When the Professor Got Stuck in the Snow by Dan Rhodes
A short novel lampooning Richard Dawkins. Some good jokes, and a surprise ending. Good fun, unless you’re Richard Dawkins.
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Europe at Midnight by Dave Hutchinson
This is the follow-up to “Europe in Autumn“. Unimaginatively, I’d expected it to pick up where ‘Autumn’ left off, but in ‘Midnight’ we have a whole new cast of characters.* Hutchinson develops the theme at the heart of ‘Autumn’, taking … Continue reading →
Oxford’s Working Past by Liz Woolley
This neat little book by freelance Oxford historian Liz Woolley picks out a couple of dozen of Oxford’s Victorian and Edwardian industrial and commercial buildings, many of which still survive today. If you didn’t know where four of the city’s … Continue reading →
Deep Shelter by Oliver Harris
This is the second of Harris’s books set in present-day London and featuring DC Nick Belsey, described on the cover by Val McDermid as “a beguiling bastard of a hero”. As in the first book “The Hollow Man“ it doesn’t … Continue reading →
The Invention of News by Andrew Pettegree
This is a moderately heavyweight and academic account of the development of news media in Europe over the 15th to 18th centuries, but it is not dry or sterile. It describes the changes in spoken, written and printed transmission of … Continue reading →
The Hollow Man by Oliver Harris
“The Hollow Man” is Oliver Harris’s first novel. His central character is a disillusioned, disreputable detective constable whose patch is Hampstead, but who knows the seedier parts of London too. The story concerns a suicide in a house in the … Continue reading →
A Crisis of Brilliance by David Boyd Haycock
This book tells the story of five young British artists over the decade leading up to and through the first world war. All of them – Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Richard Nevinson and Dora Carrington – studied at … Continue reading →
Europe in Autumn by Dave Hutchinson
This is the first book in a planned trilogy. The second volume, “Europe at Midnight“, is due out in November 2015. “Europe in Autumn” is set in a dysfunctional Europe not too far in the future. The open borders ideal … Continue reading →
The Wood Cutter by Reginald Hill
The Woodcutter of the title is the central figure in this story of a boy, the son of an estate forester in the Lake District, who grows up in the hills and is a natural and self-taught rock climber. After … Continue reading →
An Officer and a Spy by Robert Harris
Another excellent work by Robert Harris. He has written a fully-researched but fictionalised account of the “Dreyfus affair” which split French society around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his introduction Harris writes: “None of the characters … Continue reading →