In Bomber County Daniel Swift describes how he started to research the life of his grandfather (also Daniel Swift) who was lost at sea when his the Lancaster bomber he was flying was shot down over Holland. His researches, which included visits to military graves and other memorable sites in western Europe, led him to [...]
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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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We have just come back from The Black Forest, having driven across France from Dieppe to Strasbourg and then into Germany, staying for a week in a very comfortable rented house in Titisee-Neustadt – a place I would recommend to anyone who appreciates wonderful scenery and all the facilities of a lakeside resort. Before I [...] 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 [...] I love the cover of Fordlandia. It shows an idealised American suburb with mothers and children walking down a street of bungalows, complete with white picket fences bordering the gardens, and newly-planted apple trees. However, the backdrop is undeniably the tall trees of the South American jungle, for this illustration shows Fordlandia, Henry Ford’s attempt [...] Most readers in Britain are so well-supplied by books in their own language that they rarely venture into reading books in translation and therefore miss out on the best literature of other European nations. About a third of titles reviewed on A Common Reader are European books in translation and I am pleased to add [...] Like many people this years I’ve been thinking back twenty years to 1989 (see the Wikipedia entry for this momentous year), when the Iron Curtain collapsed and we saw the end of totalitarian rule in Europe. I well remember watching television news as East Germans flocked in their thousands through the Brandenburg Gate into West [...] I find that some of the most interesting history books are those which focus on a neglected aspect of a person or event and Conspirator, Lenin in Exile, provides a fascinating and very readable portrait of Lenin and his long-suffering wife Nadya during a period of their lives which few bother to study. Helen Rappaport’s [...] Twenty years ago I sat in front of my television watching crowds stream through the Brandenburg Gate as the East German border guards finally gave up the job of trying to prevent people crossing from one side of the Berlin Wall to the other. Anyone with a sense of history could not help but share [...] There was so much “history” in the 20th century that it is easy to forget highly significant but more local events which have been lost among the big picture issues of world wars, evil dictatorships and million-strong massacres. The destruction of Smyrna (now modern-day Izmir) in 1922 is one such, and Giles Milton has done [...] This book, Rosemary Bailey’s Love and War in the Pyrenees, is a rare treat: a moving and well-written history book/travelogue, from a writer with a considerable personal knowledge of the area she writes about and an intimate acquaintance with the people who live there. Although my knowledge of these events was scanty to say the [...] |
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