Cabbie Monaco

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...

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...

In 2018 Stuart Heritage wrote a review for the Guardian of Tristan Gooley's Wild Signs And Star Paths and I immediately added the bo...

I was surprised to discover within one branch of my family's history, a chemist-druggist who travelled to America in 1862, leaving his ...

I first read Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island when it was published back in 1995, and then a few years ago I picked it up again...

An acquaintance suggested James C. Scott's Against the Grain might be of interest. We'd been discussing the benefits of small, loc...

It was eighteen months after reading a review of Antigone Rising before I bought it. I'd forgotten what had drawn my attention to the ...

When Boris Yeltsin became President of the new Russia, I was working for a bunch of London-based management consultants who were looking f...

This is a true story. The events described took place in Paris in 2018 and are narrated by The Man. Sometimes he thinks he's in a Philip...

Art Objects is a book for readers who relish language, its rhythm and its sounds. In other words, the art of the written word. In it Jean...

Here's a book for people who want to know more about Shakespeare but need a bit of guidance before sitting down to watch or read a who...

This week saw yet another report of university students banning a speaker for remarks made during a debate. It was a perfect opportunity f...

If you want something done, do it yourself. After " forty years of neoliberalism having gone unchecked and unchallenged " in the...

Hannah Mitchell describes herself as a " very ordinary woman " in her autobiography The Hard Way Up . The fact that she's ma...

There are things that happened to you when you were a teenager, things you had no control over at the time, things that changed the course ...

The word parson , like matron , brings to mind saucy Carry On films and salacious newspaper headlines. So it was with plenty of nudge-nudg...

It's been difficult keeping Book Club going since March. Some members returned to their native land for lockdown, and most of our group...

In the Prologue to A Cure for Gravity Joe Jackson describes an eventful 1975 gig in Basingstoke. He follows up with musings on where his l...

Ian Robinson's The Town that Vanished uses the Mass Observation Worktown investigation of the late 1930s " as a frame of referenc...

" What is history, and where does it take place? " Sebastian Haffner's book isn't concerned with the type of history we l...