If All The World and Love Were Young by Stephen Sexton
top prize-winning poetry and emotional toll of lockdown ekes in
Tag: Ulysses
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford
a very very very good big book on WAR
The Priest of Love by Harry T. Moore
An un-Lawrentian D.H. Lawrence biography
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
this is not a test, it’s a memoir
A Shorter Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, ed. Anthony Burgess
Can Burgess turn this tough novel into a frothy paperback? No.
Dotter of her Father’s Eyes by Mary M Talbot and Bryan Talbot
There’s something both lower-case romantic and sweetly anachronistic about a husband-wife literary collaboration. What makes this one, Dotter of herContinue Reading
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a big, serious novel all about big, serious things. It is intelligent, articulate, humaneContinue Reading
Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
Iris Murdoch is one of the handful of writers who I return to with regular irregularity. Like Graham Greene, VirginiaContinue Reading
Byron Easy by Jude Cook
Byron Easy by Jude Cook is the least enjoyable book I’ve read in ages, and the first one I haveContinue Reading
Swann’s Way (À la recherche du temps perdu 1) by Marcel Proust
I’m writing this in the beautiful Spanish Pyrenees, having spent a day doing little more than reading Proust and lookingContinue Reading
King Jesus by Robert Graves
For the past year, I have been working on a historical novel set in “Biblical times”, and during that timeContinue Reading
Quesadillas by Juan Pablo Villalobos
This is a very short novel (that, somehow, feels even shorter than it is) published by the commendable independent publishingContinue Reading
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz
Someone told me about eighteen months ago that I should be careful. That when people pass the mid-point of theirContinue Reading
We’ll Always Have Casablanca: Getting Out of Morocco and Racing Through Kurt Vonnegut’s Galapagos
Casablanca felt very different to the other Moroccan cities I visited. Very European, actually, in terms not just of architecture,Continue Reading
A Rubbish Couple of Days
Over the last few days I have made a series of unforgivable travel booboos. Yesterday I nearly gave myself heatstroke,Continue Reading
Ul-Essaouira-sses: James Joyce and Morocco’s Atlantic Coast
Desperately needing some cooler weather and a low pressure environment in which to cold turkey from the anti-depressants I’d beenContinue Reading
On the Future of This Blog
Right. I am finally taking my own titular advice to heart and heading off for a little bit of living.Continue Reading
Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Building up towards my planned reading of Ulysses in August, I decided to try a different, shorter, Modernist classic. This was Woolf’sContinue Reading
Triumph Of The Now 