Susan’s Bookshelves: The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
We’re in Tuscany in 1528 where a nun, Alessandra Cecchi, has just died having left instructions that she is not to be...
We’re in Tuscany in 1528 where a nun, Alessandra Cecchi, has just died having left instructions that she is not to be...
Oxford Lieder Winterreise Posted on March 2, 2021 All the way from the resonant arpeggios of Gute Nacht to the haunting, wistful A...
My third granddaughter (GD3), aged 9 and an avid reader, recently decided and declared that the books she likes best are about...
Rumer Godden’s powerful, unsentimental 1955 novel is about children. But, however it might have been marketed, it doesn’t feel like a children’s...
I’ve known about the prison reform work of Elizabeth Fry since I was about 9 – thanks to The Girl, a sister...
Biographies written in the nineteenth century tended to be hagiographic or, at least, selective in what they told the reader. Think of...
Last summer I caught up with two former teaching colleagues over a congenial lunch when we were being encouraged to “Eat out...
When the teenaged me first read Tess of the D’Urbervilles she emerged from it fizzing with fury. She wanted to yank hypocritical,...