Month: February 2019
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Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
Ghost Wall was a book that seemed to come up in quite a few of Best of 2018 blogs and articles that I read over Christmas, so I was eager to read this. It’s an incredibly slim volume, running to around 150 pages, but in packs an absolute punch. I read it across a single day. Silvie…
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Man at the Helm and Paradise Lodge by Nina Stibbe
When Love Nina came out a few years ago, I thought it was one of the funniest books I’d ever read. Nina Stibbe was a young girl from Leicester who’d come down to London to become a nanny. The book is made up of letters sent home describing the goings on the Gloucester Place household.…
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Books, Books, Books
If you’re a reader of this blog via an RSS reader like Feedly then two things are of note: You are very sensible. RSS readers are still excellent ways to stay on top of numerous websites. You are going to see a deluge of book reviews sometime around about now. Read on to discover why.…
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The Not-Live BAFTA Awards
In 2002, Ant and Dec remade the famous “No Hiding Place” episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. This was a classic episode of the sitcom where the “lads” tried to avoid learning the result of an away England game, before highlights were shown later that evening on TV. Something that made some sense when the original version aired…
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The Desperate Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph is not doing well right now. It only sells 363,000 paid copies of the printed paper, having long since been overtaken by The Times. Despite being one of the earliest news providers in the UK to have a web presence – eTelegraph anyone? – it feels somehow left behind now. Titles like…
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RAJAR Q4 2018
This post is brought to you in association with RALF from DP Software and Services. I’ve used RALF for the many years, and it’s my favourite RAJAR analysis tool. So I am delighted that I continue to be able to bring you this RAJAR analysis in association with RALF. For more details on the product,…
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Podcast Exclusivity
As always, these are my personal views, but it’s probably worth reiterating at the outset. I am not a fan of exclusivity, for a number of reasons. Let’s start by looking at the streaming music market. We continue to see fairly significant growth in this sector with companies like Spotify, Apple, Deezer, Google Play Music and Tidal…
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The Quaker by Liam McIlvanney
The Quaker is simply one of the best crime novels I’ve read for a long time. I devoured it. Unusually the book begins several months after a series of murders has already taken place. Glasgow of the late sixties is in a state of flux. Families are being moved out of the slum tenements that…