When she was a teenager Misti Traya travelled from America to spend three months working in an orphanage in Romania. This is what happened to her... When I was 15, I went on a mission of mercy. My mission was this: Dear God, please let the Ivies have mercy on my ... Read More...
General
Steerforth recalls, with pathos and bemusement, his brief attempt at being an entrepreneurial philatelist... When I was 11-years-old I became friends with a boy whose parents were divorced. I'd never met anyone whose mother and father lived apart and I remember feeling quite jealous that he had two homes. In my ... Read More...
The Travellers' Library series of books published by Jonathan Cape gives a fascinating glimpse of literary fashion in the 1920s, including names that have endured, others that have been completely forgotten, and still others currently halfway to obscurity... My edition of James Joyce's Dubliners was published in Jonathan Cape's series The Travellers' Library ... Read More...
Virtually everything you will hear in the forthcoming General Election campaign from all Parties will be frothy twaddle, bearing no relation to facts and designed merely to appeal to tribal prejudices. Here are some of the most frequently-recurring pieces of tripe and the truths behind them... 1) Conservativeballs: Osborne’s ‘austerity’ has meant ... Read More...
What's the real minority specialist-interest genre of books - the one that bookshops just can't shift? It's literary fiction, says Steerforth... As a bookseller, one of the first lessons I learned when running the fiction section was that the sales of the first volume of Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps ... Read More...
What are the wildest stars of rock and roll like when they're at home with their mum and dad? That was the premise behind these images captured by John Olson for LIFE magazine in 1971. Pictured above is Eric Clapton with his mother at the house in Surrey where he grew up. In 1971 at ... Read More...
'Jays are not nearly so nice as they look' - that's how people used to write nature books. Ornithology-enthusiast Nige makes a Proustian discovery in a charity shop... There it was, in the window of the local hospice shop: British Birds and Their Nests - by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald, with colour illustrations by Allen W. ... Read More...
Douglas on Henry James, cardiac arrests and coping with one's health... I had to forgive myself last year for not finishing a Henry James novel. I’d read maybe a dozen of his shorter fictions, all of them with relish. The Middle Years, The Pupil, The Liar, The Real Thing, and The Altar of the Dead were ... Read More...
Bookseller Steerforth recalls his battles with the bibliokepts - both oddball amateurs and professional book thieves... In his memoirs, Jeffrey Bernard used to talk about the distinct social groups that frequented his regular pub, the notorious Coach and Horses in Soho. Alongside the actors, stage hands, dancers and drunks, there were ... Read More...
More nostalgia today, as Nige makes a pitch for the next building toy-based Hollywood blockbuster... Following the success of The Lego Movie, the time is surely ripe for Bayko: The Movie. For those of us who spent a formative portion of our early years assembling red, white and green 30s-style houses from bits ... Read More...
