British readers may remember Vitali Vitaliev from his time as Moscow correspondent on David Frost’s 1990s television programme, Saturday Night Clive, and many broadcasts on BBC Radio 4. Vitali was born in the Ukraine, eventually defecting to the West, living in Britain and Australia, and eventually returning to London where he is a successful journalist [...]
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. . . written by Tom Cunliffe, of East Sussex, England (to read more about me see my About page).
It consists of book reviews and more general articles about reading and currently receives over 10,000 unique visitors each month. So far 290 book reviews have been published. My currently-reading shelf:  This website is archived for posterity in the British Library's UK Web Archive 
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Even since reading Stefan Zweig’s remarkable description of psychological co-dependency in his novel, Beware of Pity, I’ve tried to read every thing I can get my hands on by this fine writer. In recent years, a minor publishing industry has developed around Zweig, with Pushkin Press leading the way with quite a few volumes of [...] Ever since Jerome K Jerome had such a phenomenal and long-lasting success with Three Men In A Boat, other travellers have written humorous accounts of their exploits, increasingly so in recent years. There seems to be a vast market for these books, and I enjoy reading them from time to time, usually as light relief [...] I never associate jigsaws with summer, mainly because there is just too much to do in the real world outside rather than delving ever-deeper into the intricate detail of those little cardboard shapes. Its different in winter, when afternoons become shorter, and for several days I can get absorbed in assembling the chosen picture, stopping [...] When I bought this beautifully-produced book, Corvus, A Life With Birds, I hadn’t fully realised that it would be more about living with birds than watching them. However, I soon realised that Esther Woolfson has long experience of nurturing and co-habiting with lost and abandoned birds, most of which would have been destined to an [...] This final volume, Coda, in Simon Gray’s diaries will be warmly welcomed by anyone who has followed Gray’s progress from The Smoking Diaries to The Last Cigarette, in which he documented his life in characteristic candid and confessional style. When Gray died in August 2008, Ian Jack, the then editor of Granta and a close [...] In My Father’s Country, subtitled “The Story of a German Family”, Wibke Bruhns takes us through German history from the start of the 20th century to the Second World War, as it affected her family. She begins with her grandparents and ends just after the trial and execution of her father, “HG” Klamroth for his [...] Having read Anthony Beevor’s “Berlin, The Downfall”, my eye was drawn to A Writer at War, being as it is, a significant historical source for the Russian experience of the German invasion and its aftermath. Grossman was despatched by his editors to the locations of most of the key events in the Russian war with [...] I do not usually read family sagas, but was drawn to Family Romance as I was already a fan of John Lanchester’s novels, particularly The Debt To Pleasure. I was not disappointed because this book is a wonderful read and draws the reader in to the labyrinthine history of his parents (and grandparent’s) lives. Lanchester’s [...] At a time when the only media references to Moslems seem to be negative, it is refreshing to read Unimagined, an amusing account of a Pakistani boy growing up in London and dealing with life as an immigrant. Other readers have suggested that this book bears comparison with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, but this is [...] |
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