Reviews - Alan Bennett: Writing Home and Untold Stories

Alan Bennett
Writing Home (4*)
Untold Stories (4*)

Writing Home is a miscellaneous collection of autobiography, memoir, diaries, book reviews, prefaces to published plays etc., mainly from the nineteen-seventies and -eighties. It includes the original, enjoyable account of the recently filmed 'The Lady in the Van', hilarious memories of Russell Harty and diary extracts from periods during filming. (June 2016)

Untold Stories is similar. It begins with a revealing and fascinating memoir of growing up in Leeds during the nineteen thirties and forties, followed by diary extracts from 1996-2004. The last third is a collection of pieces about the theatre, broadcast media, art and architecture, and three more recent experiences, including his treatment for cancer. Both books interest and entertain throughout. (November 2016)



Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Reviews - Owen Jones: The Establishment and Chavs

Owen Jones 
The Establishment And how they get away with it (4*)
Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class (4*)

The Establishment explains how the powerful are able to ignore the electorate and manipulate things for their own benefit. You'll never watch the news in the same way again. Essential for anyone pissed off with how the wealth is being fracked out of society leaving only the shafted bedrock behind. It leaves little hope so long as things continue as they are. (February 2016)

Chavs is Jones's earlier book. If you only suspect that successive governments have gravely failed to look after the ordinary population as they should, this will confirm it. As someone from an ordinary background who prospered despite a false career start, I doubt I would be able to do the same again now that things are so stacked against those without the advantages of wealth and class. Even truer for Alan Johnson, as reviewed previously. (September 2016)

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - Bill Bryson: One Summer and The Road to Little Dribbling

Bill Bryson
One Summer: America 1927 (4*)
The Road to Little Dribbling (4*)

One Summer is an account of a summer when rather a lot happened, much of historical significance. You have to admire Bill Bryson for organising so much material in such a readable and entertaining way, but as an English reader I might have liked less about baseball. As noted previously, it is interesting to compare Bill Bryson with Gervase Phinn. (May 2015)

The Road to Little Dribbling is a follow up to Notes From a Small Island published twenty years earlier, both based on travels around his "adopted country" of Britain. He has the ability to rant about all kinds of ridiculous and scandalous things in the most amusing way while revealing things about your own country you never knew, even about places you thought you did know. (August 2016)



Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Review - Gervaise Phinn: Road to the Dales

Gervase Phinn
Road to the Dales (4*)

Gervaise Phinn’s entertaining books about life as a Yorkshire teacher and schools' inspector are best sellers. Here he no less amusingly remembers his early life in Rotherham. Some chapters about his relatives drag a bit, but the tales of his childhood in the nineteen-fifties have countless laugh-out loud moments and vivid contemporary memories.

It is edifying to see how someone so accomplished handles this kind of material, and interesting to compare Gervase Phinn with Bill Bryson. Both are among Amazon's best selling authors, but apart from the difference that one writes mainly memoir and the other travel, both produce a similar kind of light humour. For me Phinn is much the better writer. He really is a fantastic story teller and describer of people, with a truly original gift for language - e.g. he describes taking a girl to see a scary film, throughout which she clung to him "like a Whitby limpet." The trouble is that if you Google it you'll find he has used the same expression in other tales too, which is self-plagiarism. Still, it gave me the idea for the cricket ball which "whistled like the wings of a Pontefract pigeon." Is that plagiarism?

Phinn sells fewer books than Bryson, probably because Bryson paints on a broad canvas whereas Phinn is much more parochial.



Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - Ian Jack: The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain and Paul Kingsnorth: Real England

Ian Jack
The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain: Writings 1989-2009 (5*)
Paul Kingsnorth 
Real England: the Battle Against the Bland (4*)

Both these books observe how Britain has changed during the last half century.

Paul Kingsnorth is concerned about the march of corporate consumerism and how it replaces all things distinctive and different with things uniform and meaningless, be they shops, town centres, pubs, canals, farms, orchards, the countryside or communities. He rejects accusations of nostalgia or being anti-progress. His concerns are about the replacement of the good with the not-so-good, and the loss of value and our identities.

Ian Jack is one of the writers I would like to be. His collection of long and short pieces also compares then with now, evocatively merging fact with personal experience. I was especially moved by his analyses of the ideological changes that led to the Hatfield rail crash, the changes to Dunfermline high street, and the demise of the cinemas in Farnworth, Lancashire. There seems little risk of Ian Jack losing his identity - he maintains it through his writing - but in the end he exemplifies Kingsnorth's concerns.


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - David Kynaston's and Dominic Sandbrook's histories of post-war Britain

David Kynaston
Austerity Britain, 1945-1951 (3*)
Family Britain 1951-1957 (3*)
Modernity Britain (Book 2) 1959-1962 (3*)

Dominic Sandbrook
Never had it so good : A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (4*)
White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties 1964-1970 (4*)
State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain 1970–1974 (4*)
Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979 (4*)

I have been reading gradually through the enormous Kynaston and Sandbrook tomes - not to be undertaken lightly as one of them recently took me most of the summer. They are worth the effort though. Having lived through much of their periods, they bring back lots of associations. I find Sandbrook for the most part more entertaining, but Kynaston is arguably the more impressive, especially in the rich tapestries he weaves from disparate events all occurring on the same day. (read 2012-2015) 


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Review - Colin Thubron: In Siberia

Colin Thubron
In Siberia (4*)

The landscape descriptions, second to none, immerse you in this vast frozen, mysterious region (the statistics are beyond belief) and catch the imagination like an alien world. Some parts must be like Britain before civilisation, just after the ice age. Others sound like life after civilisation ends. This account of the author's encounters and places he visits is moving and fascinating, the ways of life often very different, but rather him than me. Perhaps I'm just not a traveller at heart.




Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Review - Roy Hattersley: Goodbye to Yorkshire

Roy Hattersley
Goodbye to Yorkshire (4*)

Many will remember Roy Hattersley as a senior Labour politician from Sheffield. His intelligence and erudition radiate from every metaphor, contrast and description in this collection of twenty two essays about the fading concept of Yorkshire-ness, first published in 1976. I enjoyed some of them immensely, especially the more autobiographical pieces, but others seem in places rather forced or even maudlin. Worthwhile if you make the effort.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Review - Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Thomas Hardy
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (4*)

We recently went to see the new 'Far From The Madding Crowd' film (as good as the 1967 version with Julie Christie but why make it again?) and as 'Tess' is a free Kindle download I decided to immerse myself again in Hardy's rural nineteenth century England, one I hadn't read before. In 'Madding' whenever anything begins to go wrong it turns out right, but in 'Tess' it's the other way round - everything that starts to go right goes wrong. Outstanding novel but a sad tale.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - Alan Johnson: This Boy and Mr. Postman

Alan Johnson
This Boy: A Memoir of Childhood (4*)
Please, Mr. Postman: a Memoir (3*)

Alan Johnson is well-known as a politician but his memoirs are more social than political, and rather good. I wish we could be confident that someone from his ordinary and actually rather deprived background could still achieve similar things today.


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - L. P. Hartley: The Go-Between and Graeme Simsion: The Rosie Project

L. P. Hartley
The Go-Between (5*)
Graeme Simsion
The Rosie Project (4*)

Leslie Poles Hartley's The Go-Between is the novel that begins with the well known line "The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."

One might imagine that I identify with the teller of the story, a man in his mid-sixties who remembers a particular summer in his childhood that had a profoundly damaging effect upon the rest of his life, but thankfully I don't consider myself to be very much like him at all. It's an impressive book though.

Actually I identify far more closely with the protagonist of Graeme Simsion's highly amusing book, The Rosie Project, because I am pretty sure I fall somewhere well along the same psychological spectrum, as you might guess from my obsession with objects and details.

Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.

Previous book reviews 

Reviews - Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island and Andrew Motion: Silver

Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island (4*)
Andrew Motion
Silver: Return to Treasure Island (3*)

I read these while putting together the 'Talk Like A Pirate' post.

Despite being published in the 1880s, Treasure Island remains an exciting read.

Andrew Motion has written a worthy sequel - the first half is impressive with the kind of suspense, imagery and mastery of language you would expect from a Poet Laureate, but the story gets a bit tangled up in itself during the second half.

Key to star ratings: 5* would read over and over again, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.