Panoramas of Lost London, this week’s Random Book of the Week, is a collection of photographs originally commissioned by London Country Council to capture buildings, streets and neighbourhoods before they were lost forever through redevelopment. The images range from the earliest days of photography up until the end of the Second World War. Philip Davies…
Month: November 2016
Her Brilliant Career -Ten Extraordinary Women of the Fifties, by Rachel Cooke
Her Brilliant Career is a collection of ten mini-biographies of women whose extraordinary professional achievements go some way towards debunking our understanding of 1950s women as obedient housewives happily in exile from the workplace. Cooke’s examples are drawn from vocations as wide-ranging as architecture, cookery, archaeology, gardening, film production, journalism, theatre and rally car driving,…
The Englishman At War, edited by John Freeman (1941)
I must start this week’s Random Book of the Week with a confession: a long line of theft led to me possessing this book. I ‘borrowed’ it from my parental abode a few years ago, my dad had himself ‘borrowed’ it from his own parental abode many years before that, and we think my Granddad…
The Jerilderie Letter by Ned Kelly (1878) (edited and introduced by Alex McDermott)
The Jerilderie Letter is Ned Kelly’s attempt to justify his actions as Australia’s then most wanted, and these days most legendary, criminal. Dictated to fellow Kelly Gang member Joe Byrne, it is named after the town of Jerilderie, New South Wales, where the Kelly Gang carried out an armed robbery and where Ned tried to…
The (Second, not that I’m bragging) Liebster Award
I was nominated for a second Liebster Award by Midnight Ranter who, as well as writing a super blog full of interesting book reviews and her own beautiful writings, is extremely patient, given that I was very kindly nominated for this back in June. Please, do not take this as a lack of gratitude! I am…
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