Literature

By Garry Curtis, author of Incoming! Garry Curtis is a former Royal Marine Commando and one of the UK’s most respected hostile environment consultants whose clients include the BBC war correspondent, John Simpson.  Here Curtis, 49, lifts the lid on one of the most dangerous jobs in the world and how he overcame PTSD. His biography, Incoming! hits the UK shelves this week, and is available to buy on Amazon UK. It looks exciting on the TV, glamorous even. Journalists,...

You might think you are making your own choices in life, but you’re not. You are, in fact, a robot, merely doing the bidding of the genetic ‘instructions’ hardwired into your brain. So says author and free will expert Paul Kwatz in this thought-provoking piece of popular science, which presents fascinating philosophical arguments in a concise, clearly-worded and engaging fashion. With a background in medicine, Kwatz writes under a pen name, and presents his readers with some hard-to-swallow facts about...

As I am a kale eating, energy conserving, Trump loathing, Corbyn loving, Lily Allen listening, hug a tree, kiss a bee, spray paint on a bedsheet and wave it at the march activist - no animals harmed in the making of products and does no one think of the children? - of course I read the Guardian. It’s sort of the daily Bible for people who are dubious about actual Bibles.  But here’s a nasty little secret that would bring...

A new book has been released that claims to prep Generation Y on how to thrive in a world screwed up by Baby Boomers. Lucy’s Cohen’s ‘The Millennial Renaissance lays out an actionable, profitable plan for surviving the tough world Millennials have inherited from their parents. With the housing market increasingly inaccessible, retirement seeming like a distant dream and university debt racking up business entrepreneur Cohen offers millennials an alternative to the path taken by the boomers—an innovative and attainable approach to both...

It is quite possible, and beyond that most satisfactory, to lose one’s thoughts in consideration of the idea that the turbulently shifting great moments of history produce or recognise precisely the artists required to frame those occasions for present and future generations to understand and appreciate. Without Homer, ancient Greece would be but a rubble of interesting statuary and quite likely without Homer it all would have been paved over decades ago. Our knowledge of the clashing fortunes and misfortunes...

One of my very favourites in a long, long list of literary anecdotes is drawn from the late Dick Seaver's posthumous memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight. Seaver more or less discovered Samuel Beckett in Paris after World War Two, at least in terms of the larger world markets, and became Beckett's friend, editor and publisher at Arcade, Grove and Viking Press. In any event, sometime in the early 1960's Beckett paid a visit to Seaver in New York and...

By Antony Percy, author of Misdefending the Realm ‘The Communist Threat’? Weren’t the Russians our allies in the Second World War? That might be a common reaction to the idea that the UK faced the challenge of countering Soviet spies and subversives when war was declared on Nazi Germany in September 1939. It is, however, frequently forgotten that, shortly before Hitler invaded Poland, he and Stalin had signed a non-aggression pact named after their Foreign Office Ministers, Ribbentrop and Molotov....

Misdefending the Realm by historian Antony Percy is an eye-opening account of the Soviet Union’s infiltration of the British government during World War Two, and the shocking failing of MI5 in dealing with the threat effectively. Having thoroughly researched MI5’s activities during the critical era of the Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939 – 41) for a PhD, Percy is arguably the UK’s leading expert on Russian espionage within and without the Security Service during the early War years. Calling upon a wide...

The 12th century story of King Arthur and his gallant knights is complex, frustrating, and fraught with contradictions and impossibilities. Very few of the names and events recorded in these chronicles exist in the historical record, and so the text represents a huge historical crossword puzzle that is almost impossible to crack. But how can we derive an answer for two-down in this puzzle, if we have not discovered the solution for five-across? Arthurian history is traditionally set in the...