Beryl Bainbridge: Artist, Writer, Friend by Psiche Hughes I am inordinately excited to have been able to get my mitts on this rather different biography of my favourite author, the first full biography since Beryl’s death. Thanks to my lovely neighbours who rescued it from the Amazon delivery man and depot hell this morning, so Read More
Category: Authors B
A “perfick” entertainment…
It’s not often that you can successfully combine a phrase and idea from a Shakespeare sonnet – number 18 as it happens. You know the one that begins: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease Read More
Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week – Review Round-up
Thank you again to everyone who has joined in Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week. I said I’d do a full round up – so here are all the links so far. If I’ve missed you out, please leave a link in the comments and I’ll add you in. As Simon did for his Review Round-up for Muriel Read More
Nights at the Theatre
Front Row: Evenings at the Theatre by Beryl Bainbridge From 1992 until 2002, Beryl was the theatre reviewer for The Oldie magazine, and her reviews have been collected in this volume. Collected columns like these can easily date, however Beryl prefaces each review in her idiosyncratic style with comments about what she’d been doing, or thoughts about arriving at the Read More
“Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way”
A Quiet Life by Beryl Bainbridge Alan sits in a café waiting for his sister Madge, whom he hasn’t seen for fifteen years – there to discuss their late mother’s effects. Both are now in their forties, and they’re still as different as chalk and cheese. Rewind twenty-five years. It’s the 1950s; petrol is still Read More
Dinner Parties – A Risky Business!
Injury Time by Beryl Bainbridge Dinner parties… Love ’em, loathe ’em – but from the mid 1970s to perhaps as far as the late 1990s they were a symbol of the middle classes. The kitchen-sink drama moved into the Dining Room. Acceptance of your position in the hierarchy by giving dinner parties was soon replaced by Read More
Beryl on the box & big screen …
Today, I offer you a survey of Beryl’s work for TV and film, with as many links to clips as I can find… During the early part of her career, Beryl was an actress. In 1961, she famously appeared in one episode of Coronation Street as the peace-protesting girlfriend of Ken Barlow. See BB in Corrie. She wrote Read More
Love the one you’re with – the Bainbridge version
Sweet William by Beryl Bainbridge I was thinking of an apt title for this post and was planning on calling it ‘The man who loved women‘ after the celebrated François Truffaut film, but then I remembered the Stephen Stills song ‘Love the one you’re with‘. It seemed to encapsulate Bainbridge’s 1975 novel in a nutshell. (More Read More
Two Naughty Schoolgirls…
Harriet Said by Beryl Bainbridge Harriet Said was Beryl’s first work written in the late 1950s. However it ended up as her third published novel, as its darkness struggled to find a publisher initially. It is the story of two teenaged schoolgirls and what they got up to one summer holiday… The two girls are an Read More
It’s Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week!
Welcome to Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week I hope that many of you will join us in reading one of her books this week, and maybe posting about it, or leaving a comment on any of the Beryl posts here. Please do leave a link to your review in the comments below so everyone can follow Read More
A Beryl Bibliography – part two
Following on from last week’s post highlighting Beryl’s earlier novels, here is a brief survey of her later novels and other works to help you choose which books, if any, you’d like to read if you join in with Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week in mid-June. Once more, clicking on a book title will take you Read More
A Beryl Bibliography – part one
Thank you for the wonderful response to my decision to host a Beryl Bainbridge Reading Week in June. Some of you aren’t so familiar with her books, so I thought I’d post a bibliography and give an idea of the subject for each of them, in time for you to find copies of those that Read More
From the archives May 2013: HHhH by Laurent Binet trans Sam Taylor
I reviewed this originally on my old blog in two stages – combined into one post here: Halfway Hangups: HHhH is the book du jour, the one that’s getting the blog-inches, mostly giving it glowing reviews. It won the Prix Goncourt in France, and Mario Vargas Llosa thinks it “magnificent.” For anyone who hasn’t encountered it yet, HHhH Read More
Anyone for Beryl?
I’ve been inspired by a question that Simon asked his discussion post during Muriel Spark Reading Week which he co-hosted with Harriet. Simon asked “Which other authors would you recommend to the Spark fan?” and my immediate response was Beryl Bainbridge! I’ve read just four of Bainbridge’s fifteen novels, but each one has been a Read More
The making of a scientist
Konstantinby Tom Bullough When I met Tom Bullough at the Penguin Blogger’s Night last month, I was instantly taken with his reading from his novel Konstantin. Later, talking to him, he was excited by the finished article and showed me the lovely fold out cover. An oversized paperback original, the dust-jacket is scattered with gilt Read More
Bottling Things Up, or Bottling Out?
The Bottle Factory Outing by Beryl Bainbridge A couple of weeks ago, Simon at Savidge Reads chose three books he was going to read before his imminent thirtieth birthday, (and he asked for more recommendations for forty books to read before he is forty.) One of the three was based on a suggestion of mine Read More
A classic adventure
The 39 Steps by John Buchan (1915) Richard Hannay is newly returned from living in South Africa, and he’s already bored with London. Everything seems to be happening elsewhere, especially in the Near East, and the Greek Premier, Karolides, seems to feature. “It struck me that Albania was the sort of place that might keep Read More
The return of everyone’s flying car
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again by Frank Cottrell Boyce When Mr Tooting is made redundant, he decides he needs a project and, with son Jem’s help, they rebuild an ancient old camper van. Then the plan is to go globe-trotting in it. It needs new vintage sparkplugs though despite all their travails. Off they Read More
Cuddle up with a cosy mystery
Death of a Cad by M C Beaton. Now that the weather is cold and frosty, what better type of book to huddle down with than a cosy mystery from M C Beaton. I did exactly this yesterday in between preparations for Christmas with the second in her Hamish Macbeth series set in the Highlands. Read More
Book Group Report – In search of dragons …
Jamrach’s Menagerie by Carol Birch This story of young Jaffy Brown and his adventures, starting with an encounter with an escaped tiger, was another really good book group choice. We all throroughly enjoyed this impeccably researched and ultimately rather gory tale of exploration and shipwreck in Victorian times. The Guardian’s review of the book tells Read More
Home, sweet home, or not as the case may be…
Wall Of Daysby Alastair Bruce A man stands on a rocky outcrop, watching the sea-green water. He is called Bran. He survives alone on a small island just big enough to sustain him where he has lived for ten years ever since he was banished from his homeland. Life on his rain-soaked island is hard, but Read More
Class wars in the suburbs – just ‘champion’ …
The Champion by Tim Binding Tim Binding is one of those authors of whom I’ve been aware for a while, and I’ve even got a couple of his books in my TBR piles, but never read any of them. The publicity blurb for his latest published earlier this year, said ‘The Champion pulsates with black humour Read More
The mad scientist and his red ray
This post was edited and republished into my blog’s timeline from my lost posts archive. The Fatal Eggs by Mikhail Bulgakov Translated by Roger Cockerell Pre-blog, back in 2006, we read The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov in our book group and I loved it. This novel about the devil coming to a town of Read More
How to live alone and get by, Brookner style…
This post was edited and republished into my blog’s original timeline from my old blog lost posts archive. 16 July 2011, will be Anita Brookner’s 83rd birthday, and has been renamed International Anita Brookner Day by Thomas at Hogglestock and Simon at Savidge Reads. To celebrate this author, they have set up the IABD Website with a competition to win AB books Read More
One of the other bests of Beryl …
The Birthday Boys by Beryl Bainbridge. Now I’ve read three novels by the late great Dame Beryl Bainbridge, I can truly say that she has become one of my favourite authors, and I can’t wait to read more. She was a master of succinctly getting to the heart of the matter. Her novels aren’t long in Read More
Look inside …
This post was republished into my blog’s original timeline from my lost posts archive. Take one book – a 1965 Puffin paperback of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Pages well tanned, covers worn, spine well-creased and starting to fall apart – it’s my well-loved edition I had as a child. The painting on the front Read More
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank L Baum
The Wizard of Oz is one of our favourite family films at Gaskell Towers, and my daughter and I are really looking forward to going to see the new production at the Palladium during the Easter hols. It struck me though that I’d never actually read the original book, and the OUP very kindly sent me a Read More
A Cosy Mystery That Hits The Spot – Death of a Gossip by M.C. Beaton
M C Beaton, the pen-name of Marion Chesney, is a prolific author of cosy mysteries with two hit series to her name… You may be familiar with Agatha Raisin – a bossy urban sleuth who now lives in the Cotswolds and is delighted to stick her nose into things to keep busy. While I’ve read the Read More
Air-freighted asparagus? Never again!
How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee. I love popular science books and programmes. As a trained scientist, who still does useful but not challenging science at work, (I’m a school lab technician), at best, these books are great at keeping the science bit of your brain ticking over while Read More
File under Noir, not Fantasy
The Dresden Files Books 1 and 2 by Jim Butcher A few weeks ago while talking about crime series to read, my good blog-friend LizF recommended these books to me. As is often the case with me and my TBR mountains, I’d spotted them myself some time ago and had already picked up the first Read More
