From 1837 to 1841, John Clare, the peasant poet, was a patient in a private asylum in the Epping Forest. Clare and his wife Patty had six children and life was proving increasingly burdensome to Clare, who began to suffer bouts of severe depression, leading to alarmingly erratic behaviour and serious delusions. In The Quickening [...]
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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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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 [...] I’ve seen Icon Books Introducing series in the bookshops but it was only when confronted by a long train journey with my current novel finished that I finally dived in and bought one. I don’t think I’ve read a graphic book before and I was suprised by how much I enjoyed reading Introducing Kafka with [...] The Oxford University Press website helpfully gives a list of potential readers of their books and in the case of Death and the Author, the expectation is as follows: a. Anyone with a interest in D. H. Lawrence; b. anyone interested in exploring what it is like to have a disease for which there is [...] 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 [...] Forever Nude is the story of French painter and print-maker Pierre Bonnard’s lifelong relationship with a young farm girl, Marthe de Méligny, his muse and inspiration over many years. Bonnard encountered Marthe when she was 16 years old and attempting to cross the Boulevard Haussman. Marthe, who had just arrived in Paris from her father’s [...] It was only through reading W G Sebald’s book Vertigo that I realised that there was more to Casanova than the usual idea of a serial lover and seducer. This commonly accepted view of Casanova is even immortalised in the Merriam Webster dictionary as “Lover; esp: a man who is a promiscuous and unscrupulous lover”. [...] In Keeping Mum, Brian Thompson has written a funny and interesting memoir of his wartime childhood. His mother seems to have been an extremely difficult woman and yet Brian somehow survived the experience and is now able to write about his early life without bitterness – quite an achievement. From his early days, his father [...] This lengthy book, The Power and the Glory, is an account of the John-Paul II years, but with the rose-tinted glasses removed. David Yallop has assembled an incredible amount of material to present the behind the scenes story of what really went on in the Vatican, particularly focusing on the fall of communism, the scandals [...] |
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