Last year one of my best books was published in 1959 but this year I’ve gone all the way back to 1871. Despite having majored in English lit, I managed to get through university without reading Middlemarch. I don’t imagine I would have enjoyed it much at that point, so it’s just as well. This year, I finally decided to read it (well, listen to it) and, at last, I was ready for it. I found it beautiful, funny, compassionate, clear-eyed, and entirely satisfying. It’s about life, ambition, loss, discovery, folly, and wisdom. Some things are worth waiting for.
Introduction and Notes by Doreen Roberts, Rutherford College, University of Kent at Canterbury.
Middlemarch is a complex tale of idealism, disillusion, profligacy, loyalty and frustrated love. This penetrating analysis of the life of an English provincial town during the time of social unrest prior to the Reform Bill of 1832 is told through the lives of Dorothea Brooke and Dr Tertius Lydgate and includes a host of other paradigm characters who illuminate the condition of English life in the mid-nineteenth century.
Henry James described Middlemarch as a 'treasurehouse of detail' while Virginia Woolf famously endorsed George Eliot's masterpiece as 'one…
We can’t all be lucky enough to take Ada Palmer’s history course in which the students restage the papal election of 1492, but we can all read her thought-provoking, witty, and thoroughly entertaining book. Filtered through the lens of Machiavelli and carefully chosen figures, famous and not, she explores the world in which they lived vs. the one imagined by future generations. Any book that features papal nicknames such as “Battle Pope One”, “Battle Pope Two”, and “King Log” is a winner to me.
The Renaissance is one of the most studied and celebrated eras of history. Spanning the end of the Middle Ages to the beginning of modernity, it has come to symbolise the transformative rebirth of knowledge, art, culture and political thought in Europe. And for the last two hundred years, historians have struggled to describe what makes this famous golden age unique.
In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating. Her witty and irreverent journey through the fantasies historians have constructed about the period show how its legend derives more…
We start with the news that a cliff on the seaside in Cornwall has collapsed, obliterating a small private hotel. Some guests died, some survived. The remainder of the book is the story of their last days. The characters range from slightly feral children to an extremely difficult clergyman, representing a range of post-war British society. Kennedy has a keen satirical eye but, despite their follies and sins, you find yourself gradually thinking “not that one” and “I hope she makes it”. You’ll have to read it to find out who does.
This summer holiday vintage crime classic exploring the mystery of a buried Cornish hotel invites us to solve the puzzle as detectives: perfect for fans of Celia Fremlin's Uncle Paul, Agatha Christie, or Richard Osman ... 'I am loving it!' Nigella Lawson 'Hilarious and perceptive ... Perfect.' Daily Mail 'Entertaining, beautifully written, and profound.' Tracy Chevalier 'Tense, touching, human, dire, and funny ... A feast indeed.' Elizabeth Bowen 'Kennedy is not only a romantic but an anarchist.' Anita Brookner 'Oh boy, what a treat; wonderfully sharp and funny ... Page-turningly good!' Lissa Evans 'So full of pleasure that you could…
Dependable grad student Ardeth Alexander finds herself trapped in a nightmare as the unwilling blood source for a captive vampire, the centuries-old Rozokov. When she discovers that her fellow prisoner is not the worst monster she faces, she realizes that the only way to survive is to make an irrevocable choice.
On the streets of Toronto, Ardeth struggles to figure out how to survive her new life and Rozokov faces a world that has changed utterly from what he knew. But the powers that trapped them both have not gone away – and still have plans for them.
