Le Col de Joux Plane
25 July 2020 Earlier this year I decided to plan to put my bike in the back of the car and drive to Provence with the aim of riding up Mont Ventoux. I was going to go in May, but … Continue reading →
Tony
The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North
Intriguing, imaginative, inventive, impressive. Claire North’s character Harry August and his fellow kalachakra live Groundhog lives rather than Groundhog Days. Unlike we normal ‘linear’ folk their lives are both sequential and repetitive in time. Like the Ouroboros continually swallowing its … Continue reading →
Sierra de Aitana, Alicante, Spain
23 February – 1 March 2020 An Exodus holiday This holiday ended just about 10 days before Spain went into lockdown in response to the coronavirus pandemic, followed a few weeks later by the UK. I’ve used an abbreviated format … Continue reading →
The Five by Hallie Rubenhold
The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper The stories of the lives of these five women have one thing in common: they show how desperately hard life was for working-class women in mid-Victorian times, and how … Continue reading →
Another Fine Mess by Tim Moore
Across the USA in a Ford Model T Tim Moore is a travel writer who specialises in coming up with daft ideas, doing them, and then writing about them. Never having driven one before, his daft idea for 2018 was … Continue reading →
The Devils of Cardona by Matthew Carr
An excellent story in the form of a political crime thriller set in the foothills of Pyrenean Spain towards the end of the 16th century. Carr captures the paranoia of the times with the secular state and the Inquisition both … Continue reading →
Finland Forever by Diana Webster
In the summer of 1967 when the rest of the world was heading to San Francisco to smoke hash and drop acid in Haight/Ashbury, I went to Finland for two months. I lived with a family in a tiny place … Continue reading →
Wayfaring Stranger by Emma John
Emma John trained as a classical violinist but abandoned any plans for a music career in her twenties when she realised she wasn’t quite good enough to play at the very highest level. She became a journalist and sports writer … Continue reading →
Fermat’s Last Theorem by Simon Singh
This is an excellent book! Almost everyone learns Pythagoras’ Theorem at school, which says that when the squares of each of the two shorter sides of a right-angle triangle are added together, the answers equals the square of the longest … Continue reading →
Dead Lions by Mick Herron
The second in the Jackson Lamb series. I felt it lacked a little of the tautness of the first; it ranges over an area wider than the confined London of “Slow Horses“ and the plot requires a bigger stretch of … Continue reading →