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Booksrss

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Morality tales

18 June 2011
A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: The Collected Stories Margaret Drabble

Penguin Classics, pp.223, 20

Francis King celebrates Margaret Drabble’s distinguished career and vividly recalls their first meeting I first met a youthful Margaret Drabble when, already myself an established author, I was working at… Read more

Feeling pleasantly uncomfortable

4 December 2010
The Sounds of Crime Mark Billingham, Lawrence Block, Christopher Fowler, Peter James and Val McDermid

Whole Story Audio Books, pp.3 CDs, 2 hours, 45 minutes, 14.99

It is rare for stories to be specially commissioned for an audio book, but as Maxim Jakubowski, the editor of The Sounds of Crime tells us in a pre-thrill talk,… Read more

Two legs good

27 November 2010
The Lost Art of Walking Geoff Nicholson

Harbour Books (East) Ltd, pp.278, 12

In September 1954, Albert Speer decided to walk from Berlin to Heidelberg, a distance of 620 kilometres. As Hitler’s architect still had more than a decade of a prison sentence… Read more

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Laughter from the Gallery

30 October 2010
A Long Lunch: My Stories and I'm Sticking to Them Simon Hoggart

John Murray, pp.320, 20

This is an amiable book. The parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart, also the wine correspondent of this magazine, for which he drinks as selflessly as Zorba the Greek, has set out… Read more