Burger’s Daughter by Nadine Gordimer

This novel is the story of a young woman, Rosa Burger, reflecting on her relationship with her father, a member of the South African Communist Party described as ‘South Africa’s Lenin’ who died incarcerated for his anti-apartheid activism. South African Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer was active in the anti-apartheid movement, becoming close to Nelson Mandela’s defence attorney…

ODE TO THE MAN WITH THE FLOOR TO CEILING BOOKCASE

SOMETIMES AT HOME WHEN I’M FEELING LOW NO DANNY DYER ON THE TV, NOWHERE TO GO I BRING UP GOOGLE IMAGE, FLOOR TO CEILING BOOK CASE IS WHAT I TYPE IN DRINKING AND THINKING OF HOW MY LIFE COULD HAVE BEEN   THEN YOUR SMUG MUSH POPS UP ALL IN MY FACE LEANING CASUALLY AGAINST…

The Memory Palace- A Book of Lost Interiors by Edward Hollis

This book is a bit like Time Team meets Changing Rooms, if you can imagine such a beast. Taking his grandmother’s house as a starting point, the author recreates various lost interiors from history, from Roman palaces to the toilets at the ill-fated Crystal Palace. The historical ‘re-imagining’ is wonderful and I was fascinated by…

The Usborne Children’s Encyclopedia by Jane Elliot and Colin King (1986)

I don’t know where to start with this book. I have loved it since I was 7 or 8.  That’s over 25 years of hot book loving. This sh*t is real. I actually own three copies – two that were purchased for me as a nipper (I can remember the moment I was given another copy…

The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose

You may think this is the most pretentiously-titled book that I own but I’ve got plenty more where this bad boy came from. This 500-page whopper primarily charts the rise and fall of the great working class autodidact tradition – what the British working classes did to educate themselves in the absence of a state-sponsored…