Erica

LATEST ARTICLES ( 422 )

• Coming Up for Air (1939) by George Orwell

  

  By JF The author of this novel, George Orwell, most famously known for his satires on society in Animal Farm and 1984, here composes what can be interpreted as... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Stamboul Train (1932) by Graham Greene

  

  By JN The Orient Express, a fascinating machine transporting people from different walks of life across Europe in a web of murder, lies and love. Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Brideshead Revisited (1945) by Evelyn Waugh

  

  By AW Written between December 1943 and June 1944 following a parachuting accident, Evelyn Waugh’s “operation of divine grace on a group of diverse but closely... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Forbidden Zone (1929) by Mary Borden

  

  By JM Mary Borden’s The Forbidden Zone, an accumulative collection of ‘fragments’ as termed by Borden, accrues both prose and poetry in a personal memoir of... Read more

  Posted on 23 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934) by Angela Thirkell

  

  Book review by George S: Trooper to the Southern Cross is a novel by Angela Thirkell, first published in 1934 under the pseudonym of ‘Leslie Parker’. Read more

  Posted on 14 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Three Miss Kings by Ada Cambridge

  

  Book review by Sylvia D: The Three Miss Kings by Ada Cambridge (1844-1926) was serialised in The Australasian in 1883. It was then published by Heinemann in... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Walter Greenwood’s Saturday Night at the Crown (1959)

  

  Walter Greenwood is best remembered for Love on the Dole (1933), but he went on writing until the nineteen sixties and remained a popular author. Read more

  Posted on 10 February 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Helen of Four Gates (1917) by Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

  

  Book review by George S: Ethel Carnie Holdsworth’s previous novel, Miss Nobody (1913), had not been a commercial success, and that may be one of the reasons... Read more

  Posted on 12 January 2017 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Man in Grey – a Regency Romance (1941), by Eleanor Smith

  

  It’s tosh and I loved it.  Bath gentility, Almack’s assemblies, gauzy frocks, curricles and phaetons, two aristocrats in a marriage of convenience, her lover an... Read more

  Posted on 17 December 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• She Was His Wife (1936) by Augusta Varty-Smith

  

  Book Review by Sylvia D: My second book from the Mark Valentine donation is Augusta Varty-Smith’s She Was His Wife, published by Heath Cranton in 1936. Read more

  Posted on 15 December 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• 1944 (1926) by the Earl of Halsbury

  

  The Earl of Halsbury’s novel, 1944 (published in 1926) is a very readable example of the ‘Future War’ genre’. Before 1914, these had mostly been grim warnings... Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Sunset Over Soho by Gladys Mitchell (1943)

  

  This novel – one of the Mrs Bradley mystery series for which its author is chiefly known – centres around the strange discovery of the body of an old man in a... Read more

  Posted on 23 November 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Robert Peckham (1930) by Maurice Baring

  

  Book review by Sylvia D: Maurice Baring OBE (1874-1945) was the eighth child and fifth son, of Edward Charles Baring, first Baron Revelstoke, of the Baring... Read more

  Posted on 18 November 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Lords and Masters (1936) by A.G. Macdonell

  

  Book Review by George S.: A. G. Macdonell is best known for his comic novel, England, Their England. Lords and Masters is a comic novel, too, but the humour is... Read more

  Posted on 12 November 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Holdfast by A. G. Street (1946)

  

  Shedding a relatively rare light on the plight of rural England in time of war, this novel by A. G. Street (author of the better-known Farmer’s Glory (1932))... Read more

  Posted on 04 November 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The English Air by D. E. Stevenson (1940)

  

  This novel by Edinburgh-born writer D. E. Stevenson (her father’s cousin was Robert Louis Stevenson) centres upon the story of Franz (‘Frank’) Von Heiden, the... Read more

  Posted on 27 October 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Death at the President’s Lodging (1936) by Michael Innes

  

  Book Review by Sylvia D: Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936) was the first of many novels and short stories featuring detective, John... Read more

  Posted on 15 October 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• The Body in the Silo by Ronald Knox (1933)

  

  Title page, illustration by Bip Pares As well as formulating the Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction or Decalogue, the Catholic priest and theologian Ronald... Read more

  Posted on 14 October 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Case with 4 Clowns (1939) by Leo Bruce

  

  Book review by George S: Case with 4 Clowns (1939) is the fourth of Leo Bruce’s Sergeant Beef novels, and it’s not the one to start with, since in it Leo Bruce... Read more

  Posted on 11 October 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE

• Those Who Remain by Eileen Tremayne (1942)

  

  Shuttling between London and the secluded village of ‘Eldbury’ in the early part of the Second World War, this novel concerns the plight of a single family as... Read more

  Posted on 28 September 2016 BOOKS, CULTURE