The everyday as exceptional

I studied Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at school and even forty years on I can recall, probably inaccurately, some of the wonderful language. The teacher had to explain what it was that would have made Queen Elizabeth 1 and her court laugh, although as a teenager it was enough to know that one of the characters is called Sir Toby Belch. The thing was tho', the play was rather dry and stolid on the page, and it was only when a group of us went to the theatre to see it performed that it came alive.

And so, I was wary of expecting too much from Alan Bennett's "The Complete Talking Heads",

Too many books, not enough time

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 of your life. For example, that time when the headmaster told you your choice of A-Levels didn't fit with his timetable, so you had to choose different subjects. You made the most of it of course, changed your expectations, reassessed your career options, and achieved success nonetheless.

Years later you find the time to do that thing you wanted to do aged sixteen and you discover David Lodge's book, The Art of Fiction

A Marxist and a monarchist

The British royal family is an anachronism. Don't you find it odd in the 21st century that one family's wealth, prestige and standing is based on its claim to be descended from a French bastard who invaded England nearly 1000 years ago? Geneticists tell us that pretty much everyone with English ancestry is related to William the Conqueror, including Danny Dyer, who's traced his roots back to King Edward III. So why should Queen Elizabeth and her extended family be the exception and hang on to all the loot?

A daft story with a philosophical theme

Imagine the scenario; climate change and ecological destruction has reached the point where a great catastrophe is about to unfold unless world leaders agree to "Turn off the factories, ground the airplanes, stop the mining, junk the cars." What would you do? If you're a member of the Sumners family in Kate Wilhelm's Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, you decide to build your own hospital and research centre, and start cloning yourselves to save the human race.

A Dark-Adapted Eye. What's the truth?

I used to love the telly series Columbo. Peter Falk as the shuffling detective in his rumpled mac knew who'd committed the crime right from the beginning. He just had to work out how to catch 'em. In Barbara Vine's book A Dark-Adapted Eye we know there's been a murder, we know the murderer was Vera Hillyard, and we know she was hung for her crime.

Over thirty-five years Vera's family has tried to forget about the incident, and in their own ways have distanced themselves from it. The long dormant memories are reawakened when a true-crime writer contacts Faith Severn, the murderer's niece.

Parson Peters - a life of dishonesty

The word parson, like matron, brings to mind saucy Carry On films and salacious newspaper headlines. So it was with plenty of nudge-nudging and wink-winking that I settled on the sofa to read Adam Sisman's The Professor and the Parson: A Story of Desire, Deceit and Defrocking.

The Parson of the title is Robert Peters, and the book follows his career as he repeatedly tries to take up positions at academic and religious institutions around the world, using forged documents and bogus qualifications.

A Long Petal of the Sea? Not my cup of tea.

Our book club choice for August was Isabel Allende's A Long Petal of the Sea, published in 2019. Len and Yvonne are fans of the Chilean writer and were keen to read it.

She's a new author for me. Allende's Wikipedia page was encouraging, mentioning magical realism and saying her novels are often based on historical events and real-life individuals. As for A Long Petal of the Sea, it ticked quite a few of my boxes. The opening part is set during the Spanish Civil War, a conflict I know little about, during a period of time that I find fascinating - the 1930s, economic depression, competing ideologies of Marxism and Fascism, the run-up to World War II. With a couple of weeks to spare before book club I read George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia and then sat down to immerse myself in Allende's tome.