Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson, is an unforgettable true story of survival under extreme conditions, and carries a lesson that I find central to my life experience. Joe and his climbing mate, Simon Yate, decide to attempt the unclimbed west face of Siula Grande, in Peru. [...]
When I was a child, one of my mother's favourite authors was Rumer Godden. The titles I remember are Kingfishers Catch Fire and The Greengage Summer. Now, many generations later, I have at last read Kingfishers Catch Fire. I am in love with it and could read [...]
The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope is the sixth in a series of novels on the 19th-century social world of clergy and their families and community in a mythical English shire. I have not read all the Barchester stories, just Barchester Towers, and have watched [...]
In the time of Covid, I'm sure that many historians have been comparing the effects and the management of the epidemic with previous epidemics in history. The Great Plague was not an isolated event—40,000 Londoners had died of the plague in 1625—but it was the last and [...]
LIghthouse Keepers have become mythical figures in our culture, in the sense that their skill, hard work, dedication and hardship have an aura of courage and heroism, intensified by a setting of wilderness and isolation. There is a strand of literature, both fiction and non-fiction, that has [...]
The Garden of Angels by David Hewson is my latest read. I found this story fascinating for several reasons. It is set in wartime Venice, which in some ways seems insulated from the terrible struggles in Europe, but in other ways is infiltrated by the evil of [...]
J M Coetzee's literary output is astonishing; two of his novels have won the Man Booker prize, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003. Reading his biography, I was surprised to find he was born the same year as me (1940) and his [...]
Galileo Galilei, in 1609, set a telescope in the garden of his house and turned it skywards. Never-before-seen stars leaped out of the darkness to enhance familiar constellations: the nebulous Milky Way resolved into a swath of densely-packed stars; mountains and valleys pockmarked the storied perfection of [...]
I confess that until recently, I had not read any of John Steinbeck's books. They were not on our set list at school or even in the modern American literature stream in my Arts degree. Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, "for his [...]
Margaret Forster's family memoir, Hidden LIves, is a study of the real lives of three generations of women, spanning from 1869 to the early 1980s. Margaret's grandmother and mother were both born in the working class and stayed locked within it in subjugated positions. Margaret died of [...]
