tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14599895697105480112012-01-23T10:37:18.878-08:00Reviews thhat have appeared in The TabletAndy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.comBlogger161100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-70744711610924297502011-08-10T09:13:00.000-07:002011-08-10T09:13:24.911-07:00

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Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-88631331613993557082011-06-15T07:14:00.000-07:002011-06-15T07:14:13.269-07:00

George Weisz does magic: he retrieves the past for those robbed of it. Not entirely unlike the True Kindness - the special Orthodox who hold the dying victims of bomb attacks in Israel, and “collect the spattered dead” - he shuttles endlessly across Europe and America tracking down the lost, inanimate underpinnings of Jewish lives riven by the holocaust. This forensic furniture dealer tracks

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-6153537685031313872011-01-12T10:43:00.000-08:002011-01-12T10:43:28.276-08:00

Into Celia Idlewild’s perfect world an egg drops. There she is, preparing a perfect breakfast tray for her husband - "everything as it should be: black lacquer tray, two white porcelain cups, ginger thins, the Sunday worship on the radio” - when the egg plops through the letterbox and cracks on the mat. On the shell is written in thick pen: “HAPPY FAT…” We learn: "For a moment she was puzzled

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-20686186143319510122010-04-27T07:18:00.000-07:002010-04-27T07:20:54.517-07:00

At the Chime of a City Clock DJ Taylor, Constable £12.99 The scene is a country-house weekend in 1931. While maids bring afternoon tea and footmen trip over each other in their eagerness to serve, the society hostess mingles with a swanky band of the not so great and the not so good. As our narrator says, all is not quite “anyone for tennis?” A shady cove by the name of Rasmussen is eyeing up

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-31986610304796789062009-07-23T04:43:00.001-07:002009-07-23T04:51:05.227-07:00

The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen, Harvill Secker £17.99 Tucked away on the inside back cover of The Selected Works of TS Spivet is a url which takes you to a curiously eccentric website, decked out to look like a collection of sepia photographs and scratched movie clips, in which you can learn more about events and characters in the book. You might, for example, listen to the

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-66992359112106464402009-03-08T14:53:00.000-07:002009-12-29T04:05:12.044-08:00

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Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-4643902424867161642008-09-10T03:12:00.000-07:002008-09-10T03:16:26.236-07:00

You wouldn’t want a father like Marty Dean. If there is a blackout during a thunder storm he will hold a candle under his chin to show his young son Jasper “how the human face becomes a mask of evil with the right kind of lighting.”The bedtime stories he tells are “dark and creepy tales, and each had a protagonist that was clearly a surrogate me.”But by far his scariest story is that of Jasper’s

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-48592841585688621182008-04-11T06:50:00.000-07:002008-04-11T06:51:57.314-07:00

There is a killer on the loose in St Petersburg. Its name is cholera, and its accomplices are poverty, slothful bureaucracy and a sanitation system so inadequate that the city is left to stew in its own waste. The city stinks: nowhere more so than in the office of investigating magistrate Porfiry Petrovich overlooking the excrement-filled Yekaterininsky Canal. Driven to distraction by the

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-59131970486846445182008-02-10T00:46:00.000-08:002008-02-10T00:48:15.131-08:00

“What is a spy?” asks Vincent Austin. “Are they born or made?” The question may not sound particularly promising, but the answer Christopher Koch presents in this compelling portrait of two very singular people is intriguing. For, while espionage may be the book’s stage, spying is simply the backdrop against which a much more profound and rich personal drama is played out. Vincent says he

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-44350302490868624572007-11-01T11:31:00.000-07:002007-11-01T11:37:06.027-07:00

DI John Rebus is beside the hospital bed of his nemesis, Big Ger Cafferty. The gangster who has dogged Rebus throughout his career is in a coma, but Rebus is not offering sympathy: “Wake up you old bastard…Playtime’s over…No point you hiding there inside that thick skull of yours. I’m waiting for you out here.” No one else is concerned for the invalid and, Rebus reflects: “Cafferty had no

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-29144564348096752902007-10-06T07:59:00.000-07:002007-10-06T08:03:38.325-07:00

Rosamond is dead. Imogen is missing. Those who remain have been entrusted with delivering a message, recorded on four C90 cassette tapes, from the dead woman to the beloved granddaughter of Beatrix, her childhood friend. When all efforts to find Imogen fail, the family listen to the tapes, and experience what Jonathan Coe describes as: “The gradual unveiling of their family’s occult,

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-67049573846962713172007-08-17T08:05:00.001-07:002007-08-17T08:05:46.550-07:00

Michael Engleby is an unsettling companion. Few would willingly keep his company. Yet here, where he is our narrator, we must. People are a puzzle for Engleby: fluid beings who change distressingly. Relationships and conversation are largely beyond him. Others, even his mother, are shadows. We can’t be sure whether he is merely socially inept or more deeply disturbed. There are the unexplained

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-25555447209291972232007-08-17T08:04:00.001-07:002007-08-17T08:04:51.492-07:00

It is 1962 and sex, as Philip Larkin put it, would not be invented for another year. A little late for him, and for Edward and Florence. It is their wedding night. The ceremony has passed off well and they are now in a hotel on Chesil Beach in Dorset. They are about to step into the adulthood that married life bestows, to launch themselves, “to love and set each other free.”But. With McEwan there

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-10425918599976632712007-08-17T08:01:00.000-07:002007-08-17T08:03:25.704-07:00

At John Peel’s death it was clear that we were witnessing the passing of a National Treasure. There were tributes on radio and television, in print and on record.But why, exactly, did Peel achieve this status when countless other broadcasters, however distinguished, do not? On paper, his claims to fame; playing records on Radio 1 for 37 years, and hosting a gentle Saturday morning Radio 4 show

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-5887920851007715892007-08-17T07:59:00.000-07:002007-08-17T08:01:12.775-07:00

Are you a yob? To help you find out, Francis Gilbert offers a handy checklist in this English Journey-style survey of the way we are, and even puts himself through the test.Are you a victim of yobbery? If so, it’s but a short step to practicing yobbery yourself.Are you a perpetrator of yobbery? Gilbert admits to occasionally putting his feet up on the opposite seat on trains. Do you enjoy

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1459989569710548011.post-61369641458462935032007-08-17T07:52:00.000-07:002007-08-17T07:59:03.272-07:00

When Jimi Hendrix arrived in London in 1966 he carried just his guitar, a change of clothes, his pink plastic hair curlers and a jar of Valderma face cream for his acne. Materially he travelled light, yet his psychological baggage was weighty.It included a childhood of extreme poverty; a mother whose death when he was 16 haunted him throughout his life; and an alcoholic, often jobless father who

Andy Bullhttps://profiles.google.com/117986409103488142861noreply@blogger.com0