Category: Literature

Victoria Summerley (writer) and Hugo Rittson Thomas (photographer) had an original idea in 2015. They would write a coffee table book about gardens in Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. The outcome was Secret Gardens of the Cotswolds and it was successful enough for them to venture a sequel this month.

Yesterday I inadvertently omitted another novelist born in 1881. But perhaps it’s impossible to omit something inadvertently of which you are ignorant at the time? My host at lunch this week said that he has been an admirer of the Austrian writer, Stefan Zweig, for many years. I had never heard of him and had… Continue reading Stefan Zweig

I expected twelve volumes of James Lees-Milne’s diaries to last me through the winter but like a case of wine they were consumed more quickly than anticipated. I finished them with considerable sadness one morning last week.

“It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than… Continue reading Best Books

“In my father’s house are many mansions” (John 14:2). I stay in a house with many bedrooms and in every one is a copy of Rathcormick: a Childhood Recalled (2001) by Homan Potterton.