I thought Bregman’s previous book, Utopia for Realists, was pretty good. This book is even better. Bregman presents an optimistic view of human beings, and backs this up with many, many examples. He writes like…

John Buchan was, according to Christopher Hitchens, “the father of the modern spy thriller”. But, as the introduction to this, his most famous novel, explains, he was a writer “of his time”. That’s code for…

OK, I’ll confess: I don’t get it. The illustrations are lovely. The message is nice. It might work as children’s book, but for adults? I’m not so sure. And yet the book is mega best-seller…

Stephen King is a master storyteller. He’s often classed as writer of horror, but as one who generally doesn’t read horror, I think that’s not entirely accurate. In this collection of short stories (some would…

Joanne Harris knows a thing or two about writing, having published some 20 novels and several other books as well. This short book came out at the height of the Covid-19 crisis and just in…

I’ve thought for a while that one of the most honest films ever made about the subject of slavery in America is Quentin Tarantino’s Django. Even though the film is a fantasy (much like Inglourious…

In 1943, the best-selling book Under Cover by John Roy Carlson described the pro-Axis groups that thrived in the US before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Carlson — whose real name was…

This is the third, and final, book in the series that began with Codename: Villanelle. When I first read about that book, I was very keen to read it — and was not disappointed. The…

The first of the Penguin Little Black Classics series that I’ve read — having bought a whole shelf of them a few years back — and it’s a good one. Chekhov is described as having…

Matt Ruff has taken a long, hard look at what life was like for African Americans in the early 1950s and reimagined it as horror fiction written by the master, H.P. Lovecraft. All the main…