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Capital by John Lanchester |
John Lanchester shows an extraordinary ability to portray the feelings, thoughts and backgrounds of the characters featured in Capital, all of whom live in the same South London street. Without wasting a word, the essence of each character is established so well that their responses to momentous events in their lives, as well as their strengths and weaknesses, are entirely believable and so is the author's detailed knowledge of contemporary situations and dilemmas. I couldn't put it down!
(bwl 79 Winter 2016) |
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Castle Howard - The Life and Times of a Stately Home by Venetia Murray |
This is a finely researched and written history of the Howard family. Venetia Murray portrays the robust characters that built and lived in Castle Howard as very real people. She describes their political, social, sporting and domestic lives over the last 300 years and includes some mind-boggling detail - on eighteenth century roads it could take 4 days to travel 64 miles which didn't stop them moving constantly between one great house and another.
(bwl 5 October 2000) |
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Caught in the Revolution: Petrograd, 1917 by Helen Rappaport |
Told through the experiences of foreigners, a vivid account of the disintegration of the cultural world of Tsarist Russia as the February revolution gathered pace towards the Bolshevik victory in October. Journalists and enthusiasts for social change hastened to St. Petersburg when deprivation, exacerbated by war with Germany, triggered the end of Romanov rule. The workers' response to a freedom never experienced or imagined led to strikes, mob violence and the oppression of anyone remotely bourgeois! Brilliantly researched - hard to put down!
(bwl 84 Spring 2017) |
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Dance with Me by Victoria Clayton |
Reminiscent of the styles of a succession of well-known novelists, first (and, to me, most successfully) Nancy Mitford, then Molly Keene with shades of early-Jilly Cooper. It brings in some serious issues before becoming rather melodramatic and finally, neatly (too neatly?), achieving an assortment of happy endings. Recently published but set in 1976 - I am amazed and amused at how dated some of the attitudes and assumptions now seem! Improbable maybe but highly entertaining.
(bwl 18 April 2003) |
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Ethel and Ernest by Raymond Briggs |
In this enchanting and very funny little book Raymond Briggs, celebrated author of "The Snowman", tells entirely in cartoon format the story of his parents' marriage and his own childhood in their small London house. The personalities of his parents - his father's enthusiasm for new ideas contrasting with his mother's redoubtable common sense - shine through as they come to terms with progress and the changes in their lives from the pre-war years to the seventies.
(bwl 11 October 2001) |
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Funny Girl by Nick Hornby |
Nick Hornby misses nothing in recreating the attitudes and atmosphere of the 1960s with uncanny accuracy. Barbara Parker realises that becoming Miss Blackpool is never going to fulfil her yearning to make people laugh so instantly escapes to London. There she becomes "Sophia Straw", the star of a spectacularly successful domestic sitcom produced within a television scene in which innovation is struggling to overcome old-fashioned convention and respectability which eventually it does. The swinging sixties have arrived!
(bwl 82 Autumn 2016) |
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Life in a Cold Climate - A Portrait of a Contradictory Woman by Laura Thompson |
I wrongly assumed that this fascinating biography of Nancy Mitford would match the sparkling and witty style of her novels but of course difficulties and disappointments could not, in a true story, be so light-heartedly overcome. However, referring constantly to her writing which so closely reflected the world she knew, Laura Thompson shows that with her "capacity for happiness" she was far from the sad figure often portrayed in the past, sometimes by her own remarkable family.
(bwl 24 June 2004) |
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Miss Garnet's Angel by Salley Vickers |
Two stories intriguingly intertwined - Julia Garnet breaks the mundane habits of a lifetime and moves to Venice for six months to live in the Campo Angelo Raffaele. The story of her new experiences and the people she meets alternates with the story of Tobias and the Archangel Raphael and is written with the same matter-of-fact clarity about both these very different worlds and the emotional awakening of two people living thousands of years apart.
(bwl 28 February 2005) |
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Mr Golightly's Holiday by Salley Vickers |
I was drawn to this book by the extract from the first chapter printed at the end of Miss Garnet's Angel. The lively characters living in a small village in the present day are depicted with great clarity and understanding and the story describes the effect on their lives of a visitor from a very different background. The eventual realisation of what this was came as a complete surprise! At least it did to me.
(bwl 28 February 2005) |
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Pax Britannica by Jan Morris |
The second book in Morris's trilogy of the British Empire is set at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, when the confidence of the British people in their country and the Empire reached its zenith. The depth of knowledge on which Morris draws is astounding and is imparted in a beautifully balanced mixture of wide ranging situations and individual experiences, creating a gripping portrait of the Empire that once covered 25% of the world's land.
(bwl 78 Autumn 2015) |
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Six Wives - The Queens of Henry VIII by David Starkey |
A brilliantly researched, lively and absorbing book which brings Henry's six wives (and Henry himself) to life as real people. As well as their own personal stories, it traces the complex tangle of the personal and political relationships linked to Henry's marriages and, always there in the background, their effect on the long drawn out course of the Reformation.
(bwl 26 October 2004) |
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The Age of Kali by William Dalrymple |
A totally fascinating series of essays, subtitled by the author 'Indian Travels and Encounters'. William Dalrymple has an uncanny ability to reach the people at the heart of the action, be they deposed maharajas, politicians, fanatical guerrillas or their heavily guarded leader and he writes powerfully and movingly about the mixture of hope, despair, enterprise, corruption, faith, nostalgia, injustice, violence, squalor and beauty of the India he knows and loves.
(bwl 5 October 2000) |
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The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad |
After the fall of the Taliban this Norwegian writer lived for three months with the extended family of an Afghan bookseller who, despite persecution, had prospered through his passion for books and Afghan culture. Her experience revealed shockingly how, despite "liberation", Muslim authoritarianism leads to the total subjugation of his dependents, above all the women, and the hopelessness of their situation. Fascinating from start to finish although her erstwhile host was outraged by the book.
(bwl 32 November 2005) |
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The Gentleman's Daughter by Amanda Vickery |
A scholarly yet highly readable study of the lives of upper class women in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, It is regarded as a feminist work yet the author constantly points out the contradictions between the assumptions of feminist historians and the evidence of the women's correspondence which is her source. It reveals unexpectedly close physical and emotional involvement in their children and family lives as well as expanding intellectual and cultural horizons.
(bwl 9 June 2001) |
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Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans |
Subtle humour supports the characterisation of four individuals recruited from London with its nightly bombing and all the deprivations of wartime in 1940 to work on a Ministry of Information film being made on the beaches of Norfolk. This unexpected turn in their lives has consequences which transform their previous mundane existence in entirely plausible ways. Despite an element of tragedy this story of liberation from the characters' pre-war past is told with gently ironic wit which does not lack compassion.
(bwl 77 Summer 2015) |
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Those Wild Wyndhams: Three Sisters at the Heart of Power by Claudia Renton |
Lord Leconfield's three beautiful, intelligent and volatile granddaughters grew up with every opportunity to spread their wings which they most certainly did. As leading members of The Souls, pre-occupied with philosophy and ideas, they mixed in society with the leading political figures of late Victorian and early Edwardian England. Much more than a biography - this is a beautifully researched and fascinating account of a remarkable family in the era eventually devastated by the First World War.
(bwl 80 Spring 2016) |
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Two Lives by Vikram Seth |
At times I found myself disappointingly bored by the details of humdrum daily life that fill many of these 502 pages, though significant events and situations are vividly described. The remarkable stories of Seth's much loved uncle and his wife, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany whose family was tragically wiped out during the war, would have been twice as effective at half the length. However, reviewers don't agree with me - they loved it!
(bwl 32 November 2005) |
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Winter in Madrid by C J Sansom |
I was originally gripped by this tale of subterfuge and pretence in the grim conditions of Madrid just after The Spanish Civil War but It was the author's brilliantly researched knowledge of the conditions experienced by the characters in that uncertain world that remained in my mind at the end. I was not convinced by the rather contrived element of thriller and I found the ending disappointingly dull but I am glad to have learnt a lot about Madrid at that time.
(bwl 90 Autumn 2018) |
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