2020-06-18 07:52
Schubert and his work – Herbert Francis Peyser turns out to be a short and simple account of Schubert’s life. Given when the book was written, there is no surprise that the conce… Read More
Blog Directory > Books & Literature Blogs > Contemporary Blogs > Philip Spires commonplace book contemporary Blog >
Philip Spires Commonplace Book Blog
philipspires.blogspot.com
Tags:
english
england
sri lanka
san suu kyi
anne tyleracircs
museum
grass
herbert francis peyser
anne
jealous god
I have kept a commonplace book for many years. In recent times, it has become just a workbook to support my research on Philippine education. But now, via a blog, I want to recreate what it used to be, a place where scraps of impressions are filed for future reflection. It's not a diary, it's just a mental scrapbook, concentrating on book reviews, concert reviews, visual arts and some occasional pieces on travel.
2020-06-18 07:51
Edward B Taylor’s Anahuac, Mexico and the Mexicans, proved to be a thoroughly surprising read. Not only was this written in the late 1860s, but it was composed and expressed in apparen… Read More
2020-06-18 07:48
Kate Atkinson´s read for the first time in the form of Behind The Scenes At The Museum. It’s a magical realist style, quite superbly virtuosic and utterly vivid in everything it… Read More
2020-06-18 07:44
The Jealous God by John Braine was published in 1964, just a short while after his blockbusting Room At The Top and its sequel, Life At the Top. Braine was one of the original ‘a… Read More
2020-06-17 14:47
Urala is a village near Galle in the south of Sri Lanka. Its existence might be fiction, but equally it might have been, or be reality. Everyday life there, just like anywhere, is a mixture… Read More
2020-06-17 14:47
Sweet Tooth by Ian McEwan is a subtle, moving book about espionage. There is a touch of oxymoron about that, somewhere. No-one is killed. There are no guns. No-one is shot, poisoned, dismemb… Read More
2020-06-17 14:45
Melvyn Bragg subtitles The Adventure Of English with the intriguing phrase “The Biography of a Language”. He thus implies that the language, specifically English, has a life of i… Read More
2020-06-17 14:42
“How pointless real life was! In novels, events led up to something,” thought Ezra, as he scanned his mother’s diary. “What would you say is your patients&rsquo&hell…Read More
History, Myth. Fact, Fiction – Several Points Of View: A Review Of Innocent Traitor By Alison Weir
2020-06-17 14:40
Reviews often begin by warning of spoilers. Neither excuse nor warning here for saying that Alison Weir’s book, Innocent Traitor, recounts the public and political life of Lady Jane Gr… Read More
2020-06-17 14:39
Justin Wintle’s Perfect Hostage – A Life of Aung San Suu Kyi is not a book with a particularly perfect title. It sounds like it will be a simply a biography, and perhaps a rather… Read More
2020-06-17 14:38
A review of Capital In The Twenty First Century would itself have to be a book, so let this be a mere reflection on some of Thomas Picketty’s wealth of material. And there is no better… Read More
2016-02-03 11:09
Iris Murdoch’s the sea, the sea is not obviously a ghost story. There are no clichés like clattering chains or bangs in the night, nor even translucent eminences passing through… Read More
2016-02-02 13:37
Proverbially, the horse’s mouth is always the best source. Academically, primary material is usually the most reliable. So now what is to be found by revisiting a major work of the pas… Read More
2016-02-01 16:23
It’s not often that a book review of any kind threatens to be longer than the original work. Any review of Margaret Atwood’s Good Bones, however, risks such ignominy. Good Bones… Read More
2016-02-01 16:22
J. R. Hale’s Machiavelli And Renaissance Italy was originally part of a Teach Yourself History series, published by Penguin Books in the 1960s. A twenty-first century reader will first… Read More
2016-01-29 14:33
History changes when it is re-read. The casual reader, as opposed to the historian, always reads history with one eye on the present: there is always comparison at work whenever we reflect o… Read More
2016-01-28 13:43
Chapter One – The PlotWell, gentlefolk, at least that’s out of the way!Chapter Two – The CharactersYoung Tristram Shandy, so unfortunately misnamed, is so young he’s… Read More
2016-01-28 13:40
A Pair Of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy was first published in the eighteen seventies. It is a romance of the Romantic era. A cursory glance from today’s perspective might suggest that the… Read More
2016-01-26 16:51
Perhaps not many people regularly read non-fiction, especially when it might appear to emanate from academic sources. Thus a title such as Development As Freedom by Amartya Sen, if encounter… Read More
2016-01-16 10:00
Henry James, great though his name remains, can be something of an acquired taste for some readers. Lest it be said, in terms a lay person unacquainted with this writer’s indeed impres… Read More
2016-01-16 09:59
Lawrence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey is very much the follow-up after the success of Tristram Shandy. The author does not try to re-create the near anarchy of the earlier work. Indeed… Read More
2016-01-15 09:33
If Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell had been a piece of music, rather than a novel, it would probably have taken the form of a gigantic Bartok arch. Its apparently simple, but rather disconcert… Read More
2016-01-15 09:32
Reading takes you there, sometimes even to places where you, the reader, may not want to go. Someone else, someone we have never met, did this, thought that, recorded it and related it. The… Read More
2016-01-14 17:19
Why might anyone want to read a book describing contemporary politics and international relations some thirty years after its publication? Surely a more recent history or overview would be p… Read More
2014-02-20 14:31
To reveal that “he dies in the end” gives no more away about the plot of Stoner by John Williams than the revelation that “he’s born in the beginning”. Both phr… Read More
2014-02-20 14:27
In The Deposition of Father McGreevy Brian O’Doherty transports us into a world and culture that will be quite alien to most readers. By the book’s end, we may even be convinced… Read More
2014-01-17 10:28
Woman Of The Inner Sea by Thomas Keneally is a thoroughly satisfying novel. Via its pages, the reader shares its characters’ experience, inhabits their landscape and almost participate… Read More
2014-01-16 14:46
In a very famous context, D. H. Lawrence is himself famous for using a word beginning with ‘f’, a word that is infamous rather than famous. Mentioning this word and then repeatin… Read More
2014-01-15 13:56
A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques of important artists, but als… Read More
2014-01-14 17:19
In A Change Of Climate Hilary Mantel presents what is essentially a family saga, but in settings that add extra dimensions to the expected dilemmas. The family in question is the Eldreds. Ra… Read More
2014-01-13 09:44
Brian O’Nolan was an Irish civil servant who wrote fiction and journalism under pseudonyms. Flann O’Brien was the name O’Nolan used on his fiction and it is the name of the… Read More
2014-01-12 09:30
In some ways The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes is far too short. Tony Webster, the novel’s central character and first person narrator, lives most of his adult life in relative a… Read More
2014-01-12 09:29
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Prodigal Summer is eventually both surprising and deceptive. It is surprising because of the twists and turns of the lives of its characters, all of whom bec… Read More
2014-01-11 14:07
In Blackberry Wine Joanne Harris presents a novel about Jay, who is a writer. Some years ago Jay created a character in Three Summers With Jackapple Joe, the novel that made his name. But si… Read More
2014-01-10 14:38
In Egypt, in Alexandria to be precise, if precision be our goal, Lawrence Durrell once attempted to fuse fiction into a relativistic universe that, poorly interpreted, might blur perception… Read More
2014-01-10 14:35
Writers of fiction are often accused of forcing their characters to jump through ever more fanciful hoops to satisfy a presumed need for engaging plot. The fact that reality often amplifies… Read More
2014-01-10 14:31
The Room Beyond by Stephanie Elmas is a ghost story. When Serena arrives in Marguerite Avenue to apply for a job, she is intrigued to find as she walks the street that next door to number 32… Read More
2014-01-09 15:06
Pure by Andrew Miller promises rich, illuminating and even exciting experience, intrigue mixed with history, science blended with romance. Set in the year 1785, the novel inhabits pre-revolu… Read More
2014-01-09 15:04
Trespass by Rose Tremain is a novel that repeatedly meditates on and around the theme it takes from its title. The author’s glittering but deceptively simple prose dances through the m… Read More
2014-01-09 14:56
As novels go, After Many A Summer by Aldous Huxley presents something of the unexpected. It’s a strange, rather perplexing experience. By the end, most readers will feel that wha… Read More
2012-11-24 06:58
A Text-Book on the History of Painting by John Charles Van Dyke was published a century ago. Today it offers the modern reader not only potted, period critiques of important artists, but als… Read More
Subscribe to Philip Spires Commonplace Book
Get updates delivered right to your inbox!