Pages & Proofs

Author Will Self and his family had a narrow escape earlier today when the roof of their London home, in Stockwell, and three neighbouring Victorian townhouses collapsed. He told the Evening Standard: “It was like the front of my house fell off. I got the children out to the back of the property because it […]

Flappers ahoy! Here’s the trailer for the forthcoming movie of The Great Gatsby, directed by Baz Luhrmann and shot in 3D. It’s certainly going to be a pretty movie. I wonder what F Scott Fitzgerald would have made of it.

The Guardian carries a review of Railsea, the new novel from China Miéville. they say it’s a “wildly inventive crossover/young adult fantasy with elements of SF and trains, lots of trains, all done with the kind of brio of which most writers can only dream.” Joan Aiken, the Awdrys, Daniel Defoe, Ursula Le Guin, Herman […]

Paul Kimmage triumphed at the 10th British Sports Book Awards with his biography, Engage: The Fall and Rise of Matt Hampson. The author used to be a journalist at the Sunday Times. Hampson is a former rugby union prop who was paralysed from the neck down after an accident in practice while on duty for England […]

Earlier this year, I read Moby-Duck by Donovan Hohn. Here is my video review of this non-fiction book about thousands of bath toys that fell into the ocean off a container ship and were washed around the globe.

For seemingly no good reason at all, the BBC asks why locked room mysteries are so popular. It’s good to see the article reference John Dickson Carr, who was the master of the locked room mystery as detailed in our feature about this sub-genre of thriller writing. Dickson Carr, who also wrote under the pseudonym […]

There’s a rather amusing new Tumblr – Really Long Book Titles of Really Old Books. Boy, AbeBooks could supply a long list of gems for this one.  How about Illustratio Systematis Sexualis Linnaei. Denuo edita, revisa ac translatione Germanica locupletata per M.B. Borckhausen adiectis tabulis CVIII ad originale Millerianum aeri incisis et coloratis, which can […]

The first rule of Mustard Club is…. The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club edited by Gourmet, which was actually crime writer Dorothy L Sayers. Apart from penning memorable novels and essays, Sayers was a skilled copywriter and worked for Benson’s advertising agency in London. This spoof recipe book was a promotional tool for Coleman’s […]

Memories were flooding back to me as I browsed these long forgotten Blue Peter Annuals ranging from 1965 to 1981. Some of the covers are shocking – what were the BBC thinking? John Noakes and Peter Duncan falling over and getting hurt. Lizzie Dripping (aka Tina Heath) becoming a host. Lesley Judd’s boots and flowing […]