Category: Reviews
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The Implausible Rewilding of the Pyrenees
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2022.] Here’s a book about nature that is neither an impassioned rant nor a lecture. Instead, over a period of years, Steve Cracknell spoke directly to the horses’ mouths and with great empathy and balance, he lets us learn about the various sides of the…
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Living the reality
[This review was first published in Catalonia Today magazine here.] [Writer Carrie Frais: Pic by Poppy Maidment] Who are these people? “Immigrants temporarily or permanently residing in a country other than the one[s] in which they were raised.” This to me is a much better explanation than the word expat (or expatriate) which I…
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The Inner Life of Animals
[Pic: Club Hípic Raúl Pinteño] [This book review was first published under the title "Animal feelings" in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2020.] Can horses feel shame? Do deer grieve for their dead? Why do roosters deceive hens? What about humpback whales that act as if they’re grateful, adulterous magpies or pigs that have learnt their own names?…
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The Good Luck of Right Now
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, February 2015.] Since the huge commercial and critical success of "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" by Mark Haddon, there has been a slight trend towards novels that use a main character with a degree of mental distinctiveness. Matthew Quick’s previous and…
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God is an Englishman (Donald Horne)
(This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, July 2019.) This summer while we on the continent of Europe are enjoying doing whatever we can afford to do under the Mediterranean sun, we should all spare a thought for the English and their other Brit cousins. They will be living through the continuing…
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Elizabeth Costello (by JM Coetzee)
(This article was first published under the title "The author’s mouthpiece" in Catalonia Today magazine, January 2019.) Elizabeth Costello is that very rare thing: a commercially successful writer of fiction from Australia – the far end of the world that has typically given very little attention (or much else) to people who…
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This Boy’s Life
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, April 2018.] It’s a great relief to read something as authentic as this memoir of Tobias Wolff’s childhood. In 2018, when (even for adults) predictable superhero and action movies are dominating the western world’s popular culture as a form of escapism, my bowels were nicely warmed…
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Between Two Fires
This book is exactly the kind of thing you would hope to find when you are aimlessly looking through the shelves in that slowly dying place called a bookshop. Focusing mainly on the area around his adopted home town of Frigiliana David Baird has used immaculate research to write in compelling detail…
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Poor But Sexy
[This article was first published in Catalonia Today magazine, May 2016.] How little we know about the culture of that ‘area of darkness:’ Eastern Europe. Living within a few hundred kilometres of this region, most of us would be hard pressed to give the names of more than a handful of directors, actors or…