Cabbie Monaco

News-gathering doesn't seem to have changed much over the years if Evelyn Waugh's Scoop is anything to go by. Shenanigans describe...

Stig of the Dump takes me back to when it was read out in my junior school class. I was probably the same age as Barney, the boy who was t...

I decided to read Rabbit, Run after seeing it included in a couple of listings of great literature of the 20th century. It's about Har...

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go because it was described as a dystopian story. The events take place in 1990s England, bu...

I went to the Free Verse Poetry Book and Magazine Fair in April 2024, looking for options for self-publishing. Meandering through the stal...

Isabel Colegate's The Shooting Party gives away the end of the story on the first page: " It caused a mild scandal at the time, ....

Before picking up The Hare With Amber Eyes , I was under the impression it was fiction. My heart sank on discovering it's a family mem...

José Saramago's The Cave isn't for the faint-hearted reader. It was a book club choice, and such was the density of words that I w...

Claire Douglas isn't writing books for people like me, but nevertheless I do have some positive things to say about The Couple at No. 9...

Lengthy family sagas don't appeal to me and I'd never normally have opened the covers of Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres . Howe...

I knew nothing of Ian McEwan's Saturday before picking it up. It was just another one of his books, another that I wanted to read bef...

If your reading preference is for door-stop sized sagas featuring families or fantasies, Muriel Sparks's 134-page The Girls of Slender...

I have no idea how Anita Brookner's 1983 book Look At Me came into my possession. It's an old paperback copy with yellowed pages ...

I might have been half listening to one of those BBC Sounds programs whilst preparing lunch, or reading an end of year best books list in ...

A few years ago a university friend attempted to reunite our old gang. The response was somewhat unenthusiastic. Rose-tinted memories resur...

I love libraries. Unlike the online world, they don't limit your horizons to something an algorithm suggests because you've taken ...

Last year the screen persona of James Bond turned 60. He made his debut in 1962 with Dr. No . I must have seen all the movies. I groaned a...

In the early 1970s Mum's American pen friend and family paid us a visit on their way home from Iran; the husband was something in US di...

Did you know that Macbeth was a real Scottish king who died nine years before William the Conqueror fought the battle of Hastings? Shakes...

I started to read Roddy Doyle's Two Pints a few years ago, when an Irish friend gave me a copy and told me it was "feckin' br...