Search Results

“... and the SFRS investigation into the second fire ‘fascinating … worthy of Agatha Christie or Ian Rankin’, is grating. It would have been better not to have mentioned the failure of the fire alarm to sound than to describe this fact as merely ‘curious’. Her tone, like that of the GSA as a whole, is defensive. ‘Sprinklers are not legally required ...”

“... hustling their product up and down (but mainly down) the country. One of the several ways in which Ian Hamilton’s Fifty Poems looks deeply unfashionable is that for Hamilton 50 poems means not a selection of work written in the last few years but almost the entire canon of a quarter-century: the 33 poems in A Visit, reshuffled, occasionally tinkered ...”

“... A kiss, it seems. England has won a Test Match and Emburey is conveying his congratulations to Ian Botham. It is front-page news for the Guardian but back-page for the Daily Express. The popular papers have a problem. Myra Hindley and the Moors Murders is a rich story on which to lead, as full of purple prose today as it was twenty years ago. It should be ...”

“... strangers. Thévoz speculates that the impossibly suave heroics of James Bond were the product of Ian Fleming’s boredom at Boodle’s during the Second World War, while he was serving as a desk-bound intelligence officer. Club bores typically occupied themselves by complaining about the vulgarity of recently admitted members. The dislike of all and any ...”

“... belief contribute directly or by opposition to the subject-matter of most of these books. Derick Thomson’s Companion is a response to intensifying interest in Highland culture. It is handsomely illustrated on a wide range of themes, but there is a thoroughness in its approach which makes it more than a tourist souvenir. There are two pages, for ...”

“... Captain Haddock with his wild torrents of expletives, the Tweedledum and Tweedledee detectives Thomson and Thompson and above all the locales (Caribbean piracy, the pyramids, Aztec human sacrifice, Andean sun worship) gripped me, made me laugh and gasp and keep reading. When I’ve worried that my colonial background and the adventure yarns of the empire ...”