Review by Sylvia D: Philip Gibbs’ The Amazing Summer (1941) is a good example of his journalistic novel-writing, set as it is against a backdrop of the hot and sunny summer of 1940, the Battle of Britain and the early months of the Blitz. It has resonances with Elizabeth Goudge’s The Castle on the Hill … Continue reading
Posted in January 2018 …
Second review of Joy and Josephine by Monica Dickens (1948)
Book Review by Jane V. The book opens with a kind of prologue. An Irish girl puts her crucifix in the folds of a newborn baby’s blanket and leaves the child in a church porch. Chapter One opens on a train travelling to the West Country soon after WW1. Seated in the carriage are three … Continue reading
The Reckless Lady by Philip Gibbs (Published October 1924 by Hutchinson and Co)
Book Review by Kath R. Philip Gibbs’ Wikipedia entry details his career as a war correspondent during the First World War and his reluctance to censor his reporting of the war. He agreed to the censorship, but after the war wrote The Realities of War. It appears that he was a prolific writer about the … Continue reading
The Winding Lane (1931) by Philip Gibbs
Book Review by George S: Philip Gibbs’s books have been described as ‘newsreel novels’. Typically they take a topic from the headlines and build a story round it. Often this was done at high speed – one of the best, Young Anarchy, about the General Strike, appeared in September, 1926, just a few months after … Continue reading
Love on the Dole by Walter Greenwood (1933)
Book review by Chris Hopkins. Having now posted blogs about most of Walter Greenwood’s fiction, I realise that these pretty much all refer back to his first novel, Love on the Dole (1933), so for the sake of completeness and to help the blog reader, I ought to add a blog for that first novel. … Continue reading
Of Love and Hunger (1942) by Julian Maclaren-Ross
This 1942 novel by J. Maclaren-Ross draws extensively on the author’s experience as a vacuum-cleaner salesman before the war. It is the story of Fanshawe, a man living a precarious debt-ridden life, just about surviving by doing a job he despises.
The Greater Trumps (1932) by Charles Williams. In memory of Thecla – Reading Group member 2012 to 2016.
Book Review by Chris Hopkins. I remember reading Charles Williams’ novel The Place of the Lion (1931) at school in the 1970s, at the suggestion of my friend Robert Jones (now sadly lost touch with, but who was definitely an intellectual aged eleven onwards). He said that it was a very weird novel and that … Continue reading
Reading 1900-1950 