About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
John Preston
Mixed The Guardian (UK) Preston’s biography is largely anecdotal, without too much concern for context. The stories are good and Preston tells them with his gift for the kind of wry comedy that suits English decline. The \'mystery\' in his book’s subtitle surely refers to his behaviour in life rather than the manner of his death – of his family only Ghislaine believes he was murdered. The picture of Maxwell that emerges is vivid but familiar: bombastic, florid, devious, gluttonous, bullying, absurd. But why was he these things?
Anita Anand
Positive The Guardian In Anand’s narrative, the courses of two lives separated by a gulf in race, class and geography narrow slowly until they meet each other, momentarily and theatrically, on stage in front of a London audience. Hitchcock might have made the film ... Perhaps Anand intends only to show how popular Indian history would like to see Singh, or how Singh would have liked to see himself. Certainly the earlier that Singh’s resolve can be shown to take hold, the more the book’s title can be justified, though given the shortage of information about his intentions for most of the period 1919 to 1940, a more accurate title might have been \'The Wandering Assassin.\' What Anand provides about his state of mind is reasonable biographical speculation ... Her book isn’t perfect. There are some jarring Americanisms...and in terms of technique an inclination to go beyond the cautiously speculative...into the assertively fictional ... But all the same it is an involving account of a strange and obsessive life.
Alan Rusbridger
Positive The Guardian \" The book he [Rusbridger] has written is eloquent in its argument for well-resourced journalism, and never better than in its central narrative of how an old profession struggled to cope with a new technology that threatened it with obsolescence—averted, in the Guardian’s case, by the commitment and generosity of its readers.\
Graham Robb
Positive The Guardian Robb has a good eye for the small and seemingly ordinary things that convey a sense of remoteness —of place and time ... Robb intercuts the past and present, the intimate and the impersonal, to wonderful effect. Few authors write so well about things lost and neglected—or have such sharp ears and eyes for the natural world.
Rory Stewart
Positive The Guardian This is a tender book sheltering under a robust title ... How much Stewart regrets this growing apartness is hard to know from this account. The delight of it lies in his encounters with the specific rather than in ruminations about the general. He has an alert eye for the awkward detail – the things that don’t quite fit with the tone of a scene. It makes him an enjoyable and persuasive writer ... As well as a fine lament for his father, Stewart may have written the obituary of a social, military and political class.