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.

A Bernie Gunther Novel Of course I couldn’t wait and I bought the book and downloaded it so I could finish it on the plane, which I did. About Dalia, a smouldering siren of the German cinema, her Yugoslavian background, including a monster father, her married time in Switzerland, all of which Bernie unravels. He sees her in the old cinema at La Ciotat, and then recalls 1942 when he was employed by Goebbels to get her into a picture, and his bed. Bernie smokes and screws his way through constantly challenging dangers, which makes him our favourite detective....

I like Jim Harrison but this book seems to just go on and on. It’s almost totally stream of consciousness and with him that means fishing, and sex, and alcohol.  Pretty much with anyone. There is an interesting plot buried in it, with the most obnoxious family in the world, a family of brutes and killers, who are being slowly poisoned by one of their own, but even this gets away from him and it goes on and on with him boozing, and looking for women to fuck.

An excellent novel. An old trope, the young lion writing the biography of the grumpy old master, but handled very nicely here, and with a world of understanding of the female. With a famous Indian novelist it of course could be interpreted as Salman, but actually he manages to create in Mamoon a convincing and genuinely moving grumpy old bastard figure. I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, and delighted. I must read more of him.

Found a nice 1961 First Edition at Iliad. I remember not liking this novel when I first read it, too Catholic I thought snobbishly, but I was wrong. It is a beautiful book which I very much enjoyed this time. The burnt out case refers to both the lepers and the architect (aka the novelist) trying desperately to hide himself in Africa. He arrives in depression, believing in nothing, contemptuous of everything, fleeing a disastrous affair, which is so Greene. Of course as he is famous the world won’t let him be. And because he tries to avoid it they pursue him more. It ends in the wonderful seedy world of misunderstood and misconstrued emotion, not entirely dissimilar to the world-weary end of Gatsby, where things inevitably go wrong.

Short stories. But not quite up to it.

Lovely when you find a new writer you love. Bingeing on her of course. She does indeed inhabit some dark places. But she always throws light into these murky corners. And as with most of detective fiction and the thriller: She is on the side of the innocent.

I picked this up and began to read, and then I couldn’t put it down. I read it with delight, because I was feeling lately his writing for me was going off the boil. The subject: a Professor who cannot resist his students is now almost a modern cliché, but I suppose from the amount of writers who have dealt with it, it’s a recurring temptation. Here’s what I wrote in 1999. Brilliant writing and deservedly the Booker winner – which I read before the announcement and thought it my book of the year. The disgrace of the father and the rape of the daughter, woven together in a totally compelling way.

Since I just finished The Plantagenets I went straight into his sequel about the War of The Roses, which as he explains, is far more than the simple York v Lancaster struggle it is often presented as. He is a good narrative historian. It’s interesting to see how important Kingship was in those days to keep an unruly country with powerful and ambitious Lords in check. When the unfortunate (bi-polar?) Henry V1 came to the throne everything fell apart. Nicer for the French of course. Had a signed copy I picked up in Hatchards. (UK)

Pretty good simple history of Caesar and the principal assassins.

Welcome back Cutter. Sorry. Silly mood. I really enjoyed this dark, disquieting first person narrated thriller about a Chicago female reporter sent home to the South, and her awful mother, to investigate a couple of teen murders. Very well written. I am going to read more of her, she really delivers.

I enjoy his books and I had somehow missed this one, which is about a Berlin detective, but with the twist that Hitler is still alive and the Nazis won the war. An excellent read.

The latest in the Penguin paperback new translation and series of re-releases of these excellent short detective stories featuring the indefatigable Maigret. Perfect for a plane ride.

I really like some of his books, but others I find too long, and in this one once we got to talking dogs I’m afraid I lost interest. Far and away the most enjoyable I have read so far is the trilogy IQ84.

Love him. Love it. He is one of the best American writers, not just of detective fiction, but of prose. I have read them all before but enjoying them even more a second time. Re-read with great enjoyment. Chandler is one of my favourite writers.

A brilliant book. Quite stunning in fact.

My Con Man. A very short but true story about the writer plagued by a charming con man.

An account of the 400 men who pretty much decided the Battle of Waterloo, by defending the farmhouse of La Haye Sainte during the battle of Waterloo, fatally delaying Napoleon’s advance and ensuring time for the Prussians to arrive, to save the day and all Europe from the relentless dictator.

A very finely written memoir by this very funny man, of his total addiction to movies, and the growth of a brilliant comedian. I was fortunate to see him interviewed by his brother at The Writers Guild, and then again interviewed and doing Stand Up at Largo.

Another in the brilliant new series of Penguin Maigret novels. They are very short and simply written, but deceptively great.

Finely written Irish novel.

A Shortcut Man novel. I really enjoyed this, as I did a previous one of his. It’s a Crime Novel and an excellent one.

Since the New Year I have been working through Dan Jones’ long story of The Kings Who Made England or who nearly unmade France as they might better be known. Violent, arrogant, aggressive, assertive, muddle headed and very often wrong, they seem to have only two flavours: mad and violent, or mad and sneaky. Two deposed: Ed 2 and Dick 2, both as it turns out far shittier, tyrannical, and less sympathetic than Shakespeare and Marlowe present. Hard not to sympathise with the French, the Welsh and the Scots, and all who suffered under them, not the least being the poor English caught between taxation, endless wars and the plague. Nicely written narrative history.

In hindsight it’s hard to see what all the fuss was about Thorpe. Once removed from the scene he was never missed. A man whose confident sense of his own superiority led him to get away with (attempted) murder. I skimmed. This was the man in the silly hat who hit the beaches to the Monty Python theme tune. Always a charming clown and of course stalked by the singularly unattractive looney Norman Scott with whom he had an affair in the days when that sort of thing, though widespread, was illegal. Between the Kings and the Upper Classes it’s a relief the Sixties happened.