ok so now in my trek through a.christie decade by decade i have reached one i like unreservedly (=no.1 in the 1930s omnibus, The Sittaford Mystery, 1931, where she really finds a rhythm), so i am going to try and sum the 1920s AC for you
i. AC invent[…]

Crazy title, crazy book. And for a while Jaynes was painted as a crackpot too — he had committed the sin of publishing his theory as this popular and accessible book instead of in the technical language of a peer-reviewed journal. The book rece[…]

ok i haven’t read an agatha christie since i wz about ten so i have embarked on an ODYSSEY OF MIDDLECLASS CRIME, working my way through the new christie “by decades” collections — which means i began with THE SECRET ADVERSARY […]

I trust you all watched the first of Adam Curtis’s new documentary on freedom last night (The Trap, repeated BBC4 surely, so look out for it.) It might have left you in a state of paralysis as he traced the impact that a strain of game theory h[…]

Looking back it’s so bizarre, it runs in the family. My mother’s brothers grew up in the 50s and when I was growing up I received some hand me down books and toys. Were they ever into space stuff! A Dan Dare radio station toy, an early To[…]

norton died in 2005, aged 93, with a LOT of titles to her name — my reread entirely took in books i read aged i wd say 10-12
my interest was slightly piqued by fellow lollard TRACER HAND, who lent me THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN (ed.Drake/Flint[…]

Not a review proper — tho I should do one — but just a note of a curious fact about William Mayne’s EARTHFASTS trilogy: viz Earthfasts (1966); Cradlefasts (1995); and Candlefasts (2000). The stories are about (inadvertent) time-trav[…]

Most of Enid Blyton’s books are either fantasies or thrillers, of a sort: a gang of kids, formalised or not, in a run-in with adult crooks. I don’t know if she came up with the formula herself, but commercially speaking she is its definit[…]

I just received – maybe you did too – a spam email from amazon.co.uk entitled “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Pre-Order Your Copy Now!”.
I can understand what Amazon gains from this, but really, why would anybody bother[…]

i. in andre n’s general conception of our far future, there is a galactic federation coming to pieces, with a severe class system — the proper mode of address for the pampered aristo class (male) = “gentle homo”
ii. in bedknob[…]