Isn’t it a cliche about tradespersons homes being the worst places to see evidence of their skill? Electricians and plumbers are known for having death-trap exposed wires and dogdy pipes as much as they are for being tapped up by bored housewiv[…]

I’ve just finished The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza. I’d read a review in The Guardian which compared it to The Name of the Rose which is my favourite novel (currently read it 9 times) so I went out and bought it straight away. […]

(A better sense of the inside of West’s head could be gleaned from the photographs of the interior of 25 Cromwell Street, published in the Guardian colour supplement with an extract from Burn’s book, back when it was just coming out in 19[…]

There was a two-part doc on Channel 5 which made a claim about them I didn’t remember, so I picked up Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers: the True Story of Fred and Rosemary West again. I quite quickly remembered why I disliked it so much[…]

I’d heard glowing recommendations from a couple of friends, so had to try Lorrie Moore. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel so satisfying on every scale and level.
Her use of words is bright and playful, her sentences sharp and[…]

Weblog Response: To make up for the lack of a comments facility, if you’ve got something to say about The Brown Wedge and want to make it public, this is the thread to do it on. (We’ll be adding this as a permanent link somewhere prominen[…]

More Zenda action: the other thing that struck me reading it is how difficult the sexual codes now are to understand. Early on in the book the hero visits an inn and flirts with a lusty wench: there’s a bit of banter on the stairs and the hero […]

I am A Boy Band-Benny Ramsay Menerofsky
Single Channel DVD
The concept here is insanely simple, a man dressed as a boy band sings a 16th century English Madigral. A love song then is a love song, the melodramtic heart break, the “i sigh, i di[…]

(an addendum to Tom’s Prisoner Of Zenda item below): there was once a daily newspaper strip called Thimble Theatre, and its creator, E.C. Segar, needed his lead character, Ham Gravy, to take a sea voyage. He introduced a rough and tough sailor,[…]

The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope
Yesterday I spent two long bus journeys reading this classic of Victorian adventure fiction. My rip was definitely roared but the novel seems to me an excellent example of the perils of an author letting a belove[…]