A very personal, sensitively written account of a naive young Englishman’s encounters with ordinary people as he spends a year walking the length of Spain. We gain a vivid insight into the harsh realities of life in Spain in the 30s, as the author faces poor but kind natives, coupled with blatant immorality, seething unrest…
This book is amazing in terms of its complexity and vivid action. The main characters are very well developed and the action scenes are captivating, even if somewhat incredible at times. As the first of a series, it builds up a huge cast of players in multiple locations, the relationships between which become quite a…
How is it that a story, in which hardly anything happens except for Harold nursing his blisters, can be so captivating, so thought-provoking, so moving? Rachel Joyce has an unusual knack for interweaving past incidents and memories into the current narrative, while cunningly maintaining our suspense by concealing what really happened twenty years earlier until…
Set in Napoleon’s heyday, this is a seemingly endless series of battles – often recounted in gory detail – interspersed with reckless carousing. Peter and Raoul always come out victorious and, if they do happen to get injured, they’re well again in no time. Bonaparte and his troops manage with next to no sleep, advancing from…
This is a complex adventure of political and religious rivalry, set in several nations of a fantasy world where supernatural powers intervene in human encounters. Spiritual bondage and fervour, cruel power struggles, brutal treatment of slaves and blow-for-blow accounts of battle to the death have the reader gasping with apprehension or seething with fury. But…
Robert Harris paints a vivid picture of life around the bay of Naples just before Vesuvius erupts. The engineer Attilius battles powerful, arrogant, carefree, unscrupulous men in his successful attempt to repair the aqueduct which is the lifeline for all the towns around the bay. Then, anticipating the eruption of Vesuvius, he does what he…
I’ve just attended a very inspiring writers’ weekend with Adrian and Bridget Plass and Sheridan Voysey at Scargill House in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales. The theme was Panning for Gold – identifying the really precious moments in our lives with a view to creating a personal memoir. A task we were assigned was to write…
Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel My rating: 2 of 5 stars I feel decidedly artless for not having appreciated this famous tome from highly acclaimed author Mantel, Hilary. I found it extremely difficult to read: first, because of the innumerable, intricately-related characters, many referred to with several names/titles, who weave themselves unannounced in and out…
Even the first chapter has a good question: How do you think Jesus would treat Moses, Mohammed, and Siddhartha Gautama (the Buddha) if they came to a crosswalk together?
It took a while, but I’ve finished it now. I was a bit previous in my earlier judgement. Schneier has realized there are moral aspects to the question of trust. Nevertheless, I’m still rather disappointed in the book. There are a few penetrating insights and provocative assertions: Defectors are endemic to all complex systems (p. 32)…
I have listened to this as an audiobook and hardly dare to say anything which might sound negative about such a distinguished author or this book in particular. It is totally biblically based, expounding many passages very literally, but reinterpreting others metaphorically (e.g. “all things” in Rom. 8:32); I have trouble with that kind of ambivalence….
Just started this. It’s about trust, especially as applied to security issues in the physical, social and digital worlds. Bruce Schneier is a very clever and thoughtful observer of society with an ability to not overlook the wood for the trees. He dares to ask fundamental questions and suggests answers. Which means I’m all the more surprised to…