Nothing Tra La La?

Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize in 2014 for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North , which was in part based on his father's ...

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

Ulysses Temper is a British soldier in Italy during the Second World War. There he befriends art historian Evelyn Skinner, and helps her res...

This is a very odd love letter to Australia, begun soon after the author emigrated there in the summer of 1950 and published in 1952. I borr...

This extraordinary, meticulously researched book is an essential read just now. Belton charts the rise and rise of Vladimir Putin from his e...

Cecil Madden was "the world's first television producer", according to the cover of this memoir edited by his granddaughter, J...

Wartime Britain , which I read last month, referred to these diaries by Winifred Vere Hodgson (1901-79), who lived at 56 Ladbroke Road when ...

This enormous volume - 591 pages before  the exhaustive acknowledgements, notes, bibliography and index - is a detailed history of the Secon...

Having read Michael Bartholomew's biography of HV Morton , I'm now on to Morton himself. HV Morton's London is a collection of t...

This is a very good biography of a very successful writer and pretty awful human being. Michael Bartholomew brilliantly teases out the real ...

I raced through this enthralling, vivid account of the Second World War, part of a new series written by Dominic Sandbrook for his eight yea...

Entirely selfishly, I bought this for the Dr's birthday so that I could read it. It's the third in a trilogy, after Crooked Heart a...

I’m struggling a bit with prose for grown-ups, so over the last month worked my way through The Adventures of Tintin , an eight-volume box-s...

After my post on Kingdom Come , a shrewd friend recommended me Alex Ross's earlier work, Marvels , originally published as a four-par...

Old Baggage , which I loved, is a prequel to this brilliant, comic novel about bad behaviour during the Second World War. We begin a li...