Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,065Chief of Staff
The best thing is the theme tune, sung by Jack Jones.
Are you sure you’ve watched this series? 😁
The theme tune IS marvellous BUT it’s sung by Tony Christie…I used to love this show, but I’ve not watched it in decades…I’m guessing it doesn’t hold up nowadays.
@Sir Miles I was half cut and didn't bother checking on Wiki. That'll learn me ! Of course it is Tony Christie ! It is even on his greatest hits CD that sits on my extensive shelf of greatest hits CDs. And @CoolHandBond I saw Jack Jones in concert once and his opening number was of course The Love Boat ! I never saw Tony Christie in concert.
Conversely, I’ve never seen Jack Jones but I have seen Tony Christie in concert. Christie had a great strong voice and if he had had a bit more star quality he could have been as big as Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck.
Yeah, well, sometimes nothin' can be a real cool hand.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,065Chief of Staff
Just to derail a little further…Tony Christie was one of my dad’s favourite artists…he’s seen him countless times…I had planned to see him on his final tour, but the dates just didn’t work out…he’s done some terrific songs.
Hear hear! Also recommended from Carré is "The Pidgeon Tunnel." Whis is said to be true stories from Carrés time in the civil service.
I just finished reading "The Helsinki Affair" by Anna Pitoniak:" CIA agent Amanda Cole is thrust into an international conspiracy involving high-profile assassinations and Russian blackmail...." Not going to make any spoilers, just saying that this one had an entertaining mix of active highjinx and bureaucratic tedium... Recommended!
"I mean, she almost kills bond...with her ass."
-Mr Arlington Beech
Now, usually Virginia Woolf sends me to sleep. I tried reading To The Lighthouse three times and never made it past page 20 without nodding off. Ditto Mrs Dalloway. So it was with some trepidation I picked up Between the Acts, which is her last published novel and a refreshing change from those stream of consciousness opuses Woolf usually churned out. That isn’t to say the novel is an easy read. Woolf’s obsession with time, which seems to be sparked by Eliot’s two poems Burnt Norton and East Gidding, sees her creating a gamut of fascinating narrative transitions between the here and now and the past, which she enacts for us as if it was still the present; hence all of time becomes the Now, a moment the ancient philosophers describe as ‘Chairos’.
The novel perches on the edge of the Second World War, and takes place in a single afternoon at Poinzt Hall, a fictional estate in the Home Counties, where the monied – but not too posh – Oliver’s are preparing for the annual pageant to raise church funds. This involves the well-to-do turning out to watch a mummer’s play put on by the local no-so-well-to-do. Woolf uses the pageant and the incidents that surround it to reinforce the passage of time and the importance of NOW while reflecting on the likelihood of conflict and societal disruption.
By the time Woolf completed the novel, the war had been ongoing for over two years, so there was scope for her to revise the text and include more explicit references than perhaps she might have done [for instance, there is a moment when a speech of conciliation delivered by the local rector is drowned out by a squadron of aircraft passing overhead].
Overall the novel concentrates too much on the pageant play which could serve its purpose at half the length, and the interesting interaction between the Olivers and their unexpected guests Mrs Manresa and her young lover [read: gigolo] William Dodge seems curtailed and too reliant on subtext when the conflicting emotions need to be positioned front and centre. The last few pages however, when Woolf returns unequivocally to the subject of time and now are quite masterful.
After my brief and disappointing foray in to women's literature (though what is that, we don't talk about men's literature) I returned to the tried and trusted Sharpe adventures by Bernard Cornwell, this time Sharpe's Enemy which is set in Portugal, Christmas 1812.
It was the fifth Sharpe novel to be published, though Cornwell later wrote a number of prequels.
Immediately it does something that - probably coincidentally - the last few novels I've read by women did not do; namely, it throws down a gauntlet in the first few pages, then another - something the reader wants addressed or followed up, or a wrong that needs to be righted. We see a motley seemingly British band or rabble of soldiers behave appallingly and unsympathetically to innocent locals - well, I think in the previous novel but one the winning side did that anyway, but it's clear we are meant to be appalled - so what is going on? Then, one of the nastiest of them is suddenly undone by a reference to somebody's mother.
It turns out that this is a rogue garrison made up of deserters from many opposing armies, hiding out in a deserted area and living off the hog of the land. The hold a general's wife hostage, along with one from the French forces, and Sharpe has to pay a ransom and see if he can retrieve her.
In one fine scene, Sharpe joins forces with the French troops on Christmas Day and enjoys a sumptuous French Christmas meal, the recipe the author later reveals largely taken from Elizabeth David's French Provencal Cooking, which you can pick up on Amazon or eBay.
That all said, the novel doesn't start off as fine literature and I lost count of the number of times the characters 'grinned' at each other, still that's male banter for you I suppose. Because the official villains - the French - are allies of a kind for part of this - more emphasis is placed on homegrown villains, the office politics of the Army, such as those in authority who disapprove of Sharpe's promotion to major, snooty types. This also happens in Bond movies where the main villain doesn't show his face until later on, we have to engage with the likes of Professor Dent or Mr Osato instead.
Two women are depicted in the book - Sharpe receives flirtation from his superior officer's wife under the dining table - but despite the author's best efforts they do seem a bit second hand, you don't feel too taken with either of them.
The book seems to make one realise that as a bloke you would be found wanting under Sharpe's command, not up to the fight - it doesn't flatter the reader. Personally I again found it hard to visualise some of the battles taking place. Much of the bloodshed that takes place in the final third alienated me from Sharpe a fair bit, still, that's the army for you. It's to Cornwell's credit that he doesn't sugarcoat what went on or glamourise war in the slightest, it also makes you remember that the army requires a code of sorts, a pride, to make men want to do that stuff in spite of the personal risks, and that each battalion ought to have have some history or tradition of glory attached to it.
The ending is a bit downbeat so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as happy Christmas reading but I did find the book engaging in every chapter.
My rereading of John Gardner's Boysie Oakes books continues. THE AIRLINE PIRATES (US title AIR APPARENT) has our Boysie in civilian life being unwillingly pulled by his old boss Mostyn into working for a dodgy airline company he has set up funded by their old Chief, named for the first time in this novel.
Boysie as usual is chased, not unwillingly, by several young ladies all half his age and with unlikely names. His progress from total coward to standard gun-wielding hero is almost complete, and the plot is less bonkers and more realistic than usual.
HIDEAWAY is a collection of connected short stories. I've only read the two featuring Boysie so far, and they were very slight and easily missable if you don't want to track this one down.
Silhouette ManThe last refuge of a scoundrelPosts: 9,328MI6 Agent
edited February 2025
That's great, @Barbel. I recently received the Hodder and Stoughton first edition of A Killer for a Song from the US. So that's completed my Boysie Oakes hardback collection. It took a while but I got there. 🙂
"The tough man of the world. The Secret Agent. The man who was only a silhouette." - Ian Fleming, Moonraker (1955).
"A KILLER FOR A SONG" arrived yesterday and I started reading today. @chrisno1 in the very first line the singer Jack Jones is mentioned. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. I'm nervously awaiting the third time....
"Rising'44: The battle for Warsaw" by Norman Davis
This history book is about the Polish resistance's rising against the German occupiers in 1944. This is easily confused with the equally heroic uprising in the Jewish ghetto the year before. The Nazi occupation of Poland was perhaps the most brutal of any country in Europe in WWII. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, there were several underground resistance organisations in the country. The People's Army was under Stalin's control, but had little support on the ground. The Home Army had not only the support of the legal Polish exile government in London, but much more importantly wide support in Poland itself. When the Soviet forces came very close to the Polish capital and there was every reason to belive they would enter Warsaw in days, the Home Army started an uprising against the German occupiers. The Home Army fought with great skill and incredible bravery. But the Soviet Army didn't come, instead they stopped at the other side of the river Vistula and waited. The Home Army wanted to show the world that they took responsibility for the freeing of their country and deserved to get their country back, to a degree comparable to De Gaule and the Free French Forces before the western allies reached Paris the same year. Unfortunately this was not Stalin's plan. He wanted complete Soviet control of Poland, and a London-backed Polish resistance freeing Warsaw was a threat to his plan. When his allies wanted to fly supplies to Warsaw he denied the planes to land on Soviet-held territory to refuel. Some British airdrops were made from Italy, but the uprising didn't get much help from the west either. In spite of this the uprising lasted for an incredible 63 days!
In the end the Home Army in Warsaw had to surrender to the much larger and far better equipped German forces. Only then did the Soviet forces move and entered Warsaw. The men and women from the Home Army who were still there were seen as "bandits" and even even collaborators with the Germans, and they were rounded up for torture, jail and even executions.
The book is well written and tells us a story of that's both tragic and heart wrenching. The author wanted to include eyewitness accounts, but found that incorporating those short stories directly into the flow of his story didn't work. Insted he decided to reference them in his text where they were the most relevant and putting the eyewitness stories in "boxes" a page or two later in the book. It's up to the reader if this works, but the eyewitnesses sure tells important stories.
This part of WWII history is far less famous than it deserves and Davis' book comes highly recommended.
Home Army fighters (they had to use captured uniforms, guns and equipment:
SELECTED STORIES – Katherine Mansfield (2002; from 1909 - 1923)
Katherine Mansfield lived a short life, born in 1888 and dying of a haemorrhage in 1923. She was a native of New Zealand and her stories reflect the colonial experience and the immigrant outlook, focussing on both the opportunity and the prejudice afforded the newcomer and outsider. There is a spartan atmosphere to her prose that lends itself to the auspices of the short story form, where the contraction of action, description and character are both expected and carefully orchestrated. Like most short story writers of the modern and modernist eras, Mansfield prefers to offer slices of experience which point metaphorically to a theme – usually one of discontent in its various forms – and leaves her stories unresolved and open ended. Her characters tend to be indulgent, and tend to be monied. Several times she refers to the Burrell’s, a fictional family unit whose life is represented in excruciatingly closeknit detail, so detailed the mundane becomes the focal point of interest and the narrative becomes amusing in its observations: the fitful cheerful children, the bored husband, the mother and her brood of relatives, the obnoxious neighbours. Another series of stories set in Paris evoke the wind of societal change as Mansfield’s people enjoy the triumph and despair of a broadening culture. There is an obsession with age and aging, perhaps from Mansfield’s fatalistic point of view and vitally important to understanding life in all its colours. Discreet humour peppers the various stories, never at her subjects, always with them or surrounding them. The tiny details emerge from the broad palate intact and glimmering with meaning. The Garden Party is perhaps her triumph, where an upper middle class family’s morning preparations for a charity garden party are disturbed by the accidental death of one of the local labourers. The distance between the classes, the invisible barriers erected, are expertly rendered through the solemn, yet thoughtful, eyes of the young Laura. The antithesis of Laura is country girl Leila, who experiences Her First Ball and brushes away the cobwebs of doubt in a riot of dancing. Other works, such as the post war Paris set Miss Brill or the spinster-led The Daughters of the Late Colonel focus on older generations, people who recognises the days of youth are past. An Indiscreet Journey and Je Ne Parle Pas Francais both describe assignations taken by train, the heroines revealing a startling lack of mature understanding of their environment and their place within it. These appear autobiographical, as do many of the New Zealand based stories, but Mansfield is never specifically clear when her personal life ventures onto the page. As with most collections of this kind, there are some fillers, some dull or over-long offerings, and some gems. Usually, the shorter pieces win us over because they are rich in description and refuse to dwell on their subject’s preconceptions. However, Mansfield is not a writer I would go out of my way to recommend.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,065Chief of Staff
@Number24 very interesting, thanks…I’ve put this on my ‘books to look out for list’ - although I may have to get it when I visit the UK because books in Canada are very expensive 😳
The last in the Boysie Oakes series, this has a definite melancholy feel about it. Boysie is no longer the happy reluctant coward from the start of his story, he's a seasoned agent who kills bad guys and rescues beautiful girls with exotic names every bit as skilfully as James Bond himself.
No spoilers, but it's clear Gardner was deliberately writing his last Boysie book here and ... but changing the subject, I noticed a strong similarity to one of his Bond books namely "No Deals, Mr Bond". I checked with AJB007's resident John Gardner expert @Silhouette Man who said I was right, but it also resembled later Gardner Bond novel "Death Is Forever". I'll have to read those again soon, now that I've finished with Boysie (bar a short story or two in "The Assassination File").
So, I hope others here (yes, @Shady Tree and @chrisno1, I mean you) enjoy this series as much as do. I'll have to read it again, but not wait 50 years this time before I get round to it.
A fascinating book detailing the deciphering of the ENIGMA code machine during WW-II.
One of the great intellectual achievements of the past century was the de-encryption of the ENIGMA code machine, an electro-mechanical rotor based cipher system used by NAZI Germany, the U-Boat version of which...was deemed the hardest to crack.
Admiral Dönitz's U-Boat strike force, the Kriegsmarine Wolfpak had unleashed tremendous destruction on Allied boats and cargo ships in the Atlantic ocean during 1939 to 1943, sinking millions of tons of goods down the Atlantic Ocean.
The resulting food shortages, rationing and the closing of many factories resulted in a very difficult situation for Britain.
Central to countering the U-Boat threat was understanding their radio messaging and encryption codex, as that would lead to a better understanding of their operational tactics.
A series of daring raids i.e., a U-110 captured in the mid-atlantic with an intact ENIGMA machine, the weather ship Laurenburg and the seizure of its ENIGMA code settings for an entire month and the seizure of a German weather cipher in the Mediterranean, brought to British intelligence the very hardware and substance of this machine.
The workings of which were figured out by a team of brilliant British and Polish mathematicians and cryptographers, working in Bletchley Park under the GC&CS (Government Code & Cypher School).
With the machine decoded, NAZI war efforts could now be visualized in real time.
The information gleaned from the code-breaking, helped in steering Atlantic convoys in routes far away from the U-boat threat and later on, with the support of US Navy's aircraft carriers...fuel resupply ships and refueling submarines 'milch cows' feeding the U-boats were combed out and destroyed, operationally dismantling the Wolfpak threat.
In the end the author opines that the ENIGMA code break saved millions of lives by shortening the world war by a year. Had the code not been broken, ships from the Pacific would then have to be brought into the Atlantic fleet for the invasions of Italy, Sicily and Normandy resulting in a D-Day in 1945 and a Pacific win in 1946.
A D-day in 1945 would have meant tremendous destruction in Britain from continual Nazi V-2 ballistic missile strikes, Allied air force loses through the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, in addition to hundreds of thousands of men dying in the European theater of war.
Wonderful read.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,065Chief of Staff
edited March 2025
I've been to Bletchley Park, it’s fascinating…the ENIGMA code was finally broken because the German’s decided to do the ‘British thing’ and discuss the weather first…but they could never read it in ‘real time’ - that was impossible.
A lifelong fan of Taupin’s work with Elton John, I looked forward to reading this memoir but was very disappointed.
30% details of his love life (wives & girlfriends, obviously, with barely a word about his first wife)
30% details of which nightclubs he was in, who owned and managed them, and who he was drinking with (eg Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart)
30% details of his hobbies (eg horses and horseriding)
10% details about his songs (writing them, hanging around in studios while Elton records them, watching from the wings as Elton plays them)
For someone who can write world-beating lyrics, Taupin turns out to be a dull and boring memoirist unlike his songwriting partner, whose equivalent volume “Me” is much more entertaining.
Sir MilesThe Wrong Side Of The WardrobePosts: 31,065Chief of Staff
30% details of which nightclubs he was in, who owned and managed them, and who he was drinking with (eg Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart)
I’m not having he can remember those days drinking with the Hollywood Vampires Club 🤣 no way could he remember 30% of those times, let alone write a book that is 30% based on those times 🤣 unless his book is 10 pages in total 🤭
Possibly Dylan Thomas’s masterwork, Under Milk Wood was much loved by millions in the 1960s and 1970s when its brand of poetic theatre for voices presenting a bawdy dreamscape of a Welsh world fell neatly into the groans and moans of the permissive society. Thomas’s characters obsess over one another like schoolchildren discussing a naughty secret. Gossip and hearsay is enough for plot. Character is divided between the drunk and the dumb, the downright daft or the sorrowfully senile, such as blind Captain Cat listening to the world outside his window through his dreams and his memories. What grabs most in reading the play is Thomas’s ability to create words and phrases that should never work, yet they do because his visual capabilities, matched to an innate ability to foreground people’s observational colloquial speech, offer a rich and vibrant landscape, one you can intimately interpret and empathise with. The stories contained in the narrative, which meanders all over the village of Llareggub and back again, are humorous, touching and extremely vivid.
Where the play falls down is in the simplicity of its message, if there is one at all, which appears to be that all God’s creatures however afflicted, guilty or innocent, will have a place in the Lord’s Great Land, the Bread of Heaven, Wales. Lyrically dense and quite possibly a tad over bearing for that, Thomas entwines the listener [or reader] in his mystical almost fairy tale fishing village, as if Llareggub is some Welsh version of Brigadoon, sweeping out of the mists only for a BBC Radio Show. This fairy tale has distinctly adult themes. Lust, primarily.
I don’t entirely know how to judge Under Milk Wood. It’s reputation has been damaged over the years. It doesn’t have the political or even societal impact of a work like Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. While Synge brought rural Irish folk to life in all their bitterness and brawn, striking blows against Unionism and Nationalism alike, Thomas takes a more playful hand and doesn’t comment on anything of the times. The lack of a central character or a solid story deflects any steady point of view, so instead we have people who to all intents and purposes share the same sorrows, the same wiles and lusts, the same preoccupations, the same spoils; without striking differences, the effect is slightly soporific, as if nobody in Llareggub really cares of life beyond the village, trapped almost by the sea that drowned Captain Cat’s shipmates.
Dexterous in execution then, but Under Milk Wood is lacking in a sense of purpose other than as a form of highbrow poetic entertainment.
The BBC showed a telly adaptation recently, while I watched this instead:
UNDER MILK WOOD (1972)
Now considered a cult movie, the film is at turns as bad as it is good, ending up something and nothing when translating the audio play onto the big visual screen. Andrew Sinclair adapts the dialogue effectively, but you sense a heart is missing. He introduces a peculiar menage-a-trois for the First Narrator [Richard Burton] and the Second Narrator [Ryan Davies] with an unnamed woman, one who like them appears to be merely visiting the Welsh fishing village of Llareggub. Otherwise this daydream of a narrative, which transplants night-dreams into reality, and follows a day in the life of the village and its gossiping and unusual population, all observed by the Narrator and the blind seaman Captain Cat, seems unremarkable. The dense dialogue needs more unravelling than Sinclair’s adaptation can offer and frequently he seems to be adding more than needs be. If you are unfamiliar with the play, watching this peculiar dream-like movie will not enthuse you; Under Milk Wood will probably mystify more than please. However, as that was also one of the selling points of the 1954 original radio play, one can at least attest to authenticity.
Sadly, the wistful final lines are aggressively rushed by Burton and offset the play’s gentle, albeit sombre, conclusion. Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O’Toole and Sian Phillips also star, among a host of Welsh actors famous and fair. Susan Penhaligon gets her tits out, which is always nice, and there’s a good turn by David Jason as a simpleton. I quite enjoyed it, but I recently read the play, so I had an advantage. Probably not for the Dylan Thomas devotee or for the casual viewer.
The latest Sherlock Holmes novel authorised by the Conan Doyle estate. The previous authorised Holmes continuation author was our own Anthony Horowitz, who was also an authorised James Bond continuation author (and IMHO one of the best of those). Rubin isn’t up to Horowitz’s level. His characterisations are thin (Conan Doyle got more out of Moriarty in one short story than Rubin does here in a whole novel) and his timeline is unreliable. There are some very good shock scenes I won’t spoil and his main plot (Holmes and Moriarty must join forces against a common enemy) is fine. His method of telling the story is very much a matter of taste: alternate chapters are related by Watson for the Holmes elements (as expected) while the Moriarty portions are narrated by his version of Colonel Sebastian Moran. You’ll either like this or you won’t. I didn’t and won’t be in a hurry to buy a sequel.
@Barbel, I'm curious, have you ever read any of Nicholas Meyer's (of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan fame) Sherlock Holmes novels? His most notable is probably The Seven Percent Solution, but he's written several more over the years.
Interesting…I hadn’t heard of this book…I wondered why the name Gareth Rubin was familiar, and that’s because I’ve read his novel Liberation Square - which I quite enjoyed.
I may get this from the library at sometime…but I won’t rush.
Yes, and enjoyed them. At present, I have only his "The West End Horror" with other Holmes books on a shelf but I don't know where "7%" has disappeared to over the years.
Comments
The best thing is the theme tune, sung by Jack Jones.
Are you sure you’ve watched this series? 😁
The theme tune IS marvellous BUT it’s sung by Tony Christie…I used to love this show, but I’ve not watched it in decades…I’m guessing it doesn’t hold up nowadays.
I think @chrisno1 is mistakenly reviewing The Love Boat 😉
John Burke wrote some marvellous Hammer/Amicus adaptations in the 60’s.
@Sir Miles I was half cut and didn't bother checking on Wiki. That'll learn me ! Of course it is Tony Christie ! It is even on his greatest hits CD that sits on my extensive shelf of greatest hits CDs. And @CoolHandBond I saw Jack Jones in concert once and his opening number was of course The Love Boat ! I never saw Tony Christie in concert.
Conversely, I’ve never seen Jack Jones but I have seen Tony Christie in concert. Christie had a great strong voice and if he had had a bit more star quality he could have been as big as Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck.
Just to derail a little further…Tony Christie was one of my dad’s favourite artists…he’s seen him countless times…I had planned to see him on his final tour, but the dates just didn’t work out…he’s done some terrific songs.
@chrisno1 don’t worry…we’ve all been there 😁
Hear hear! Also recommended from Carré is "The Pidgeon Tunnel." Whis is said to be true stories from Carrés time in the civil service.
I just finished reading "The Helsinki Affair" by Anna Pitoniak:" CIA agent Amanda Cole is thrust into an international conspiracy involving high-profile assassinations and Russian blackmail...." Not going to make any spoilers, just saying that this one had an entertaining mix of active highjinx and bureaucratic tedium... Recommended!
-Mr Arlington Beech
BETWEEN THE ACTS – Virginia Woolf (1941)
Now, usually Virginia Woolf sends me to sleep. I tried reading To The Lighthouse three times and never made it past page 20 without nodding off. Ditto Mrs Dalloway. So it was with some trepidation I picked up Between the Acts, which is her last published novel and a refreshing change from those stream of consciousness opuses Woolf usually churned out. That isn’t to say the novel is an easy read. Woolf’s obsession with time, which seems to be sparked by Eliot’s two poems Burnt Norton and East Gidding, sees her creating a gamut of fascinating narrative transitions between the here and now and the past, which she enacts for us as if it was still the present; hence all of time becomes the Now, a moment the ancient philosophers describe as ‘Chairos’.
The novel perches on the edge of the Second World War, and takes place in a single afternoon at Poinzt Hall, a fictional estate in the Home Counties, where the monied – but not too posh – Oliver’s are preparing for the annual pageant to raise church funds. This involves the well-to-do turning out to watch a mummer’s play put on by the local no-so-well-to-do. Woolf uses the pageant and the incidents that surround it to reinforce the passage of time and the importance of NOW while reflecting on the likelihood of conflict and societal disruption.
By the time Woolf completed the novel, the war had been ongoing for over two years, so there was scope for her to revise the text and include more explicit references than perhaps she might have done [for instance, there is a moment when a speech of conciliation delivered by the local rector is drowned out by a squadron of aircraft passing overhead].
Overall the novel concentrates too much on the pageant play which could serve its purpose at half the length, and the interesting interaction between the Olivers and their unexpected guests Mrs Manresa and her young lover [read: gigolo] William Dodge seems curtailed and too reliant on subtext when the conflicting emotions need to be positioned front and centre. The last few pages however, when Woolf returns unequivocally to the subject of time and now are quite masterful.
Much better than I expected.
After my brief and disappointing foray in to women's literature (though what is that, we don't talk about men's literature) I returned to the tried and trusted Sharpe adventures by Bernard Cornwell, this time Sharpe's Enemy which is set in Portugal, Christmas 1812.
It was the fifth Sharpe novel to be published, though Cornwell later wrote a number of prequels.
Immediately it does something that - probably coincidentally - the last few novels I've read by women did not do; namely, it throws down a gauntlet in the first few pages, then another - something the reader wants addressed or followed up, or a wrong that needs to be righted. We see a motley seemingly British band or rabble of soldiers behave appallingly and unsympathetically to innocent locals - well, I think in the previous novel but one the winning side did that anyway, but it's clear we are meant to be appalled - so what is going on? Then, one of the nastiest of them is suddenly undone by a reference to somebody's mother.
It turns out that this is a rogue garrison made up of deserters from many opposing armies, hiding out in a deserted area and living off the hog of the land. The hold a general's wife hostage, along with one from the French forces, and Sharpe has to pay a ransom and see if he can retrieve her.
In one fine scene, Sharpe joins forces with the French troops on Christmas Day and enjoys a sumptuous French Christmas meal, the recipe the author later reveals largely taken from Elizabeth David's French Provencal Cooking, which you can pick up on Amazon or eBay.
That all said, the novel doesn't start off as fine literature and I lost count of the number of times the characters 'grinned' at each other, still that's male banter for you I suppose. Because the official villains - the French - are allies of a kind for part of this - more emphasis is placed on homegrown villains, the office politics of the Army, such as those in authority who disapprove of Sharpe's promotion to major, snooty types. This also happens in Bond movies where the main villain doesn't show his face until later on, we have to engage with the likes of Professor Dent or Mr Osato instead.
Two women are depicted in the book - Sharpe receives flirtation from his superior officer's wife under the dining table - but despite the author's best efforts they do seem a bit second hand, you don't feel too taken with either of them.
The book seems to make one realise that as a bloke you would be found wanting under Sharpe's command, not up to the fight - it doesn't flatter the reader. Personally I again found it hard to visualise some of the battles taking place. Much of the bloodshed that takes place in the final third alienated me from Sharpe a fair bit, still, that's the army for you. It's to Cornwell's credit that he doesn't sugarcoat what went on or glamourise war in the slightest, it also makes you remember that the army requires a code of sorts, a pride, to make men want to do that stuff in spite of the personal risks, and that each battalion ought to have have some history or tradition of glory attached to it.
The ending is a bit downbeat so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it as happy Christmas reading but I did find the book engaging in every chapter.
Roger Moore 1927-2017
Good review @Napoleon Plural I have not read a thing by Cornwall, thanks to you I am not sure I need to.
Oh, wait, didn't he do one about Shakespeare and Marlowe ? I think I read that and was pleasantly surprised although I wouldn't call it very good.
My rereading of John Gardner's Boysie Oakes books continues. THE AIRLINE PIRATES (US title AIR APPARENT) has our Boysie in civilian life being unwillingly pulled by his old boss Mostyn into working for a dodgy airline company he has set up funded by their old Chief, named for the first time in this novel.
Boysie as usual is chased, not unwillingly, by several young ladies all half his age and with unlikely names. His progress from total coward to standard gun-wielding hero is almost complete, and the plot is less bonkers and more realistic than usual.
HIDEAWAY is a collection of connected short stories. I've only read the two featuring Boysie so far, and they were very slight and easily missable if you don't want to track this one down.
@Silhouette Man @Shady Tree @chrisno1 I gave in and ordered "A Killer For A Song", the last in this series. It hasn't arrived yet.
That's great, @Barbel. I recently received the Hodder and Stoughton first edition of A Killer for a Song from the US. So that's completed my Boysie Oakes hardback collection. It took a while but I got there. 🙂
It's A Small World Department:
"A KILLER FOR A SONG" arrived yesterday and I started reading today. @chrisno1 in the very first line the singer Jack Jones is mentioned. Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence. I'm nervously awaiting the third time....
"Rising'44: The battle for Warsaw" by Norman Davis
This history book is about the Polish resistance's rising against the German occupiers in 1944. This is easily confused with the equally heroic uprising in the Jewish ghetto the year before. The Nazi occupation of Poland was perhaps the most brutal of any country in Europe in WWII. In spite of, or perhaps because of this, there were several underground resistance organisations in the country. The People's Army was under Stalin's control, but had little support on the ground. The Home Army had not only the support of the legal Polish exile government in London, but much more importantly wide support in Poland itself. When the Soviet forces came very close to the Polish capital and there was every reason to belive they would enter Warsaw in days, the Home Army started an uprising against the German occupiers. The Home Army fought with great skill and incredible bravery. But the Soviet Army didn't come, instead they stopped at the other side of the river Vistula and waited. The Home Army wanted to show the world that they took responsibility for the freeing of their country and deserved to get their country back, to a degree comparable to De Gaule and the Free French Forces before the western allies reached Paris the same year. Unfortunately this was not Stalin's plan. He wanted complete Soviet control of Poland, and a London-backed Polish resistance freeing Warsaw was a threat to his plan. When his allies wanted to fly supplies to Warsaw he denied the planes to land on Soviet-held territory to refuel. Some British airdrops were made from Italy, but the uprising didn't get much help from the west either. In spite of this the uprising lasted for an incredible 63 days!
In the end the Home Army in Warsaw had to surrender to the much larger and far better equipped German forces. Only then did the Soviet forces move and entered Warsaw. The men and women from the Home Army who were still there were seen as "bandits" and even even collaborators with the Germans, and they were rounded up for torture, jail and even executions.
The book is well written and tells us a story of that's both tragic and heart wrenching. The author wanted to include eyewitness accounts, but found that incorporating those short stories directly into the flow of his story didn't work. Insted he decided to reference them in his text where they were the most relevant and putting the eyewitness stories in "boxes" a page or two later in the book. It's up to the reader if this works, but the eyewitnesses sure tells important stories.
This part of WWII history is far less famous than it deserves and Davis' book comes highly recommended.
Home Army fighters (they had to use captured uniforms, guns and equipment:
Good review, thanks for that @Number24
SELECTED STORIES – Katherine Mansfield (2002; from 1909 - 1923)
Katherine Mansfield lived a short life, born in 1888 and dying of a haemorrhage in 1923. She was a native of New Zealand and her stories reflect the colonial experience and the immigrant outlook, focussing on both the opportunity and the prejudice afforded the newcomer and outsider. There is a spartan atmosphere to her prose that lends itself to the auspices of the short story form, where the contraction of action, description and character are both expected and carefully orchestrated. Like most short story writers of the modern and modernist eras, Mansfield prefers to offer slices of experience which point metaphorically to a theme – usually one of discontent in its various forms – and leaves her stories unresolved and open ended. Her characters tend to be indulgent, and tend to be monied. Several times she refers to the Burrell’s, a fictional family unit whose life is represented in excruciatingly closeknit detail, so detailed the mundane becomes the focal point of interest and the narrative becomes amusing in its observations: the fitful cheerful children, the bored husband, the mother and her brood of relatives, the obnoxious neighbours. Another series of stories set in Paris evoke the wind of societal change as Mansfield’s people enjoy the triumph and despair of a broadening culture. There is an obsession with age and aging, perhaps from Mansfield’s fatalistic point of view and vitally important to understanding life in all its colours. Discreet humour peppers the various stories, never at her subjects, always with them or surrounding them. The tiny details emerge from the broad palate intact and glimmering with meaning. The Garden Party is perhaps her triumph, where an upper middle class family’s morning preparations for a charity garden party are disturbed by the accidental death of one of the local labourers. The distance between the classes, the invisible barriers erected, are expertly rendered through the solemn, yet thoughtful, eyes of the young Laura. The antithesis of Laura is country girl Leila, who experiences Her First Ball and brushes away the cobwebs of doubt in a riot of dancing. Other works, such as the post war Paris set Miss Brill or the spinster-led The Daughters of the Late Colonel focus on older generations, people who recognises the days of youth are past. An Indiscreet Journey and Je Ne Parle Pas Francais both describe assignations taken by train, the heroines revealing a startling lack of mature understanding of their environment and their place within it. These appear autobiographical, as do many of the New Zealand based stories, but Mansfield is never specifically clear when her personal life ventures onto the page. As with most collections of this kind, there are some fillers, some dull or over-long offerings, and some gems. Usually, the shorter pieces win us over because they are rich in description and refuse to dwell on their subject’s preconceptions. However, Mansfield is not a writer I would go out of my way to recommend.
@Number24 very interesting, thanks…I’ve put this on my ‘books to look out for list’ - although I may have to get it when I visit the UK because books in Canada are very expensive 😳
A KILLER FOR A SONG John Gardner
The last in the Boysie Oakes series, this has a definite melancholy feel about it. Boysie is no longer the happy reluctant coward from the start of his story, he's a seasoned agent who kills bad guys and rescues beautiful girls with exotic names every bit as skilfully as James Bond himself.
No spoilers, but it's clear Gardner was deliberately writing his last Boysie book here and ... but changing the subject, I noticed a strong similarity to one of his Bond books namely "No Deals, Mr Bond". I checked with AJB007's resident John Gardner expert @Silhouette Man who said I was right, but it also resembled later Gardner Bond novel "Death Is Forever". I'll have to read those again soon, now that I've finished with Boysie (bar a short story or two in "The Assassination File").
So, I hope others here (yes, @Shady Tree and @chrisno1, I mean you) enjoy this series as much as do. I'll have to read it again, but not wait 50 years this time before I get round to it.
SEIZING THE ENIGMA - DAVID KAHN
A fascinating book detailing the deciphering of the ENIGMA code machine during WW-II.
One of the great intellectual achievements of the past century was the de-encryption of the ENIGMA code machine, an electro-mechanical rotor based cipher system used by NAZI Germany, the U-Boat version of which...was deemed the hardest to crack.
Admiral Dönitz's U-Boat strike force, the Kriegsmarine Wolfpak had unleashed tremendous destruction on Allied boats and cargo ships in the Atlantic ocean during 1939 to 1943, sinking millions of tons of goods down the Atlantic Ocean.
The resulting food shortages, rationing and the closing of many factories resulted in a very difficult situation for Britain.
Central to countering the U-Boat threat was understanding their radio messaging and encryption codex, as that would lead to a better understanding of their operational tactics.
A series of daring raids i.e., a U-110 captured in the mid-atlantic with an intact ENIGMA machine, the weather ship Laurenburg and the seizure of its ENIGMA code settings for an entire month and the seizure of a German weather cipher in the Mediterranean, brought to British intelligence the very hardware and substance of this machine.
The workings of which were figured out by a team of brilliant British and Polish mathematicians and cryptographers, working in Bletchley Park under the GC&CS (Government Code & Cypher School).
With the machine decoded, NAZI war efforts could now be visualized in real time.
The information gleaned from the code-breaking, helped in steering Atlantic convoys in routes far away from the U-boat threat and later on, with the support of US Navy's aircraft carriers...fuel resupply ships and refueling submarines 'milch cows' feeding the U-boats were combed out and destroyed, operationally dismantling the Wolfpak threat.
In the end the author opines that the ENIGMA code break saved millions of lives by shortening the world war by a year. Had the code not been broken, ships from the Pacific would then have to be brought into the Atlantic fleet for the invasions of Italy, Sicily and Normandy resulting in a D-Day in 1945 and a Pacific win in 1946.
A D-day in 1945 would have meant tremendous destruction in Britain from continual Nazi V-2 ballistic missile strikes, Allied air force loses through the Messerschmitt Me-262 jet fighter, in addition to hundreds of thousands of men dying in the European theater of war.
Wonderful read.
I've been to Bletchley Park, it’s fascinating…the ENIGMA code was finally broken because the German’s decided to do the ‘British thing’ and discuss the weather first…but they could never read it in ‘real time’ - that was impossible.
I'd love to visit there!
It’s a great place to visit…
It's still my aim to read this series, or some of it, during April, and I'm looking forward to it!
SCATTERSHOT (2023) Bernie Taupin
A lifelong fan of Taupin’s work with Elton John, I looked forward to reading this memoir but was very disappointed.
30% details of his love life (wives & girlfriends, obviously, with barely a word about his first wife)
30% details of which nightclubs he was in, who owned and managed them, and who he was drinking with (eg Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart)
30% details of his hobbies (eg horses and horseriding)
10% details about his songs (writing them, hanging around in studios while Elton records them, watching from the wings as Elton plays them)
For someone who can write world-beating lyrics, Taupin turns out to be a dull and boring memoirist unlike his songwriting partner, whose equivalent volume “Me” is much more entertaining.
30% details of which nightclubs he was in, who owned and managed them, and who he was drinking with (eg Alice Cooper, Ringo Starr, Rod Stewart)
I’m not having he can remember those days drinking with the Hollywood Vampires Club 🤣 no way could he remember 30% of those times, let alone write a book that is 30% based on those times 🤣 unless his book is 10 pages in total 🤭
He certainly claims to. I'd suggest you read it yourself but honestly it's not worth it.
UNDER MILK WOOD – Dylan Thomas (1954)
Possibly Dylan Thomas’s masterwork, Under Milk Wood was much loved by millions in the 1960s and 1970s when its brand of poetic theatre for voices presenting a bawdy dreamscape of a Welsh world fell neatly into the groans and moans of the permissive society. Thomas’s characters obsess over one another like schoolchildren discussing a naughty secret. Gossip and hearsay is enough for plot. Character is divided between the drunk and the dumb, the downright daft or the sorrowfully senile, such as blind Captain Cat listening to the world outside his window through his dreams and his memories. What grabs most in reading the play is Thomas’s ability to create words and phrases that should never work, yet they do because his visual capabilities, matched to an innate ability to foreground people’s observational colloquial speech, offer a rich and vibrant landscape, one you can intimately interpret and empathise with. The stories contained in the narrative, which meanders all over the village of Llareggub and back again, are humorous, touching and extremely vivid.
Where the play falls down is in the simplicity of its message, if there is one at all, which appears to be that all God’s creatures however afflicted, guilty or innocent, will have a place in the Lord’s Great Land, the Bread of Heaven, Wales. Lyrically dense and quite possibly a tad over bearing for that, Thomas entwines the listener [or reader] in his mystical almost fairy tale fishing village, as if Llareggub is some Welsh version of Brigadoon, sweeping out of the mists only for a BBC Radio Show. This fairy tale has distinctly adult themes. Lust, primarily.
I don’t entirely know how to judge Under Milk Wood. It’s reputation has been damaged over the years. It doesn’t have the political or even societal impact of a work like Synge’s Playboy of the Western World. While Synge brought rural Irish folk to life in all their bitterness and brawn, striking blows against Unionism and Nationalism alike, Thomas takes a more playful hand and doesn’t comment on anything of the times. The lack of a central character or a solid story deflects any steady point of view, so instead we have people who to all intents and purposes share the same sorrows, the same wiles and lusts, the same preoccupations, the same spoils; without striking differences, the effect is slightly soporific, as if nobody in Llareggub really cares of life beyond the village, trapped almost by the sea that drowned Captain Cat’s shipmates.
Dexterous in execution then, but Under Milk Wood is lacking in a sense of purpose other than as a form of highbrow poetic entertainment.
The BBC showed a telly adaptation recently, while I watched this instead:
UNDER MILK WOOD (1972)
Now considered a cult movie, the film is at turns as bad as it is good, ending up something and nothing when translating the audio play onto the big visual screen. Andrew Sinclair adapts the dialogue effectively, but you sense a heart is missing. He introduces a peculiar menage-a-trois for the First Narrator [Richard Burton] and the Second Narrator [Ryan Davies] with an unnamed woman, one who like them appears to be merely visiting the Welsh fishing village of Llareggub. Otherwise this daydream of a narrative, which transplants night-dreams into reality, and follows a day in the life of the village and its gossiping and unusual population, all observed by the Narrator and the blind seaman Captain Cat, seems unremarkable. The dense dialogue needs more unravelling than Sinclair’s adaptation can offer and frequently he seems to be adding more than needs be. If you are unfamiliar with the play, watching this peculiar dream-like movie will not enthuse you; Under Milk Wood will probably mystify more than please. However, as that was also one of the selling points of the 1954 original radio play, one can at least attest to authenticity.
Sadly, the wistful final lines are aggressively rushed by Burton and offset the play’s gentle, albeit sombre, conclusion. Elizabeth Taylor, Peter O’Toole and Sian Phillips also star, among a host of Welsh actors famous and fair. Susan Penhaligon gets her tits out, which is always nice, and there’s a good turn by David Jason as a simpleton. I quite enjoyed it, but I recently read the play, so I had an advantage. Probably not for the Dylan Thomas devotee or for the casual viewer.
HOLMES AND MORIARTY (2024) Gareth Rubin
The latest Sherlock Holmes novel authorised by the Conan Doyle estate. The previous authorised Holmes continuation author was our own Anthony Horowitz, who was also an authorised James Bond continuation author (and IMHO one of the best of those). Rubin isn’t up to Horowitz’s level. His characterisations are thin (Conan Doyle got more out of Moriarty in one short story than Rubin does here in a whole novel) and his timeline is unreliable. There are some very good shock scenes I won’t spoil and his main plot (Holmes and Moriarty must join forces against a common enemy) is fine. His method of telling the story is very much a matter of taste: alternate chapters are related by Watson for the Holmes elements (as expected) while the Moriarty portions are narrated by his version of Colonel Sebastian Moran. You’ll either like this or you won’t. I didn’t and won’t be in a hurry to buy a sequel.
@CoolHandBond you asked what I thought of this.
@Barbel, I'm curious, have you ever read any of Nicholas Meyer's (of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan fame) Sherlock Holmes novels? His most notable is probably The Seven Percent Solution, but he's written several more over the years.
Thanks for the review, Barbel. I haven’t read any of the Holmes continuation novels, and if I did, it won’t be this one!
Interesting…I hadn’t heard of this book…I wondered why the name Gareth Rubin was familiar, and that’s because I’ve read his novel Liberation Square - which I quite enjoyed.
I may get this from the library at sometime…but I won’t rush.
Yes, and enjoyed them. At present, I have only his "The West End Horror" with other Holmes books on a shelf but I don't know where "7%" has disappeared to over the years.