My mother once told me you only ever find out what someone is really like when they come into money unexpectedly. I guess mum’s point was that a sudden windfall shines a spotlight on whether a person is generous by nature or only interested in number one. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately … More The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro
With her head tucked underneath her arm She walks the Bloody Tower With her head tucked underneath her arm With her head tucked underneath her arm [From With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm by Sammy Gay (1934)] It would normally be pantomime season (oh yes it would) so it seems kind of fitting to … More The Mirror & the Light by Hilary Mantel
Before you rush to hit the “unsubscribe” button, this is very much a one-off. If you are a regular reader of What Cathy Read, I get a mention now and again as “Hubby”, and come across as basically a man of simple tastes, who is most at ease when hitting something with something else, or … More Love Is Blind by William Boyd
A few summers ago, Hubby and I took in the capitals of Scandinavia and the Baltic: Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn with their medieval old towns; scenic Helsinki; compact, cultured Oslo; and wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen. I’d had it in my head to go to Copenhagen ever since I was a kid growing up in the 1970’s … More Music and Silence by Rose Tremain
Hubby and I spent a week in France last summer to celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. 30 years! Where did they go? When you’ve no kids, you live in a Peter Pan-like bubble where you never seem to get any older and time doesn’t seem to pass until…bam! A significant anniversary hits and it’s hard … More Every Man For Himself by Beryl Bainbridge
At the time of writing, Prime Minister May is in France to commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day landings. By the end of the week she will have resigned, after a relatively short premiership dominated by Brexit. At the D day ceremony a 90-something veteran tells a BBC reporter that it took so much … More Hopeful Monsters by Nicholas Mosley
“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
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
When I was a child, and resisting sleep because I was scared of ghosts – I grew up in a formerly haunted house, but that’s a whole other story – my mother would tell me, as her mother had told her, that good people are in Heaven with God and don’t want to leave, and … More Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
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