Book Review: Cambridge
/A precocious young girl and her family travel far and wide from her beloved home of Cambridge, Massachusetts
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The Crusades!
/Some Penguin Classics achieve a new relevance for the worst of reasons, and surely the head of that list is this venerable volume from 1963, Chronicles of the Crusades, featuring M. R. B. Shaw’s piously serviceable translation of Geoffroy De Villehardouin’s The Conquest of Constantinople and Jean de Joinville’s Life of Saint Louis, two of [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Words of Radiance
/Brandon Sanderson's epic fantasy series set on a storm-raked world continues
Read MoreBook Review: Murder at Cape Three Points
/A dogged police inspector investigates two gruesome murders at the heart of Ghana's booming new oil economy
Read MoreMystery Monday: Judge Dee – Poets and Murder!
/Our book today is Poets and Murder, the last of Robert Van Gulik’s mysteries starring the redoubtable (and semi-mythical) 7th-century Chinese magistrate Judge Dee. It’s a series famously born in a bookstore – a used bookshop in Tokyo where Van Gulik found an old Chinese manuscript containing some adventures of the Dee character. Van Gulik’s [...]
Read MorePenguins on Parade: Clark Ashton Smith!
/Some Penguin Classics will feel like a very long time coming, especially to their fervent adherents. When it comes to the work of pioneering 20th century fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, surely one of those fervent adherents is S. T. Joshi, the editor behind the Penguin Classics editions of H. P. Lovecraft, who in the early [...]
Read MoreBook Review: From the Tree to the Labyrinth
/If the idea of a big collection of writings about socio-linguistics by the author of "The Name of the Rose" strikes you as a winning way to spend a weekend, Harvard University Press has some good news for you.
Read MoreCrackpot Letters to the Editor in the Penny Press!
/I ordinarily have very little patience with the various species of brontosaurus who decry all the electronic suburbs of the Republic of Letters. I’ve worn out my ‘they’re entitled to their beliefs’ credit-balance when it comes to people who sniff at online-only publication – nowadays I just clamp my mouth shut instead of belligerently pointing [...]
Read MoreBook Review: A Darkling Sea
/A murder at the bottom of an alien ocean looks likely to spark an interstellar war
Read MoreBook Review: An Explorer's Notebook
/An exuberant collection of essays and reviews by trailblazing natural historian Tim Flannery
Read MoreThe Royal Road to Romance!
/Our book today is The Royal Road to Romance by Richard Halliburton, a rollicking travel-adventure book that became a runaway bestseller when it appeared in 1925. It had been a gamble on his part, a gamble taken in the teeth of the odds and over the doubts of his friends and family – circumstances with [...]
Read MoreBook Review: A Burnable Book
/14th century court poet John Gower is brought in by his friend Geoffrey Chaucer to solve the mystery of a book whose very existence threatens the realm
Read MorePenguins on Parade: The One-Volume Gibbon!
/Some Penguin Classics win against tough competition, and one of my favorite of those is David Womersley’s wonderful one-volume abridgement of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. This volume came out in 2000, hot on the heels of Womersley’s gigantic, utterly definitive three-volume unabridged edition of Gibbon’s masterpiece (the three fat paperback [...]
Read MoreMystery Monday: The Face of a Stranger!
/Our book today is Anne Perry’s 1990 Victorian mystery, The Face of a Stranger, which introduced her detective William Monk to the thousands of her readers who’d previously enjoyed her ten novels set a generation later in Victorian times and starring Thomas Pitt – novels she’d been writing with clockwork regularity for ten years before [...]
Read MoreBook Review: Why Kings Confess
/A seemingly random murder leads our hero Sebastian St. Cyr into the dark and dangerous world of international espionage in C. S. Harris's latest novel
Read MoreBook Review: The Medicean Succession
/In 1537, teenager Cosimo dei Medici became the first citizen of Florence, and in the following decades, he set about fashioning a 'sacral' rulership for himself - a complicated process at the heart of this fascinating new study
Read MoreThe Medici!
/Our book today is that hugely durable old 1910 war-horse, The Medici by G. F. Young, a quintessential example of the particular breed of monumental Victorian history that holds up effortlessly under the onslaught of time. It’s amazing, really, how widespread across the breadth of art and literature are these great histories – and it’s [...]
Read MoreThe Danelaw
/In her brilliantly scathing new book, Elaine Scarry charges that US Presidents, in maintaining and augmenting an enormous nuclear arsenal, have broken the social contract and become monarchs in all but name.
Read More