Author: Susan Brice

  • December 2023

    The Virtual Christmas Bookshop Welcome to my bookshop; a pop-up shop just open for the festivities. Please do come in. A book is surely the perfect gift. Not too big and really re-usable; again and again if required. A paperback is not too heavy if you have to post it. It is easy to make […]

  • George Barker and Much More

    I had never heard of the poet George Barker but I was sent on a Barker odyssey recently by my favourite Sunday Times columnist India Knight. ‘Read Notes from the Henhouse, she said, ‘by Elspeth Barker. She was the wife of George Barker, who was the subject of By Grand Central Station I sat down […]

  • New word for today

    The word is: frangible. I wonder how many of you are familiar with this word. Well, not me. I love finding a new word and it most frequently happens when I read the Times newspaper! I don’t do this on a regular basis but it works well on a train journey and some of their […]

  • The Cellist of Sarajevo – Steven Galloway

    During the long siege of Sarajevo between 1992 to 1996, a cellist stood at his apartment window. He looked down at the bakery on the opposite side of the road and noticed that a queue was forming. This meant that people had learnt there might be loaves available. The cellist saw friends and neighbours and […]

  • Take Nothing With You – Patrick Gale

    I read a review of this book and decided I needed to read something by Patrick Gale. In the blurb, Stephen Fry calls this book ‘tender and funny.’ He is completely right. This is a Bildungsroman where Eustace moves fairly tortuously through a Weston-super-Mare childhood and his teenage years, helped by the cello and his […]

  • November 2023

    Recently I was in Normandy, Northern France where we were based in the small town of Lisieux. I had heard of the saint: Therese of Lisieux but apart from that I was quite ignorant about the area. I learnt that in the Second World War the Allies bombed Lisieux as it was a vital point […]

  • Brown Bread

    Apparently, cockney rhyming slang is dead (brown bread) or at least taking its last breath. Rather sad if that is the case although I suspect some of it is deeply entrenched in most people’s language, such that they don’t even realise it emanates from cockney slang. The fun comes from the fact that the actual […]

  • LM Alcott

    A friend recently sent me a newspaper article about Louisa May Alcott, the author of  ‘Little Women.’ I would have been interested anyway but more particularly now as I have just visited Concord, half an hour outside Boston, Massachusetts. LMA was the purpose of the visit. I wanted to go to Orchard House which is […]

  • Originality

    It is very difficult to be original don’t you think? Original thought is exceedingly rare. It is not surprising that everything in one way or another is derivative because we are all made up of our own set of life experiences and our encounters with others. I was discussing this topic with a bookseller recently. […]

  • Shakespeare Day

    Who knew that Shakespeare Day was November 8th? Definitely not me. If asked I would have gone for 23rd April, his birthday and possibly also the date of his death. Anyway, this has been an enjoyable education for me and I now know lots about the First Folio that I certainly didn’t know before. Yesterday’s […]