew how to do it.
13/07/2009:
Book reviews are now database-driven. For you, the non-existent user who is ever in my mind, this means that you can open each review in its own page rather than scrolling through the whole lot, among other stuff that you couldn't care less about.
10/07/2009:
Photos:
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06/07/2009:
A review of Nothing to be Frightened of by Julian Barnes.
04/07/2009:
Photos:
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01/07/2009:
Photos:
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26/06/2009:
A review of Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin.
25/06/2009:
Photos of:
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/06/2009:
Some more Amazon lists added to the Music page.
13/06/2009:
A review of Ungeduld des Herzens by Stefan Zweig.
08/06/2009:
The layout of the page of my poetic efforts has been de-cluttered (at least that's the idea).
02/06/2009:
Photos:
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25/05/2009:
Photos from:
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19/05/2009:
- Gloomy ruminations on the BNP.
- Photos.
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17/05/2009:
- Armed Madhouse by Greg Palast added to the "Life's Too Short" Unfinished Book Reviews page.
- Photos.
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01/05/2009:
Photos:
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28/04/2009:
Photos:
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21/04/2009:
- A review of The Search by C P Snow.
- Photos.
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17/04/2009:
- A couple of books added to the Books I Couldn't Finish page.
- Photos.
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14/04/2009:
Photos:
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12/04/2009:
Photos:
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08/04/2009:
Photos:
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02/04/2009:
Photos:
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20/03/2009:
- A review of The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene.
- Gillian Welch's Revival added to the list of favourite pop CDs.
- Paul Simon's Essential Paul Simon added to it too.
- Further updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
- Photos.
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21/02/2009:
- A review of Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist by Russell McCormmach.
- Photos.
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11/02/2009:
Some updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
07/02/2009:
Photos:
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02/02/2009:
Photos:
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25/01/2009:
A review of The Brain that Changes Itself by Norman Doidge.
08/01/2009:
Photos:
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07/01/2009:
A review of Doctor Copernicus by John Banville.
06/01/2009:
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01/01/2009:
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28/12/2008:
A review of a book about Superstrings.
22/12/2008:
A review added of The Time of the Hero by Mario Vargas Llosa.
07/12/2008:
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06/12/2008:
Photos:
29/11/2008:
Photos:
16/11/2008:
Photos of:
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09/11/2008:
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13/10/2008:
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28/09/2008:
Photos:
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26/09/2008:
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24/09/2008:
A review of A Girl in Winter by Philip Larkin.
21/09/2008:
Photos of:
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(More to follow.)
23/08/2008:
A review of The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.
24/07/2008:
Photos of:
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08/07/2008:
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02/07/2008:
Photos:
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29/06/2008:
A review of The Nature of Consciousness by Susan Pockett.
26/06/2008:
Photos:
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14/06/2008:
A review of An Awfully Big Adventure by Beryl Bainbridge.
07/06/2008:
Here's some new stuff:
- A review of Author, Author by David Lodge
- Photos.
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03/05/2008:
Photos:
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14/04/2008:
Photos:
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27/03/2008:
A review added of Erwin Schrödinger's What is Life?
19/03/2008:
A blog entry on the coming end of civilisation. Enjoy.
18/03/2008:
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05/03/2008:
A review added of The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt.
21/02/2008:
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09/02/2008:
Photos:
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26/01/2008:
A review added of Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
05/01/2008:
- A review of Oleander, Jacaranda by Penelope Lively.
- A review of a book about Fawlty Towers.
- Photos.
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15/12/2007:
A review of Penelope Lively'sMoon Tiger.
27/11/2007:
- A review of a biography of R S Thomas, who was a Welsh poet.
- Photos.
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27/10/2007:
Photos:
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25/10/2007:
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21/10/2007:
- Updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
- Photos.
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20/10/2007:
- A review of a biography of DH Lawrence.
- Photos.
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11/10/2007:
Photos:
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30/09/2007:
John Hiatt's Slow Turning added to the Pop CDs page.
26/09/2007:
Photos:
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16/09/2007:
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10/09/2007:
A review of Love, etc by Julian Barnes.
08/09/2007:
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05/09/2007:
Photos:
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03/09/2007:
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30/08/2007:
Photos:
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27/08/2007:
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19/08/2007:
A review of Goodbye to All That.
13/08/2007:
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06/08/2007:
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30/07/2007:
Photos:
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26/07/2007:
Photos:
22/07/2007:
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09/07/2007:
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02/07/2007:
- A review of Oxygen: the Molecule that made the World.
- Photos.
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11/06/2007:
Photos:
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06/06/2007:
Photos of:
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19/05/2007:
New:
- A review of The Russian Interpreter by Michael Frayn.
- A review of The Secrets of Self-Hypnosis by Adam Eason.
- Updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
- Photos.
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10/05/2007:
A review of Elkhonon Goldberg's The Executive Brain added.
08/05/2007:
Photos:
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30/04/2007:
Photos:
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28/04/2007:
Photos:
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18/04/2007:
A review added of Thinks... by David Lodge.
15/04/2007:
Photos:
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14/04/2007:
A review of Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks.
10/04/2007:
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05/04/2007:
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01/04/2007:
Photos:
12/03/2007:
Photos:
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07/03/2007:
Photos:
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04/03/2007:
Photos:
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26/02/2007:
A review added of a biography of André Gide. He was a French writer.
03/02/2007:
- The Manic Street Preachers' Know Your Enemy added (with some reservations) to the Pop CDs page.
- Having just added to the oBlog page I'm concerned about the impression it gives of me as a raging head-case, although not concerned enough (yet) to stop writing it.
29/01/2007:
Albums by Neil Diamond and Johannes Schmoelling added to the Pop CDs page.
21/01/2007:
Photos:
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16/01/2007:
A page of brief photo notes added.
13/01/2007:
To celebrate the 5th anniversary (*) of me having nothing better to do with my spare time, Dogsticks has been given a garish new look.
The site's optimised for Firefox. In Internet Exploder, some of the headings are a little oversized but I think it's basically OK.
There are one or two small usability/design gremlins still lurking that I intend to get around to fixing some time in the next geological epoch.
Another minor change is that headings in the Photos pages are now clickable, so you can cross-click between dates and places until you find something more interesting to do.
For those non-existent people who care, here's what the site used to look like:
(*) To the day, as it happens.
06/01/2007:
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03/01/2007:
- Updated the UK Poetry Magazines page.
- Photos.
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31/12/2006:
Photos:
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23/12/2006:
oBlog updated with festive spleen.
17/12/2006:
- Pop CD catalogue updated.
- Photos.
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10/12/2006:
Photos:
09/12/2006:
oBlog added.
08/12/2006:
A review of yet another of those "science and spirituality" books added, but actually this one - The Self-Aware Universe - is quite interesting.
06/12/2006:
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25/11/2006:
Photos:
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15/11/2006:
Photos:
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12/11/2006:
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11/11/2006:
- A poem accepted for publication.
- Photos.
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09/11/2006:
Farewell to Bleak House after 10 months.
04/11/2006:
Photos:
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01/11/2006:
Photos:
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21/10/2006:
Some stuff added to the Pop CD catalogue.
14/10/2006:
A review of Phantoms in the Brain by VS Ramachandran added.
09/10/2006:
A review of The Tax Inspector by Peter Carey added.
30/09/2006:
- Publication dates added to the Poems page.
- Schubert's 9th Symphony added to the Classical Music page.
23/09/2006:
Photos:
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13/09/2006:
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10/09/2006:
Some more bits added to the Classical Music page.
02/09/2006:
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22/08/2006:
A random photo thumbnail now appears on the home page, as you can see. You can click it if you want.
20/08/2006:
Random quotations now grace this home page.
05/08/2006:
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30/07/2006:
Stuff:
- Pop CD Catalogue updated.
- Photos.
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27/07/2006:
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23/07/2006:
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16/07/2006:
Photos:
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14/07/2006:
New science book review: The Space Between Our Ears by Michael Morgan.
08/07/2006:
A review of Jorge Luis Borges's Fictions added.
20/06/2006:
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16/06/2006:
Photos:
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26/05/2006:
Two poems accepted for publication: this one and this one.
24/04/2006:
The poetry magazines response times page has been funked up slightly.
17/04/2006:
A review of a book about Information Theory added.
08/04/2006:
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25/03/2006:
A review of The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot added.
18/03/2006:
Ooh, there's been a lot going on today:
- A page of notes about poetry magazines.
- Updates to the Pop CD catalogue.
- A couple of albums added to the Favourite Pop CDs page.
09/03/2006:
A review of Untold Stories by Alan Bennett added to the Biography/Memoir Book Reviews page.
08/03/2006:
Photos added:
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26/02/2006:
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06/02/2006:
Pop CD catalogue updated.
22/01/2006:
A review of DNA by James Watson added.
10/01/2006:
- A poem.
- Photos.
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02/01/2006:
- A review of The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin added.
- Photos.
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18/12/2005:
- A poem accepted for publication.
- Photos.
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29/11/2005:
A review of The Non-Local Universe by a couple of geezers added.
19/11/2005:
Pop CD Catalogue brought up to date, pretty much.
18/11/2005:
Stuff:
- A review of Science and the Paranormal by Arthur Ellison.
- Photos.
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10/11/2005:
Two poems accepted for publication by Other Poetry: one about pylons, the other about nothing much.
06/11/2005:
- A review of Man and the Natural World by Keith Thomas added to the History Book Reviews page.
- Photos.
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02/11/2005:
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30/10/2005:
A review of Entanglement by Amir Aczel added to the Science Book Reviews page.
21/10/2005:
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03/10/2005:
A review of Slaughterhouse 5 added.
22/09/2005:
A review added of Steve Jones's The Language of the Genes.
16/09/2005:
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31/08/2005:
A couple more book reviews:
24/08/2005:
- Poetry achievement of the year! A poem to appear in 'The Rialto'.
- Photos.
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17/08/2005:
New stuff:
- A review of David Lodge's Therapy
- Non-reviews of books I couldn't finish
- Photos.
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01/08/2005:
Two book reviews added:
- Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's
12/07/2005:
A review added of An Anthropologist on Mars.
03/07/2005:
A review added of a book about relativity.
24/06/2005:
A review of an interesting book about hypnosis added.
07/06/2005:
Photos:
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02/06/2005:
Pop CD Catalogue brought up to date.
28/05/2005:
A review of The God of Small Things added.
14/05/2005:
Reviews of The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat and The Sense of Being Stared At added.
26/04/2005:
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09/04/2005:
A poem accepted for publication in Poetry Monthly.
06/04/2005:
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25/03/2005:
A review added of a book on British geology that is almost as old as the rocks it describes.
14/03/2005:
Photos:
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26/02/2005:
Pop CD Catalogue brought up to date.
17/02/2005:
Photos:
12/02/2005:
Photos:
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08/02/2005:
A review of Gerald Edelman's Bright Air, Brilliant Fire added.
31/01/2005:
Poetry mag Obsessed with Pipework is going to publish either Between Estuaries or M6 Toll Plaza.
11/01/2005:
A review of George Johnson's Fire in the Mind added.
03/01/2005:
Stuff added:
- Average submission response times for UK poetry magazines.
- A review of Nice Work by David Lodge.
- Photos.
24/12/2004:
Three (count 'em) more poems accepted for publication in Fire. Also, the list of poems is now database-generated.
08/12/2004:
Another poem ('Sleeper') due for publication.
04/12/2004:
A review of Gide's L'immoraliste has been added.
02/12/2004:
13/11/2004:
Photos:
05/11/2004:
A review of The Emperor's New Mind added.
04/10/2004:
- A review of Crime and Punishment added.
- A Music Book Reviews page added.
- A brief-to-the-point-of-pointlessness review of a book on Beethoven added.
23/09/2004:
Another poem ('Winter') accepted for publication.
16/09/2004:
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07/09/2004:
- A review of Paul Auster's City of Glass added.
- Photos.
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03/09/2004:
Two more poems due to be published.
30/08/2004:
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27/08/2004:
A review of Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality added.
25/08/2004:
- A few bits and pieces added to the Pop CD Catalogue.
- A solitary Science link has been added.
16/08/2004:
- I've just finished reading Heinz R Pagels' The Cosmic Code.
- Another of my miserable poems has been accepted for publication.
- Photos.
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29/07/2004:
A review of Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Capital added.
26/07/2004:
A review of a strange book called The Cosmic Serpent added.
19/07/2004:
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22/06/2004:
Photos:
27/05/2004:
A review of Lampedusa's The Leopard added.
06/05/2004:
Reviews of some more biographies that I've read over the years have been added.
27/04/2004:
Fine weather, lighter evenings and a digital camera mean further photos to inflict on visitors. These are of Suffolk and - just for a change - Cambridgeshire.
20/04/2004:
Yet more photos of fens added.
17/04/2004:
A review of John Ruskin's Selected Writings added.
03/04/2004:
The Pop CD Catalogue is now pretty much complete.
01/04/2004:
Photos of Venice added.
21/02/2004:
More photos of the Fens added.
17/02/2004:
- Reviews of some more weighty pre-1900 novels added.
- Some photos of the Fens added.
03/02/2004:
News items older than 3-odd months are now siphoned off onto an archive page.
29/01/2004:
- Two more of my poems are going to be published by the ever-charitable Pulsar.
- A Links page has been added.
26/01/2004:
A review of Norman Davies' 'The Isles' added to the History Book Reviews page.
24/01/2004:
More entries added to the pop CD catalogue..
15/12/2003:
Further expansion of the pop CD catalogue has taken place.
29/11/2003:
Some more entries added to the pop CD catalogue.
11/11/2003:
Some photos of Anglesey Abbey added.
09/11/2003:
A review of 'Identity' by Milan Kundera added.
02/11/2003:
The Photos page now has thumbnails, and some pictures of Brittany.
13/10/2003:
Pop CD Catalogue added.
20/09/2003:
Two more poems added.
26/07/2003:
A review of The Light of Day by Graham Swift added.
Reviews of other books have also been spruced up slightly.
(PS Recently updated items now have an 'Updated' label.)
12/07/2003:
Two more classical music reviews added.
(PS New items on all pages now have a 'NEW!' label indicating when they were added.)
09/07/2003:
A review of Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle added.
04/07/2003:
It's been a busy day:
- A review of Great Expectations added.
- Three more of my favourite pop CDs added.
- Two new poems added.
18/06/2003:
A review of Afternoons in Utopia added to the Pop CDs page.
11/06/2003:
Another poem (Swimming) added.
31/05/2003:
More stuff added to the UK Poetry Magazines page.
25/05/2003:
Another poem (Twitch) added.
08/05/2003:
Comments on Beethoven's Hammerklavier sonata updated to include Stephen Kovacevich's new recording.Another poem (Trouble) added.24/04/2003:
A review (only half a century late) of JK Galbraith's The Affluent Society added.
21/03/2003:
What do Simple Minds and Ludwig van Beethoven have in common? They have both just had reviews added to Dogsticks.
11/03/2003:
The last of Dogsticks' broken links has been banished. Appropriately enough this historic event is due to the addition of the History Book Reviews page.
10/03/2003:
I've just finished reading The Older Hardy by Robert Gittings. Not only that - I've also written a review of it.
08/03/2003:
How could I create a Web page about my favourite bits of classical music and not include Mahler's 4th Symphony? I couldn't.
06/03/2003:
My pontifications on Paul Simon's Negotiations and Love Songs are now public. In addition, the other pop reviews have had some of their scabs of stylistic infelicity sand-blasted off. Ouch!
24/02/2003:
Pages for individual poems are now generated dynamically by a CGI script (saves me having to HTMLify them by hand). Book reviews will soon be getting the same treatment, I hope.
22/02/2003:
People have been clamouring* for the Biography book reviews page to be added. Here it is then.
* Not really.
12/02/2003:
More unstructured musings on classical music added.
11/02/2003:
The Classical Music page now exists, consisting currently of one review.
09/02/2003:
A review of Money by Martin Amis has been added.
12/01/2003:
The Music page makes its belated appearance.
05/01/2003:
A few more UK poetry magazines added.
20/12/2002:
Here's what I think of UK poetry magazines!
15/12/2002:
A review of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep added.
03/12/2002:
Another poem, Flying After Fifteen Years, added.
30/08/2002:
A review of Ian McEwan's The Cement Garden added.
29/08/2002:
Photos of Lithuania added.
12/08/2002:
More poems added.
04/08/2002:
A review of Jane Austen's Emma added.
16/06/2002:
The first batch of science reviews has just been delivered to the Book Reviews area. Get 'em while they're hot!
23/05/2002:
Dogsticks goes dynamic: a CGI script now puts a Dogsticks frame around individual photos.
15/05/2002:
Blimey! I've had another poem accepted for publication.
06/05/2002:
Dogsticks goes stateside: check out the new exhibition on the Photos page.
30/04/2002:
Dogsticks is now on a different server, and has its own domain name. World domination to follow shortly.
26/03/2002:
The Poetry page has been purged of broken links.
25/03/2002:
- Site slightly restructured.
- A review of Andy Croft's Just As Blue added.
16/03/2002:
Three more book reviews added to the increasingly unwieldy Post-1900 Fiction page.
09/03/2002:
A few more book reviews added to the Post-1900 Fiction page.
05/03/2002:
Photos of East Anglia are now on display in the Photos page.
25/02/2002:
More book reviews added to the Post-1900 Fiction and Miscellaneous Non-Fiction pages.
24/02/2002:
Pre-1900 Fiction and Miscellaneous Non-Fiction book reviews pages created.
23/01/2002:
The Photos page now has things in it!
13/01/2002:
Dogsticks up and running.
Dogsticks was created from XML source files using the fab Saxon Java XSL processor, which is free from somewhere on the Net.
Future projects include:
Photos: