0725 | A Severed Head | Iris Murdoch
I’m a big fan of Murdoch but this one just didn’t come up to her usual standards. To be fair to her, what I should say is that it doesn’t…
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0712 | Flat Earth | Christine Garwood
Just before Christmas, this popped through the door completely anonymously. Tearing it open, it sounded like just the thing to while away a day or so reading over the break….
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0698 | Possession | A. S. Byatt
Oh boy, it seems Virgin in the Garden wasn’t large enough of a stage for Byatt to perform her one-woman show of intellectual capacity. 12 years later, she’s back with…
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0697 | The Madness of Crowds | Douglas Murray
Boy, I needed this. A birthday present from my sister that really hit the spot. Murray is a gay Spectator magazine columnist so not exactly the kind of writer I…
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0686 | Inside Mr Enderby | Anthony Burgess
Enderby is a poet who parps a lot. He’s basically the early British prototype for Ignatius J. Reilly. He has no love except that of poetry which he composes on…
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0684 | The Heat of the Day | Elizabeth Bowen
On the inside cover of this, it says, “The texture of her prose has a gossamer exquisiteness…” Well, here’s an example of what passed for gossamer in the age of…
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0681 | Crash | J G Ballard
Even as I placed my penis in his rectum Vaughan had known he would try to kill me, in a final display of his casual love for me. Crash, page…
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0674 | The House of Doctor Dee | Peter Ackroyd
As with all things Ackroyd, this novel suffers from not only an obsession with London now, but, as if that wasn’t ethnocentric enough, London then. Even though it’s been 8…
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0673 | Self-Condemned | Wyndham Lewis
To a certain extent autobiographical, this again, as with The Driver’s Seat, is about someone making their own decisions. This resonated with me as Professor Rene Harding resigns from his…
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0668 | Dining on Stones | Iain Sinclair
You know you’re in for a rough ride when the book you’re about to read is recommended by the lamentable Will Self. When everything else fails, fall back on doctored…
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0653 | Everything You Need | A. L. Kennedy
This one really got me. Maybe it was because I was also reading the abonimable In Search of Klingsor at the time, a novel that would make any other author…
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0643 | Watchmen | Alan Moore
Before the mid-1980s, superheroes were pretty simple. They had special powers, they fought baddies, they fought on our side, and they won. Wathmen changed all that. Moore single-handedly deconstructed the…
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0641 | Nightwood | Djuna Barnes
No clue why this is regarded as some kind of seminal work in queer literature. It’s certainly queer, but not in the way the gushing Winterson considers it in her…
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0640 | 1000 Years of Annoying the French | Stephen Clarke
This millennial look at the history of Britain and France is told with wry, sometimes childishly irritating, and rarely laugh-inducing humour. It’s pretty comprehensive, coming in at just under 650…
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0638 | Testament of Youth | Vera Brittain
While this is one of the classic war books and written from the almost unique perspective of a woman, if you can find an abridged version to read, get that…
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0634| The Virgin in the Garden | A. S. Byatt
The influence of Iris Murdoch on Byatt seems to be very apparent here. Virgin reads like an intellectual’s version of Murdoch’s The Bell, written 20 years earlier, but without as…
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0631 | Fingersmith | Sarah Walters
Before we’ve reached the 100th page of this, Ms Walters can’t hold it in any longer: Maud stood very still, her pink lips parted [ooh er], her face put back,…
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0629 | The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy | Lawrence Sterne
This is a novel that has, since it’s publication in 1759, divided opinion throughout the ages. It certainly divided mine as you can tell from the review radar below. While…
