Nothing Tra La La?

“In the early spring of nineteen sixty-three, there was a rumour — unconfirmed and a little scandalous — that George Smiley might almost be ...

“Informed public opinion is infectious, even to governments.” (p. 149) Thursday, 30 July 1964 saw publication of two paperback “Penguin Spec...

I've been listening to this, the fourth of Mick Herron's Slow Horses books, a little behind the run of the TV version and it's b...

This is a review of a comic science-fiction novel from 1968, sort of John Wyndham done as sitcom. Yet in poking fun at the mores and anxieti...

Two teenage friends, Freda and Florence, run away from home in York in 1926 and head to London to make their fortunes on the stage. Gwendole...

Responding to an alien distress call, the Doctor and Ruby arrive in Estonia a few days before the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242 .  "...

"There could be no doubt, thought Adam, that the death of Edwin Shorthouse was not much regretted by Peacock or anyone else connected w...

"'Let's go left,' Cadogan suggested. 'After all, Gollancz is publishing this book.'" (p. 87) It's more tha...

First published in 1945, this is the second of the detective novels starring Oxford don and amateur sleuth Gervase Fen. Following the events...

This is the third of five novelisations of the adventures of airline pilot Garry Halliday, following Garry Halliday and the Disappearing Dia...

"My gnomic utterances," said Fen severely, "reduce themselves to three: that I do not believe in the crime passionnel ; that ...

This is a novelisation of the second Garry Halliday serial, about the adventures of an airline pilot (see my post about the first one, Garry...

I really enjoyed this wide-ranging ramble through Bond, the Beatles and the British psyche. It charts the interweaving histories of the Fabs...

Atomic Theory is at work in a rural parish of Ireland. This, says Sergeant Pluck of the local police station, explains a spate of missing bi...