http://www.articlealley.com en-us editorial@articlealley.com Poisoned Petals by Andy Crabb is a set of over forty short stories, tales with a Spanish flavour. Most are set in Spain, with many featuring locations and people from within the Costa Blanca, where the author lives, works and continually observes. Some ar... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/poisoned-petals-by-andy-crabb-616125.html 02nd September 2008 Mario Vargas Llosa, novelist, Peruvian, is a word painter, an artist of consummate skill, capable of simultaneous intimate ecstasy and detached observation, skill that constantly surprises, titillates and intensifies. Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter is a ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/aunt-julia-and-the-scriptwriter-by-mario-vargas-llosa-525238.html 29th April 2008 It may be that in musical retrospect, from a luxury of twenty-twenty critical hindsight, that Astor Piazzolla will be seen as having done in the twentieth century for the tango what Frederick Chopin did in the nineteenth for the waltz. It is perhaps alrea... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/cultured-tangos-517265.html 15th April 2008 At the start of Shakespeare Bill Bryson apologises for the fact that there is not much to tell. Every aspect of the bard's physical presence on the planet seems to be shrouded in doubt and mystery. We don't even know what he looked like. We don't know muc... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/shakespeare-by-bill-bryson-504532.html 02nd April 2008 At first glance Master Georgie by Beryl Bainbridge suggests it might be quite a light book, an easy read, a period piece set in the mid-nineteenth century. This would be wrong. Master Georgie is no safe tale of country house manners, of marriages imagined... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/master-georgie-by-beryl-bainbridge-504529.html 02nd April 2008 Sometimes, when reading a big book, one gets the feeling that the author set out to achieve size, as if that in itself might suggest certain adjectives from a reader or reviewer - weighty, significant, deep, serious, complex, extensive, perhaps. Sometimes... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/the-blind-assassin-by-margaret-atwood-504527.html 02nd April 2008 On The Yankee Station by William Boyd is a series of short stories, the longest of which provides the title for the set. This particular story is a superb piece of short fiction, much more than a short story, confronting, in less than twenty-five pages, s... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/on-the-yankee-station-by-william-boyd-504526.html 02nd April 2008 Rosamund Stacey is the first person narrator of her own story in the Millstone by Margaret Drabble. Rosamund is a single mother - nothing strange about that, perhaps, at least in a twenty-first century Britain where now half of births are outside of marri... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/the-millstone-by-margaret-drabble-504524.html 02nd April 2008 The Colonel's Last Wicket by G V Rama Rao is a delightful novel that uses scenarios and technicalities drawn from cricket to add poignancy to a gentle but moving story. This is not a book about cricket. It's a book about people, about their development, t... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/the-colonels-last-wicket-by-g-v-rama-rao-484484.html 03rd March 2008 At one level Willie The Actor by David Barry is a crime novel in which a ruthless criminal commits bank robberies. On another it achieves the feel of dramatised documentary, for its eponymous anti-hero, William Sutton, is not fictitious and lived a real l... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/willie-the-actor-by-david-barry-484473.html 03rd March 2008 Emperor by Colin Thubron is a mightily ambitious novel. It describes the conversion to Christianity of the emperor Constantine the Great, the circumstances of which are unknown. But this was an event that changed human history. This single event elevated ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/emperor-by-colin-thubron-479545.html 22nd February 2008 In July's People Nadine Gordimer presents a scenario laden with fears. Written in 1981, the book presents a South Africa afflicted by near-worst case Cold War disintegration. With rumoured external support, the urban black population has instigated a revo... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/julys-people-by-nadine-gordimer-479544.html 22nd February 2008 It's fifty years since A Room At The Top first appeared. Against a backdrop of post-war Britain, a period when people really did believe that a new future, a different kind of society was just around the corner, Joe Lampton, born January 1921, aspired to ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-review-of-a-room-at-the-top-by-john-braine-469680.html 06th February 2008 After recently re-reading John Braine's Room at the Top, I went On Chesil Beach, courtesy of Ian McEwan. Without doubt the latter is a masterpiece, whereas the former seems to be a little too reliant on its contemporary setting, its social mores, its fine... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/life-at-the-top-by-john-braine-469677.html 06th February 2008 This is a book that will live for ever. In it Khaled Hosseini has accomplished what many writers, most unsuccessfully, try to achieve. It's the big stories, those turning points in history, which often attract us. They automatically have something to say,... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/the-kite-runner-by-khaled-hosseini-463368.html 29th January 2008 I read A Thousand Splendid Suns having just finished Kite Runner. I would like the opportunity to live life again (who wouldn't?), if only to have a chance of reversing the order of this experience. I suspect tat had I read A Thousand Splendid Suns first ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-thousand-splendid-suns-by-khaled-hosseini-463367.html 29th January 2008 The fly cover of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan describes the book as "a short novel of remarkable depth by a writer at the height of his powers". On Chesil Beach was recently short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, but lost out to Anne Enright's The Gather... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/on-chesil-beach-by-ian-mcewan-247906.html 04th January 2008 In August 1992, myself and my wife, Caroline, arranged a trip to post-Tiananmen China. It was in the days when the London China Travel office was on Cambridge Circus, opposite the Palace Theatre on Charing Cross Road. It took me at least twenty books, a... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-silk-road-trip-or-i-gobbed-in-the-gobi--china1992-by-philip-spires-241690.html 07th November 2007 I have wanted to visit Toledo for at least forty years and for one particular reason, being the canvases of Domenicos Theotokopoulos, or El Greco as we have learned to call him. Well, now I have been and I found what I sought, plus a truly amazing and une... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/up-and-down-in-toledo-the-expected-and-the-surprising-234826.html 01st November 2007 It's often that chance encounters, the unplanned events, linger, long after the excursions and the sights of a particular trip have faded. It was in 1998 when my wife and I visited central Japan, basing ourselves in Kyoto, having availed ourselves of chea... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-memory-of-kyoto-218659.html 25th September 2007 Festival - Nits de la Mediterrania, La NuciaTwentieth Century BalletsThe final concert of the inaugural La Nucia arts festival took place last night. Starting at 10:30pm, it was staged in the town's recently completed open air auditorium and featured the ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/an-orchestral-concert-14-july-2007-la-nucia-spain-211283.html 07th September 2007 Just occasionally - in fact pretty rarely these days - something utterly surprising emerges from an evening in a concert hall. Almost forty years into an interest in music which has focused on every style of western music from Gothic to minimalism (perhap... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/puss-in-boots-el-gato-con-botas-an-opera-by-xavier-montsalvatge-208627.html 29th August 2007 This is not a review of Losing Nelson or England, England, or a record of visits to Chester. As the title claims, it's a reflection, a few observations on culture and identity seen through Englishness. The trips to Chester are offered by the way, as a... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/reflections-on-a-pair-of-novels-losing-nelson-and-england-england-and-a-couple-of-trips-to-chester-208623.html 29th August 2007 Mention Benidorm and with it, by implication, the concepts of package tourism, hotel buffets, British bars with one euro a pint lager, northern English Working Men's Club turns imitating something neither themselves nor their audience have ever been, lobs... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-culture-of-benidorm-208619.html 29th August 2007 A speech at the awards ceremony for the Libros International Children's Writing Competition. 20 July 2007 Like the students who entered this competition, I started writing when I was quite young. I wrote a lot of poetry in my early teens. I wrote a no... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/advice-to-aspiring-writers-208615.html 29th August 2007 The title of Mission's first chapter is Michael. Here is how it starts ... Enter Michael, dishevelled and panting. His movements are hurried, agitated and anxious. The kitchen door creaks on its hinges after his disinterested push. It does not close an... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/mission--some-extracts-from-the-novel-208612.html 29th August 2007 Saville won the Booker Prize in 1976. In such a vast novel it is inevitable that the pace will occasionally quicken and slacken, but a book like this can be read over weeks, almost dipped into as the passing phases of Colin's life unfold. David Story was ... http://philipspires.articlealley.com/a-reflection-on-saville-by-david-storey-208609.html 29th August 2007