There are books that don’t so much entertain as they haunt. They don’t ask for your approval, or even your sympathy - they simply step into the quietest room of your mind and sit there, uninvited, until you are forced to acknowledge them. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is one of those … Continue reading What Remains After Love: A Reflection on The End of the Affair
Tag: book-review
A Cacophony of Creaks and Courage: On the Curious Brilliance of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old
I came to The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old expecting the sort of gentle chuckle one lets out when a pensioner mistakes TikTok for a foot ointment. What I found instead was a revelation - less a book, more a quietly defiant act of civil disobedience, written in biro. If Alan Bennett’s … Continue reading A Cacophony of Creaks and Courage: On the Curious Brilliance of Hendrik Groen, 83¼ Years Old
The Hangover of Civility: Lucky Jim and the War on Pretension
I’ve always felt that the great war following the great war was not the one involving tanks or treaties, but the one fought in corridors of universities, offices, marriages, and pubs - against the dreary empire of pretension. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is not so much a novel as a snarl in prose; a bottle … Continue reading The Hangover of Civility: Lucky Jim and the War on Pretension
Auntie Christ: Evil in a Lace Collar – Seaton’s Aunt
Most of us have at some point been fed cake by a relative we didn’t entirely trust – the sort of woman who keeps porcelain dolls in glass cabinets and refers to you exclusively as “it.” But Walter de la Mare, that poetic custodian of the uncanny, raises the stakes considerably in this morbid little … Continue reading Auntie Christ: Evil in a Lace Collar – Seaton’s Aunt
On Dandy Dick – Part One: Or, How to Ruin a Dean and Win a Race
Theology, gambling, and a horse named after a dandy – what could possibly go wrong? There are some things that should never mix: vicars and vodka, bishops and betting shops, or indeed, the very Reverend Augustin Jedd and anything with hooves. And yet in Arthur Wing Pinero’s frothy 1887 farce Dandy Dick, all these taboos … Continue reading On Dandy Dick – Part One: Or, How to Ruin a Dean and Win a Race
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