It’s New Year’s Day – call someone!
This made me laugh on the one hand – a funny image to receive a phone call from a dog...
As simple as…
A simile that deserves to enter daily use. But was Newton’s thought simple? Yes and no…
‘… as simple as...
The key to the core
Life and Fate is for me one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, chronicling unflinchingly the horrors it...
Let’s begin with man
This 800 page riveting novel is in some senses one giant plea for simple, spontaneous, sincere kindness towards and between...
Good versus kind
The 800 pages of Grossman's splendid Life and Fate is occasionally interlarded with heartfelt asides by the author, including pleas...
The dog who understood
This mongrel, scooped up off the streets, in Vasily Grossman's imagined story of the real creature who was the first...
Birds of war
The more I learn about birds, the more that 'bird brain' seems a misnomer. Here they are in a war...
Hunger in the raw
This is one of the most graphic, disturbing descriptions of the effects of severe hunger I have seen, written by...
In praise of senseless, eternal kindness
Another plea by Grossman for uncomplicated, unplanned and even unwitnessed kindnesses, as opposed to those commandeered by ideologies.
Whatever your...
Communing with the cosmos
Glorious moment in this splendid, human novel: an army officer camped somewhere on the steppe enjoys a moment of embracing...
A simple summary of perfection
Grossman has a simplicity and clarity to his writing and I like his definition of perfection, not as an...
Bright eyes like glass grapes
‘Bright eyes’ implies a warm, sparkling, engaging personality until you slam up against ‘rather like glass grapes’, and then you...
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