The books in Margravine Gardens are mostly in the study, the front bedroom, the kitchen and the back of the sitting room.
In the study there is fiction and biographies including autobiographies, memoirs and diaries, almost all the OS maps of the British Isles and quite a good selection of travelogues; also reference books, poetry and CDs. In the front bedroom it is a bit of a hotchpotch; often hardbacks too big for the study shelves, the Channon dairies, many books about WW II and spies; books about Ireland; natural history books, books about Sport (this is restricted to Hunting, Shooting and Fishing); books by James Lees-Milne and Patrick Leigh Fermor. There is a small section of books that contain Bellew in the title or as the principal character: Smoke Bellew, The Impossible Mrs Bellew, A Turf Mystery.
At the back of the sitting room are PG Wodehouse, Dornford Yates, Leslie Charteris, Simon Raven, Patrick O’Brian, Olivia Manning, Kyril Bonfiglioli, Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh; also an eclectic collection of DVDs. In the kitchen are books on food, cooking and wine. I particularly like dipping into The Compleat Imbiber series.
In the top bedroom are William Boyd, Arthur Conan Doyle and Tony Scotland. Boyd because his hardbacks are too big for other bookcases, Conan Doyle because I like to read a Sherlock Holmes short story in bed and Scotland because his nine books are impossible to categorise and I wanted them to be together.
I have eight of them and have written favourably about five here. So favourably that Tony has taken to sending me complimentary copies of his new books; a practice I‘d like other authors to adopt – Michael Bloch already has. (The book by Tony I have not got is Gradual: A Renaissance Chant Book, co-authored with his partner, Julian Berkeley.) The easiest way to discover Tony’s books is on his website: Shelf Lives. To read my opinion of five of them put “Tony Scotland” in the Search box, bottom left of this page.
The Empty Throne: The Quest for an Imperial Heir in the People’s Republic of China (1993) is his first book and hitherto the only one in which the author features. He hit the ground running. It is a funny travelogue with aperçus into life in China more than thirty years ago and a smattering of history all narrated with a gossamer touch. Some authors, having success in this field, stick with the genre but not Tony. Until now his subsequent books can best be described as quirky biographies. This is an excellent category to be savoured.
(To be continued)
There are fifteen female percussionists listed on Wikipedia but Honey Lantree, drummer with the Honeycombs, is omitted. This reached No 1 sixty years ago.