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 [...]
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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 [...] 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 [...] 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 [...] This book, A Night at the Majestic, makes a very useful addition to the large number of books about Marcel Proust and his times. It is very readable, and successfully and entertainingly recreates the world of Proust. The book opens with a large dinner party at the Majestic Hotel, Paris, hosted by Sidney and Violet [...] This immensely enjoyable book, Peeling the Onion, a memoir or biography of Gunter Grass, is a fascinating account of the history and background of this great author. As a record of a boy and young man growing up in 1930s Germany it is a fascinating historical record, particularly the sections on Grass’s war service in [...] The middle of the last century was evidently not a good time to be a child, such is the rash of books describing what one national bookseller now categorises on its shelves as “Tragic Childhoods”. I have read a few of these, the determining factor in my choice being not the degree of tragedy displayed [...] |
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