Recent content by France

Here in France our health care is supposed to be the best in the world. I have nothing but praise for the treatment, it's prompt - when I had a breast cancer scare the doctor apologised for me having to wait until the next day for a scan - and the quality of care is excellent. However the cost...

Deep Secret is probably my favourite of DWJ's books, Rupert is so winderfully stuffy and the science fiction convention is hilarious.

So JKR claimed that 30% of her work is based on 'real occult experience'? Really? Where, when? Facts please, not the ramblings of someone who has an agenda about the evils of witchcraft to spout about and is probably no more immune to the temptation to slant, or even make up, facts than any...

If I've borrowed a book I always read two at a time because I read in the bath and I won't risk getting water on someone else's book.

Somewhere between 1-200. I read fast and reread a lot - reread books are always faster - so the weekly total depends on how many re-reads.

I wish no harm to the man but frankly I gave up caring whether he ever finished the series around book 5, though I did make it half way through the next before i decided that life really is too short to wade through all this detail.

Persuasion - well it's my favourite after P & P. Anne Elliot is a wonderful heroine, quite different from Lizzy Bennet, but sympathetic and very modern in many ways. I find Fanny Price in Mansfield Park too meek and irritating, Emma I've never particularly enjoyed and Northanger Abbey reads...

To those of us who live here, yes it does. Sarko is going to win, sadly, because he's so business centric that he'll probably end up by sounding the death knell to all the small enterprises which keep the villages alive by removing the protections that allow them to exist. For instance large...

For what age?

Matthius, ask yourself why any publisher would want to pay to publish a book that can already be downloaded off the internet? Your average editor is going to be far more impressed by a clean literate manuscript which is gramatically correct and has been carefully checked over than a self...

Just one, in fact - it's one of the great urban myths along with her being rejected by loads of agents. She was picked up by the second she tried there too. What is true is that Bloomsbury picked Harry Potter up for an advance of £2000 which seems like peanuts but was around the going rate for...

The Princess and Curdie?

I'm researching the early revolutionary years in North Carolina for a novel and would appreciate some suggrstions. I'm particularly looking for stuff about personal lives, how people lived etc, the food they ate, houses they lived in. I've already got a couple of reasonable histories of the...

War and Peace Can you really believe that someone like Natasha wou develop into the sort of woman who obsesses about her baby's nappies?

Tired of reading? Never Don't want to read anything in my TBR bookcase? Often. Then I go back to old favourites.