One of Penguin’s Little Black Classics range, I picked this up for less than a quid during a recent odyssey to an amazing bookstore (I tend to make pilgrimages to book stores in the way someone else might visit cathedrals or other holy sites). I may have lost 3 hours and a decent amount of money, but I did walk out with two bulging bags of treats. The Little Black Classic range is great for this kind of shopping, enabling you to walk away with […]
“In conclusion, women are just awful, and periods prove it.”
I wouldn’t have known about Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady’s Guide to Sex, Marriage and Manners if it hadn’t been for the reviews on this site, so a BIG thank you to all of the Cannonballers whose reviews placed it firmly on my radar, leading to much cackling and interruptions of my footie-watching boyfriend with a ‘Listen to this…’. Tackling all of the daily realities of Victorian ladies – an era that we’re visiting as relatively wealthy, European women so as to ensure things stay on […]
“When something goes wrong, the first thing I always think is, it is Loki’s fault. It saves a lot of time.”
I’m already pretty familiar with the Norse gods thanks to an early obsession with different mythologies, but you don’t pass up an opportunity to read Neil Gaiman’s take on them. Especially if you happen to be in a book shop and see a copy and remember that your boyfriend never bought you a copy despite the number of colossal hints you’ve already dropped. Anyway… Norse Mythology is a short trip through the stories of the gods – I read it all in one lazy morning […]
An utter bore
Having finished my previous book at the beginning of a long train journey, and being mindful of not spending any more money (and thanking the inventor of the e-reader for letting me carry a virtual library with me everywhere I go), I went for the free and fairly short Castle Rackrent thinking that a quick classic might help the journey to speed by. But, while short, this bored the ass off me, helping make the journey feel like it was three times longer than it […]
These are proving to be addictive
The third in the delightful Peter Grant series, Whispers Under Ground sees Peter’s world expand again in more ways than one. Now joined by Lesley as his partner apprentice, he’s also got his own junior to keep an eye on in Abigail, who’s led them to a ghostly graffiti artist in a railway tunnel near her school. And when an American art student staggers out of a tunnel into an Underground system, stabbed with a piece of magical pottery, Peter pauses his search for the […]
Divorced, beheaded and died; divorced, beheaded, survived
There would appear to have been two big dangers to the health of women in the 16th century. One of them was childbirth – if you didn’t die during, it was highly likely that you would do so in the immediate aftermath, mostly thanks to puerperal fever (a uterine infection caused by, shudder, tearing and a total ignorance of hygiene on the part of Tudor midwives – and the other was marrying Henry VIII. This is the story of the six unlucky ladies to have […]