There’s a party in my eyeballs and everyone’s invited
Nurse! We need 200 cc of escapist reading, stat! The last month has been a month and half, with a poorly daughter and my nearest hospital about 50 miles away, my days have… Continue reading
Category Archive: history
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80% Cat, 20% Book
I have just finished C. J. Sansom’s Tombland, 800-odd pages of social rebellion and murder, Tudor-style. Sansom’s Shardlake series are always well-researched page turners, but if you’ve not read any before you wouldn’t… Continue reading
The Reckoning – Part One
This book is too full of information— not to mention exciting— for just one review, and I keep learning things I want to tell people, and most (all) people in my real life… Continue reading
Enid Blyton, a split lip, and the Reformation
When I was five years old and waiting at the bus stop after school, a bigger boy called Simon (names have not been changed to protect the innocent as he was proper guilty)… Continue reading
“One bright day in the last week of February, I was walking in the park, enjoying the threefold luxury of solitude, a book, and pleasant weather.”
(The above quote is from Agnes Grey, and true for me if February were ‘March’, and pleasant weather were ‘at least it wasn’t not snowing for ten minutes’.) I never thought I’d see the word… Continue reading
You must not read from the book!
For the past couple of weeks I’ve been clad in a dressing gown, tripping off my nut on dihydrocodeine, and nursing a small patchwork quilt of stitches in my mouth (routine surgery, nothing that… Continue reading
The Plantagenets
The price of living with more settled times with regards to the monarchy, is that Shakespeare would have very little history play material. Tales of Prince Phillip’s racism, Prince Andrew’s private flight expenses,… Continue reading
Big Bird in a small (monk)Fish Pond
I’ve recently been reading and re-reading around one of my favourite themes, the dissolution of the monasteries. I actually really like monasteries, especially those that have gift shops where you can purchase things… Continue reading
Crossed Swords and Crossed Lovers – Balzac’s ‘The Chouans’
If it wasn’t for some recent galavanting around Brittany, I can’t imagine a time that I’d have picked up The Chouans (1829) as the next ‘must read’ from my TBR. It’s not that I don’t rate… Continue reading
Well what’s one to do when Balzac takes a bath?
The other night I’d been enjoying a long soak in the bath engrossed in my book, The Chouans , the first volume of novels comprising Balzac’s The Human Comedy. Thus far, I’ve enjoyed it far more than… Continue reading