In Little Man What Now, we read about life for ordinary people in Germany in the early 1930s. Unemployment has reached frightening levels and inflation is rapidly reducing the value of wages and savings. Berlin is a city in which wages are low and employees have to compete with their colleagues to keep their jobs, [...]
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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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As a reader who enjoys reading books in translation, I was pleased to discover One World Classics whose aim is “to expand the literary canon in the English-speaking world through a series of mainstream and lesser-known classics, often by commissioning new translations”. I have sampled just one of their books, The King’s Bride, by the [...] It has been shown through psychological and historical research that large numbers of people are capable of acting with brutality and callousness towards other human beings. Equally, a smaller number of people are able to hold to humanitarian values at whatever cost to themselves. In looking at Nazi Germany, it is tempting to say that [...] I’ve found reading Thomas Mann a bit of a challenge. Dr Faustus and Magic Mountain were uniquely engaging, but also tend to have long passages when Mann goes off into his “essay mode”, with lengthy philosophical discussions on areas which seem rather arcane these days. Also of course, the books were immensely long, and with [...] Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl is the first novel I have read from independent publishers CB Editions, and I think I can understand what the Guardian means in saying that this publisher specialises in “works which might otherwise fall through the cracks between the big publishers”. The British publishing scene is so dominated [...] I’ve read rather mixed reviews of A Game Of Cards, (also known as The Card Game) but being a fan of German novels (and also of anything published by Pushkin Press) decided to try it for myself – and was very pleased that I did so. It is not easy to find much about the [...] A Paragon of Virtue is the first novel by Christian Von Ditfurth to be translated into English and I find myself looking longingly at the list of his novels in German wondering how long we will have to wait before reading more about his convincing historian/investigator Josef Stachelmann. A Paragon of Virtue is an intelligently [...] Robert Walser wrote The Assistant in 1908,soon after attending a course in becoming a servant, and while occasionally working as a secretary in Berlin. The book is about a young man, Joseph Marti, who secures a position as live-in personal assistant to an inventor and entrepeneur, Carl Tobler, who lives with his wife and four [...] I read The Shoe Tester of Frankfurt while relaxing in a snow-bound hotel in Northern France. We had gone for a short walking holiday, but unexpectedly woke on the first morning to find six inches of snow, limiting our time there to strolls around the surrounding small towns, and sitting in warm bars and cafés [...] |
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