Nanny Iris and her books

On her last visit to my house before she died in February aged 95, my Nanny Iris casually threw into conversation how her father had taught her to read before she started school. Nan had asked how her great grandson Rufus was faring in Reception, and we were marvelling at that wonderous sorcery of early…

My sure solace: books, depression and me (#properjolly)

Last year, over the summer, I experienced a period of major depression. It hit me like a juggernaut, comprising of a familiar crash in confidence but also, less familiarly and far more worryingly, a crash in identity. I had no idea who I was anymore, and struggled to visualise myself as a meaningful human being,…

Celebrating International Women’s Day 2018!

Following our posts to celebrate International Women’s Day in 2016 and 2017, we’re back again for #IWD2018 with a bounty of books to explore woman’s place in the world. Set in Rosenau, an isolated alpine farming community in Austria, Homestead by Rosina Lippi begins with a mysterious love letter – its intended recipient potentially being…

The Road Not Taken: How Britain Narrowly Missed a Revolution 1381-1926 by Frank McLynn

Frank McLynn takes us on a journey through British history to explain why, despite our collective moaning about how it screws us over,  we’ve never managed to turn ‘The Establishment’ out on its arse. McLynn looks in-depth at various almost-revolutionary occasions – the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the Jack Cade rising of 1450, the Pilgrimage…

Panoramas of Lost London – Work, Wealth, Poverty and Change, 1870 -1945 by Philip Davies (Foreword by Dan Cruickshank)

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…

The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson (1973)

Another great book from the Persephone canon,  about the destruction of Bath’s unique architecture in the swinging 60s and 70s. I never thought I could be so moved by a book about architecture and its ruination but it proves that Persephone is full of literary surprises – and that I am a soppy git. The Sack of Bath was…

Frances Kray The Tragic Bride: The True Story of Reggie Kray’s First Wife by Jacky Hyams

Everything about the cover of this tale of gangster bridal woe screamed ‘THIS REALLY IS NOT YOUR SORT OF BOOK, BRONTE’: the Woman’s-Own-headline-esque title, the rose-between-two-Kray-shaped-thorns picture of its heroine, and the melodramatic front blurb trumpeting ‘the first full account of the beautiful, innocent young woman who married Reggie Kray – and became trapped in…

No Surrender by Constance Maud

Next up in this week’s set of book recommendations to celebrate International Women’s Day (yes I’m still going!) –  some gripping fiction. No Surrender, published by the wonderful Persephone Books, is an absolute page-turner written at the height of the women’s suffrage movement in 1911. Emily Wilding Davison said that this novel ‘breathes the very spirit of our…

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…

Miss Nobody by Ethel Carnie

I wanted to read this 1913 novel as it is believed to be the first published novel written by a working class woman, and I do love a bit of sisterhood and class war. Ethel Carnie (1886 – 1962, and pictured on the book cover) worked in the Lancashire cotton mills from the age of…