More movie Memoirs this time from the siren Ileanna.

Found this first edition from 1973 set in sweltering New York, the principal characters, though hilarious, are not quite what they seem to be. She is so playfully, both in her writing and her use of form.

He argues that Wilde invented the cult of celebrity, by agreeing to allow D’Oyly Carte to tour him round America, so that everyone could see what Patience was mocking. Persuasive argument, since Wilde had only a small volume of self-published poems to his name, but instantly became widely well known, lecturing to the denizens of the States, to greater and lesser acclaim.

That rare bird, a Roth I hadn’t read. And even rarer, didn’t love. All in dialogue. Scenes from an affair.

The Wars of the Roses and the Rise of The Tudors I picked up and read the second half of this – well from about Edward IV to the end. The more familiar arrival of the Tudors. Hundreds of years of civil war here, sometimes there seem to be about three rebellions a year. The entire island seems to be filled with plate armour and arrows and terrible bloody, muddy, hacking to bits. They’re all about 23 too. So it’s late teenage violence on a huge scale.  More like gang warfare. Richard 3^rd was definitely a serial killer. May have killed two Kings too. Henry VI it is widely assumed. Quite possibly his brother as well.

The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution I’m still reading this. It’s not a book you can rush, since it encompasses The Origin of Life, DNA, Photosynthesis, The Complex Cell, Sex, Movement, Sight, Hot Blood, Consciousness and Death. I expect to be reading it still next year. The Unbeliever’s Bible. How things really came to be. I read it on my phone and I pad. Often, occasionally, and always with great interest.

The Secret History of the Mossad. The totally fascinating, utterly gripping, long but never dull, history of the Mossad. With all the greatest hits, and a few of their misses. An intriguing tale of ten heads of this most secret service, and the way they coped with the many, many crises which continue, and the threats, which seem to worsen, and the potential for Middle East disaster with nuclear proliferation. Then there’s the incredible tale of Robert Maxwell…. This book is essential reading, and it’s updated now and in a nice big fat paperback form. I could not put it down.

Boy she can write. Beautiful sentences. A delightful, short novelette about young people picked up in the wake of Napoleon, (near Boulogne when we meet them), following him to Moscow, where his appeal is exposed as the sham it always was. In several voices, two mainly, a young lad called Henri and a Venetian “comfort lady,” whom he loves madly, though her feelings are more sisterly. They escape to Venice, but she loves a Lady and, well, Henri ends up fairly happily. It’s the kind of book that I could easily read again.