Thursday, 14th March 2024
This week sees (more or less) the first anniversary of the publication of My Back Pages by Marble Hill London. I have been at the other end of the book industry, a publisher, for more than fifty years, never more than a midwife or a salesman for...
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Wednesday, 14th June 2023
“Richard Charkin's My Back Pages is an extraordinary exposition of his quite extraordinary career. There is surely no other trade book and academic journal publisher of the last half century so qualified and so competent to describe and evaluate...
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Saturday, 4th July 2020
Harry Rée was a pacifist and a schoolmaster for whom the Fall of France was a decisive moment in the war. He joined up, found he disliked authority and was recruited by SOE in 1942 and in 1943 was parachuted into the Jura district of France to...
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Saturday, 4th July 2020
I have only started to read Trollope recently. In May 2019, we spent a week in Sicily, not in the warmth of the early summer sun as we had expected but freezing in temperatures that the locals said apologetically they had never experienced...
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Saturday, 4th July 2020
I have an aversion to long books (by long I mean anything from 500 to 1000 pages). It’s all right if the author is a genius - I love Dickens’s Bleak House and Trollope’s The Way We live Now. But so often when reading reviews of books on topics in...
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Thursday, 2nd July 2020
On a quick count, I have seventy-five books on my shelves covering the Second World War or around 5% of the total in our flat (a curiously appropriate number given it is 75 years since the War ended). No other category can compete. My collection...
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