Author: Susan Brice

  • Quirky places to buy books

    In the small town of Chesham is a community bookshop; a euphemism I suppose for second hand bookshop. The walls are painted a deep yellow and all the furniture: dressers, shelves and sideboards are painted grey. It looks quite classy and the whole place gives off an atmosphere of being loved and really cared for. […]

  • Paul Gallico, Cats And More

    So there I was on a transatlantic flight last autumn, scrolling through the list of films from which I could choose. Nothing particularly grabbed my attention until I came to ‘Mrs Harris goes to Paris’. That will do I thought and so I settled down to watch it. The film sticks closely to the book, […]

  • February 2023

    Some of you may remember that 2022 was a year when I decided I would read from home and not buy any new books. I did well, until October in my favourite bookshop in New York City when I seemed to forget my pledge or maybe I felt that being out of England meant that […]

  • Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries

    I don’t have a section for book talks, so this will have to be a musing. I spent the evening a few days ago listening to the author Kate Mosse talking on stage. She was entirely alone. This was not an interview but I’m not quite sure what it was: part performance, part illustrated lecture […]

  • Campus Novels

    I have always been fascinated by closed societies: monasteries and convents, boarding schools and to some extent universities, although one gets the feeling that most of the latter are more open now than in times past. I think the interest stems from the idea that these places can and do create their own rules, traditions […]

  • Book Clubs

    So, what do we think about book clubs? They must basically be a ‘good thing’ I feel but going further into it maybe becomes a little complicated. The first and indeed only book club that I have ever belonged to, contained myself and a couple of friends, all aged about 7, and I think we […]

  • 84 Charing Cross Road – Helene Hanff

    This is a real life story in the form of a book of letters. It has a quiet charm and illustrates the world and particularly London in the 1930s and then wartime. Helene Hanff was a writer with a particular interest in classical literature, who lived and worked in her small New York apartment. Finding […]

  • Stories of their time

    Amongst all the heaviness of the Ukraine war, the cost of living crisis and the earthquake tragedy in Turkey and Syria, the prime minister took a couple of minutes to give his thoughts about Roald Dahl and his books. He said ‘the books should be preserved and not airbrushed.’ This is referring to the publisher’s […]

  • Keep calm and carry on

    Everybody has heard this catch phrase which has been used, abused, modified and satirised for years. How many years? Well since 2000 actually, when the owner of a second hand bookshop in Northumberland found a World War 2 poster in a box of books he had bought at auction. He displayed it in his shop, […]

  • Here is a good day out in East Sussex

    In the small town of Alfriston, or maybe it’s a large village, is a gem of a bookshop called Much Ado About Books. And, there really is much ado, this is not a straightforward bookshop. The building was a house, so it is a series of small rooms, an interesting staircase and a back garden. […]