Japanese Inro by Julia Hutt
Inro were small sectioned lacquerware boxes, generally a little smaller than a cigarette packet, which wealthy Japanese wore dangling from their sash-belts from the 17th Century until around a hundred years ago, when Weste[…]

Tove Jannson wrote two picture-books-for-moominloving-tots: Vem ska trosta knyttet? (1960) and Hur gick det sen? Boken om Mymlan, Mumintrollet och lilla My (1952). When I discovered they’d been republished (as Who Will Comfort Toffle? and The B[…]

The Man Who Ate The 747 is a cute little book. It is a romance which is neither Danielle Steele doorstep thick, or branded via Mills & Boon. Romance fiction has a bad name, and yet historically the romance was a more than respectable genre. Ben […]

Bus stop top fun
From Hoxton to Clerkenwell (haven’t checked out the return route yet), on the route of the 55 and 243, next to the Foundry, Old Street station, Turnmills, Yo! Sushi, Clerkenwell Screws and the Yorkshire Grey. Variously, 8 brea[…]

Hard-working words
I saw in Smiths last night that Stephen Donaldson had written one last Thomas Covenant book. Imagine my delight! Not at the existence of the book, you understand – more tedious leprosy shenanigans I expect – but at Dona[…]

Mario Puzo’s The Godfather is that relatively rare thing: a book that most people agree is surpassed by its film adaptation(s). I agree too, but crikey, some of his other books are GREAT. I am very fond of The Sicilian, which takes the true-ish[…]

“In my box are such delights…” 2 of 3. (following this)
It’s easy to forget that the cosy children’s classics the BBC adapted in the 1980s had, when written, acute psychological relevance to their audience. OK that audie[…]

Napoleon, for the eight millionth time — every so often I get a fit to revisit a subject I already know about and enjoy, partially to see what alternate perspectives or different foci could provide, and while I’m not a Napoleon fanatic I […]

Mankind: Have A Nice Day by Mick Foley
I suppose going from a novel by a Nobel winner (reviewed below) to the autobiography of an ex-WWE wrestler is probably about as big a drop in literary respectability as one could contrive. Perhaps predictably, I[…]

Stingray: the comic
I came across a Stingray graphic novel (haha not really, it’s a squarebound collection of old strips – but I thought I’d abuse the term the way it so often is these days) in a charity shop today. There are all so[…]