No, I am not a banker, but I do read City A.M. almost every weekday morning. Why? Well, there are several very good reasons. First of...

"Lust, caution" sounds like a cross between a road traffic sign and a porn film. In fact it is the English translation used as the title...

The book that is simply called "Birds" sits on the windowsill in our kitchen, battered and stained, over 40 years old; still providing...

Yesterday I took a trip down to Bethnal Green to visit The Approach, an art gallery down a quiet road, halfway between the Museum of...

The question is this: how on earth did Winston Churchill become Prime Minister on 10 May 1940 when, three days earlier, there was no...

Writing about Beethoven, liberty and revolution can easily go to your head. Well, Wordsworth got it in one when he wrote: “Bliss it was...

Last year I read Jan Swafford's magnificent biography of Ludwig van Beethoven (first photo is from the book's dust cover), well I read...

The National Gallery in London's Trafalgar Square is currently attempting to compare and contrast two of the great painters of the...

Well, I did say booksplus and here I am featuring not a book, an album that I can't stop listening to at the moment: Rip Tide by Beirut....

I was stimulated to re-read my 30 year old dog-eared Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing by Watford Palace Theatre...

A Woman in Berlin is a unique account of what happened when the Russian army seized Berlin at the end of World War Two. It is written by...

Having read Orlando Figes' masterly history of Russian culture it seemed only fair to take a dig into the rich seam of Russian writing....

I admit to being a sucker for books and films that conjure up a world in which WWII had a different outcome. SS-GB by Len Deighton,...

This entry is ironically about a book I didn't buy: the catalogue to a fascinating art exhibition at London's National Gallery; I am...

Sylvia Nasar's excellent book about the people who were the pioneers of modern economics makes a potentially dry subject come to life,...

Natasha's Dance by Orlando Figes. The best book I have ever read? Well, put it another way, I have never read another book quite like...

Graham Greene's early thriller is full of such language: evil is on the prowl; good is in hiding, hard to find; love is tainted, full of...

So, my first entry in my new blog is about a book I first encountered 40 years ago. Facing a flight back from Boston to Heathrow with...