Book Reviews

Articles in this section

• The Irish Civil War

  23 March 2007 by Ray

  Like I think many other people I have always had a very confused understanding of the events that led to the establishment of an independant Ireland after the First World War: I knew that there had been an uprising in Dublin in Easter 1916 and that there had been fighting as well as internecine (...)

• "Little Dorrit" by Charles Dickens

  26 March 2005 by Ray

  In this very big and wide-ranging novel, Dickens follows his eponymous heroine from the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in south London, where she had lived for the first twenty-plus years of her life and the first half of the book, across France and Switzerland with her newly-rich family on a (...)

• "The Art of Travel", by Alain de Botton

  14 February 2005 by Ray

  This is a very engaging book about the mental and aesthetic aspects of travel, of particular interest to those unhappy few of us who are not really as enthusiastic about the subject as everyone else seems to be.
  Alain de Botton, author of the quite memorable How Proust Can Change Your Life, is (...)

• "Quiller KGB", by Adam Hall

  27 December 2004 by Ray

  This is a book for the grown-up versions of those who enjoyed playing with Action Man and toy soldiers at an earlier age, so any ladies in the audience can click now on another subject - this one is not for you, sorry.
  An undercover agent on an urgent mission of the utmost importance for his (...)

• "Love and Garbage", by Ivan Klima

  18 December 2004 by Ray

  An arresting title - always a good sign, in the way that a book with a memorable first line or paragraph generally tends to live up to the promise of that enticing beginning. But like much of this rather dense work, it needs to be read carefully: the author is not associating love with garbage (...)