I live in Hoylake, on the north-western tip of the Wirral peninsula. I spend an hour or more each weekday on trains and (ideally) spend the entire journey reading.
Mona Lisa Sunflowers The Scream Even if you know nothing much about art (like me) and you hear the name Leonardo de Vinci, Van Gogh, and Munch, then I bet you’ll immediately think of the paintings just listed. If you think a bit longer and harder, of course, you might come up with some others, … More A Life of Picasso Volume 1: 1881 – 1906 by John Richardson
Six years ago I visited the Bodies Revealed exhibition when it came to Liverpool. In case you haven’t heard of it, this is an exhibition of real human bodies that have been preserved using silicone rubber, a process known as plastination. The bodies are dissected and put in dynamic poses so you get the chance … More Flights by Olga Tokarczuk (translated by Jennifer Croft)
St Andrew’s Gardens is a Grade II listed art deco building in Liverpool city centre. Now used for student accommodation, it was built in the 1930s as a council tenement block, and because of its distinctive circular shape became known locally as the “Bullring”. In the 1980s it was still in council ownership but badly … More Swing Hammer Swing! by Jeff Torrington
“A war between two people is not all that different from a war between two countries.” My paternal grandfather, William Smith, was killed in action in World War I. Not long afterwards his wife died of ‘grief’ (malnutrition and exhaustion, in my mother’s view) and their five children were put into homes run by Dr … More Theory of War by Joan Brady
My Dad was a big fan of Westerns. I grew up watching The High Chaparral and A Man Called Horse; by the time I was five I was hooked. I named a teddy bear Blue Boy (after the character Billy Blue Cannon in The High Chaparral) and wrote a letter to Santa promising to be … More Days Without End by Sebastian Barry
I’m lucky enough to be celebrating my 29th wedding anniversary on the beautiful island of Rhodes. Hubby and I rented a house for a week in Rhodes Old Town and we’re sitting in its private courtyard garden having just got back from swimming in the sea off Elli Beach. This has nothing to do with … More A Good Man In Africa by William Boyd
I’ve been meaning for ages to visit capital cities in Scandinavia and the Baltic States, and with Brexit looming I decided this summer was the perfect time to turn talk into action. So in June hubby and I set off on our own little travel adventure, taking in Copenhagen, Oslo, Bergen, Helsinki, Tallinn, Riga and … More Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
When my brother became a vegetarian in his teens it caused a bit of a flap. This was the mid-1970s, we lived on a council estate in Liverpool, and the nearest we’d got to vegetarianism was eating fish on Fridays. So to find we were living with someone who’d stopped eating meat was like being … More The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)
Sometimes I read a book that I really wish I’d written; Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine is one. Really it was down to luck that I read it at all. I switched on the radio to take my mind off paying bills and updating my budget (yes, I really am that boring), and the programme … More Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
One summer holiday, as a ‘project’, I decided to research my family. Not my family tree, you understand, but my family. I was ten, I think; eleven at most. I devised a list of fifteen questions and then interviewed all my immediate family members, parents, brother, sister, cousin, aunts, uncle, granddad. (As children go I … More Brooklyn by Colm Toibin
