Blogs

Henry Marsh was once part of an elite group of around 200 neurosurgeons in England. Not only that, he’s a Sunday Times Bestseller. His focus here is letting go. With the help of an editor, this is his diary written over a year from the Covid-19 epidemic. His fears and doubts as he moved from being part of the establishment to just another NHS patient. A fearful old man with cancer of the prostrate. ‘Although I was to come to terms fairly quickly...

In the introduction, Bill Bryson explains to the editor of the Mail on Sunday , who is an old friend, the reasons he can’t write a weekly column for the magazine Night & Day . Notes from a Big Country are a collection of these columns published in the Mail on Sunday , 1996-1998. It would be the equivalent of me publishing my blog column. The Big Country Bryson refers to is America. He is a returning citizen taking with him an English wife,...

Crossing the River was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It’s not one book, but many stories linked to what it means to be human, to be black and bought and sold, to be despised because of your skin colour. I wasn’t paying much attention to the story’s through-line or theme. ‘A desperate foolishness. The crops failed. I sold my children. I remember. I led them (two boys and a girl)…My Nash. My Martha. My Travis. Their lives fractured.’ ‘The...

‘Good morning! Let me introduce myself. My name is Dora Chance. Welcome to the wrong side of the tracks.’ Carter specialises in the wrong side of the track. If it’s not circuses, it’s showbiz, which is just a different kind of circus. Dora has taken on the task of writing her autobiography. Well, not just hers, but her twin sister, Nora. It’s their seventy-fifth birthday. Same birthday as William Shakespeare (assuming we know who that is). Same...

https://wwwbbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001zqvz/close https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_(2022_film) Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. This is a tearjerker. It reminded me of C.Day Lewis’s poem Walking Away . The poet laurate is transfixed and transfigured the sight of his son (Oscar-winning actor, Daniel Day Lewis) Walking Away. Behind a scatter of boys, I can see You walking away from me towards the school With the...

Bill Bryson offers an idiosyncratic snapshot of America as the workshop of the world, the most powerful nation on earth that had a good 1 st World War—with most other countries, debtor nation—that produced tax surpluses that largely benefited President Warden G. Harding and his wealthy cronies with shades of the moron’s moron Trump. Bryson wasn’t to know this having written the book before the rise of bankrupt rapist, serial liar, tax dodger,...