Stowe House, Buckinghamshire. In preparation for revisiting Fanny Price, the Bertrams and the Crawfords over the next few weeks, I want to take a little walk in the grounds and enjoy the prospects …| Calmgrove Books
Katabasis by R F Kuang. HarperVoyager, 2025. “[It] started as this cute, silly adventure novel about like, ‘Haha, academia is hell.’ And then I was writing it and I was like, ‘Oh, no, academia is hell.'” — From an interview with the author. Sometimes, when reading a novel, one can simply engage by taking it … Continue reading Hell is other scholars: #RIPxx| Calmgrove Books
The Cornish Trilogy by Robertson Davies. Penguin Books, 2011 (1991). ‘Be not another, if you can be yourself.’ — Epigram by Paracelsus. Consisting of three related titles – The Rebel Angels (1981), What’s Bred in the Bone (1985), and The Lyre of Orpheus (1988) – the Cornish trilogy joined two other completed series from Robertson … Continue reading Games of Let’s pretend: #ReadingRobertsonDavies| Calmgrove Books
Peacock Pie: a book of rhymes by Walter de la Mare, drawings by Edward Ardizzone (1946). Faber Children’s Classics, 2001 (1913). Ere my heart beats too coldly and faintly To remember sad things, yet be gay,I would sing a brief song of the world’s little children Magic hath stolen away. — ‘The Truants’. … Continue reading Stolen away by magic| Calmgrove Books
Many mornings, when going for a constitutional which might take us by the local canal, we hear one or two cockerels giving vent in their customary fashion. One is a full-throated adult bird screaming the familiar cry; the other, younger perhaps, produces a wheezier version which never quite achieves the expected Cock-a-doodle-doo. In Latin this … Continue reading Fair or fowl? #logophile| Calmgrove Books
The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark. Penguin Archive, 2025 (1970). ‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a café, the last one left.’ ‘You’re getting morbid, dear,’ says Bill. A disturbing story of a disturbed woman, The Driver’s Seat is about a number of … Continue reading Inconceivable sorrow: #RIPxx| Calmgrove Books
Austen’s Women: Lady Susan. Performed by Rebecca Vaughan, directed by Andrew Margerison, Dyad Productions. Wednesday 24th September 2025, Theatr Brycheiniog, Brecon. “My dear Sister,I congratulate you & Mr Vernon on being about to receive into your family the most accomplished Coquette in England. As a very distinguished Flirt, I have always been taught to consider … Continue reading A most accomplished coquette: #ReadingAusten2025| Calmgrove Books
© C A Lovegrove. The end of another month marks that time when I regularly look back, like Epimetheus, at my reading progress over four weeks or so and then forward, like Prometheus, at my Bookwise…| Calmgrove Books
Codename Villanelle by Luke Jennings. John Murray, 2018 (2017). Compiled from four serial ebook novellas appearing between 2014 and 2016, Codename Villanelle was the first of a trilogy (which was to include the sequels No Tomorrow and Die for Me) before being adapted and expanded to four seasons for BBC television under the blanket heading … Continue reading Tosca’s kisses: #RIPxx| Calmgrove Books
Lesley Castle: An Unfinished Novel in Letters by Jane Austen. Introduction by G K Chesterton (1922). Renard Press, 2024 (1792). That it is unfinished, I grieve; yet fear that from me, it will always remain so . . . Composed in 1792 when Jane Austen was still only sixteen years old, Lesley Castle is an … Continue reading A neverending story: #ReadingAusten2025| Calmgrove Books
Emil and the Three Twins by Erich Kästner. Emil und die Drei Zwillinge (1933), illustrated by Walter Trier, translated by Cyrus Brooks. Red Fox Classics, 2002 (1935). From the paradoxical title to the twin prefaces (one for ‘beginners’, the other for ‘experts’) Kästner’s sequel to Emil and the Detectives is both more of the same and … Continue reading Password Emil! #WorldKidLitMonth| Calmgrove Books
© C A Lovegrove. Epitaph for a Spy by Eric Ambler. Introduction by James Fenton. Penguin Modern Classics, 2009 (1938). The village of St Gatien sprawls decoratively in the lee of the small headland…| Calmgrove Books
Stencil cover art by Bernie Reid for the 2007 Everyman / Telegraph edition. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Edited by Pamela Norris (1993), introduction by Peter Conrad (1978). Everyman’s…| Calmgrove Books
Jane Austen, 1775–1817. Before completing my re-read of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and preparing a new review for #ReadingAusten2025 I want to draw the attention of anyone else …| Calmgrove Books
View of the south side of Piccadilly beside Arlington and St James’s Streets, March 1923. ‘Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street’ by Virginia Woolf, first published in The Dial, Volume LXXV…| Calmgrove Books
The Ahlbergs, by Janet Ahlberg, from ‘Peepo!’ The Bucket: Memories of an Inattentive Childhood by Allan Ahlberg. Illustrated by Janet Ahlberg, Fritz Wegner, Charlotte Voake, and Jessica…| Calmgrove Books
© C A Lovegrove. Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim. Introduction by Elizabeth Jane Howard. Virago Press, 1985 (1898). May 16th.—’The garden is the place I go to for refug…| Calmgrove Books
James Andrews’ insipid watercolour portrait of Jane Austen (1869) based on Cassandra’s. Mansfield Park by Jane Austen. Penguin Popular Classics, 1994 (1814). “‘I do no…| Calmgrove Books
Without the aid of [insert search engine of your choice here] can you identify, from the following list, which of the entries with a month embedded in their title aren’t genuine novels, novel…| Calmgrove Books
CalmgroveBooks.wordpress.com For fans of Diana Wynne Jones and Terry Pratchett, each of whom left us during the third month of the year, the return of March Magics – first inaugurated by Kristen Me…| Calmgrove Books
Cartoon (2017) by Dan Piraro ( The stack of books on my bedside table waiting to be read has at times become alarmingly high (as my partner often reminds me) but luckily has not yet proved fatal, s…| Calmgrove Books
Jane Austen: watercolour by her sister Cassandra. “I can’t bear Jane Austen’s tedious books,” thundered one recent pundit in a UK national daily newspaper (I won’t men…| Calmgrove Books
Raymond Briggs, ‘Notes from the Sofa’. Notes from the Sofa by Raymond Briggs. Unbound, 2017 (2015). My cup runneth over. It went all down my trousers. “Award-winning author of The…| Calmgrove Books
Cover illustration by Tove Jansson, showing Moomins spotting Sniff for the first time. The Moomins and the Great Flood by Tove Jansson. Småtrollen och den stora övervämningen (1945) translated by D…| Calmgrove Books
