Classic Wodehouse, full of period dialogue, impossible plot contrivances, two-dimensional characters and everything else one might love about old Plum, if one loves old Plum at all. Infectious, too. But here's the thing: all the while I was reading it, I couldn't shake one thought from my mind.

Stanley Featherstonehough Ukridge is without a doubt the original on which Boris Johnson modelled himself.

There’s more ➢

‘A serial killer stalks the games’ ... Although I do find myself wondering how much of the book was simply inspired by the title. Having come up with that, did the rest of it all fall into place?

There’s more ➢

No sooner had I finished The Circle and raved about it to a friend who is a voracious reader and whose opinion I trust than she had me reading Super Sad True Love Story. There are similarities, which is why I am reviewing them together. Both are set a few minutes into the future and both of them are thoroughly dystopian. Both of them also accelerate inexorably and intensify to something of a climax. Both are equally scary, although paradoxically SSTLS, which on the surface is much more violent and unfathomable, is much harder to take seriously.

There’s more ➢

Who is Bailey?

We'll never know. All we know is that Lionel Essro...

There’s more ➢

The internet makes it all too easy to go hunting for the information that will make sense of a book or an author, and I am resolved not to do that. At least, not till I have finished this review. From that position of self-imposed ignorance, The Sellout is a brilliantly funny and cutting satire on race in America. Nothing is safe, no-one immune, no taboo out of bounds. Sex, music, drugs, intellectualism, passivity, crime. ...

There’s more ➢