“His right knee was a bloody pulp. His ankle was shattered. The bottom half of his leg hung at an unnatural angle. Bone and sinew and muscle glistened in the light of the still-roaring flmes.” Why, yes, ‘Slaughter’ IS her real name. Pretty Girls tells the tale of three sisters: Julia, Lydia and Claire Carrol. Julia has disappeared years ago and has never been heard from again. Her disappearance has caused a rift in the family: parents Sam and Helen have divorced, and where Helen […]
Oh My Ghosh
“Oh! just, subtle, and mighty opium! that to the hearts of poor and rich alike, for the wounds that will never heal, and for ‘the pangs that tempt the spirit to rebel,’ bringest an assuaging balm; eloquent opium! that with thy potent rhetoric stealest away the purposes of wrath; and to the guilty man, for one night givest back the hopes of his youth, and hands washed pure of blood….” — Thomas de Quincey In 1839 the Chinese government, alarmed by the increasing number […]
The Best Book You’ve Never Heard Of
Have you ever felt the urge to let your inner hipster come out? I’ve got just the thing for you: a book nobody has ever heard of. And it’s actually good. You can sit at your local non-Starbucks organic overpriced coffee joint, fancy hardback in front of you, and gaze sternly over your thick-rimmed glasses and your cashmere scarf and, your voice full of disdain, inquire of other hipsters: What do you mean, you’ve never read Willem Frederik Hermans? What is wrong with you? This […]
Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of London
These, as Maria von Trapp would have it, are a few of my favourite things: 1. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere; 2. The city of London; and 3. chocolate. Rivers of London just about covers two of these three, so it’s a good start. The book is about PC Peter Grant, newbie in the Metropolitan Police. Peter is basically an intelligent underachiever facing a long career in paper-pushing from behind a dreary desk in an uninteresting outer borough while the colleague-slash-friend that he fancies sees him as […]
See, this is why we can’t have nice things
“Without knowing it, he had constructed a gigantic vertical zoo, its hundreds of cages stacked above each other. All the events of the past few months made sense if one realised that these brilliant and exotic creatures had learned to open the doors.” Not far from where I live, across the border into Belgium, you’ll find yourself in the Ardennes, a collection of rugged forests, ragged mountains and quaint, picturesque towns where it’s perfectly okay to have a beer at 11 AM and where French […]
A Million Deaths is a Statistic
I’m a bit of an accidental war tourist. I never plan these things but somehow, I’ve been to the trenches of Verdun, the reconstructed city centre of Ypres, the Passchendaele memorial museum, the D-day beaches and their immense cemeteries, the former sites of concentration camps, the battlegrounds of Malmedy. It seems important somehow, especially for someone my age, several generations comfortably removed from any world war. Yet the sheer scale of these immense cemeteries and their endless lines of identical headstones alone makes it paradoxically […]
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