If only it were all so simple!

The Gulag Archipelago – Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1973) The Mission – In an attempt to better keep track of my reading, I have settled on the idea that creating a short a post on the book with which I am currently engaged might prove a productive and useful undertaking. For the last 2 weeks, I have been spending every spare moment utterly transfixed by Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag…

The gift that keeps on giving

You know how it is, you’re in a second-hand bookshop on a Saturday afternoon, indifferently leafing through anything that comes to hand and, for whatever reason, you suddenly fix on something that catches you’re attention. I picked up a copy of Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces 2011-2016(2016, Faber & Faber) by the comedian Stewart Lee and noticed…

Do what you can

Herself is in Greece, so I’m home alone for the next week until I join her over there for Greek Easter. I’ll have to find something to keep myself occupied for the weekend, though I fear my efforts may amount to little more that sitting on the couch and watching Sergei Bondarchuk’s incredible 8 hour…

Feminist campaigners welcome plans for the installation of North Korea’s first female despot. 

North Korea, the controversial East Asian state, plans to install its first female supreme leader, delighting the legion of feminist critics who branded the previous regime as sexist, offensive and anachronistic. “This comes from high up, from the top,” said one source in reference to the decision. While no official statement has yet been released from…

One for the poets

In the closing chapter of Augustus by John Williams, a novel I have just finished reading for the second time, I noticed yet another passage that I criminally overlooked on the first read. This quote appears in a letter written by the elderly and reflective emperor Octavius Caesar, to his friend, the historian and philosopher,…

The Romans and the Moralists

I am half way through rereading Augustus, a suberb novel by John Williams, author of the equally brilliant Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, and noticed this particularly eloquent passage that I had overlooked the first time through. The quote is taken from a fictionalised 12BC letter from the political advisor Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius and…

Under Pressure

The bookshelf above my bed is now beyond overloaded and I’m quite certain that it’s going to collapse any day now. We’re at breaking point. One of the screws on the bottom left corner is looking particularly dodgy, and despite my best efforts I can’t get the damn thing tightened back into the wall. I…