Edith Warton hailed it as “the great American novel”. Marylin Monroe immortalized the central character Lorelei Lee on the big screen. It was a publishing sensation. When serialised in Harper’s Bazaar, the magazine’s sales quadrupled. When published in book form, it was an instant hit. A second edition of 60,000 copies was also quickly picked … Continue reading #HYH25 #1925ReadingClub #ClassicsClub: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos→| a hot cup of pleasure
In September, I read two books, vastly different from each other, but both had at their core, the relationship between men and women, specifically between a husband and wife. In Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim, young Lucy Entwhistle, in a shell-shocked condition after the death of her father, meets Everard Wemyss. Everard, himself, is trying … Continue reading Two Classics about Man-Woman Relationship: Vera (1921) and The Stepford Wives (1972)→| a hot cup of pleasure
The middleclass suburb of Matchdown Park is all agog. First, newspaper editor Julian Townsend divorced his wife, Susan, and moved away. Then Susan’s neighbour, Louise North started welcoming …| a hot cup of pleasure
1 post published by neeruahcop during October 2025| a hot cup of pleasure
I am often asked the question: ‘What do you feel when you sentence a man to death?’ Thus begins this book written by legal luminary, G.D. Khosla, who served in various capacities as mag…| a hot cup of pleasure
String-King Adrian Babbacombe is a self-made man. Born to be lord of the manor, he ran away from his country-estate and started working in a London factory while in his teens. This shocked his pare…| a hot cup of pleasure
Deputy Chief Crighton is a worried man. He had been called by publisher Jefferson Judd earlier in the day. Judd told him that his estranged wife, Cora, had visited him the previous night and demanded money from him. On Judd’s refusal (he feels that she would spend it on her drug addiction), she had threatened … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Follow this Fair Corpse by Laurence Dwight Smith (1941)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Inspector Dew of Barshire is told by the Chief Constable that Scotland Yard had contacted him regarding an Irish national, Desmond O’Neill whom they suspect of spying and passing information to the Germans. The Yard had been following O’Neill, but then they lost trace of him. His last known whereabouts were Canford Grange, the estate … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Who Died at the Grange? by Michael Halliday (1942)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Artist John Lumsden is found dead in his studio. The disarray in the studio shows that Lumsden had put up quite a fight before being strangled to death. Enter Scotland Yard detective Charles Blair with Sergeant Harry Dawson. Detectives, according to the author, are of various types: There were jocular detectives, and grim detectives, and … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: Frame-Up by Andrew Garve (1964)→| a hot cup of pleasure
Time to wind up the book. The last grouping begins with Ernest Bramah’s The Malignity of the Depraved Ming-Shu Rears its Offensive Head which is an extract from his book Kai Lung Unrolls His …| a hot cup of pleasure
Tired of living life in the fast lane, writer Lola and her artist-husband Jack Storm, decide to shift to the countryside in order to concentrate on their art. The beginning seems promising when the…| a hot cup of pleasure
It is Wednesday and time for me to move on to the second review of the book, this time looking at the authors whose lives straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We begin with Sir Walter…| a hot cup of pleasure
Great English Short Stories, a mammoth book, over 1000 pages long and comprising of more than 80 stories, has stories in the English language, arranged chronologically. It is difficult to write jus…| a hot cup of pleasure
….and the firelight flickering in the hearth brought back dreams that could have hurt because they were all of a happiness that was finished irrevocably, once and for all. Susan Laird, who lost her husband, Phil, an RAF pilot, during an air-raid, now lives for her son Buster, born after his father’s death, and her … Continue reading Friday’s Forgotten Book: With Willing Hands by Diana Ridley (1945)→| a hot cup of pleasure
On to the last part of the book: the authors who saw both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. There are 39 authors in this section, so I have divided it into two parts. We begin with Ouida,…| a hot cup of pleasure
Last Year, I started this mammoth book and even posted about it. Everything was proceeding to plan when I ran across a novelette by Benjamin Disraeli. Seriously, what is a 70+ pages work doing in a…| a hot cup of pleasure
John Horton is a mild-mannered small-time businessman stuck in a bad marriage. His wife, Ethel, spends more time with artistic ‘modern’ young men who John finds utterly vapid. There are…| a hot cup of pleasure
