Links from the Guardian Review

It’s a wee while since I shared some links from the Guardian review section with you, but I think you might be quite interested in some from this week’s edition.

Firstly there’s an article titled Charlotte’s web by Claire Harman which you can read here. It’s about Charlotte Bronte and her crush on Paul Heger which inspired her to write Villette.

There’s an article here by Bill Bryson. Can you believe that it’s 20 years since he wrote Notes from a Small Island?

You can read Mark Lawson’s review of Ruth Rendell’s last book Dark Corners here.

Read Melanie McGrath’s review of Ian Rankin’s latest Rebus novel Even Dogs in the Wild here if you’re a fan.

Christobel Kent has reviewed Career of Evil by Robert Galbraith aka J.K. Rowling here.

Last but not least there’s an article by David Mitchell about Ursula K Le Guin and her Earthsea books which you can read here. I didn’t read the Earthsea books until I was an adult and I really got into the series, which is more than I can say for Tolkien’s books, so I was glad to read that Mitchell is a fan of Le Guin.

It was a rich seam of bookish stuff in the Review section this week as far as I’m concerned anyway, the above is just a selection which interested me most. I hope you enjoy some of it too.

Tony Blair – A Journey

This is a wee bit of a rant. I tried to stop myself but it got the better of me in the end.

Tony Blair came to my notice some time before he stood for the Labour leadership contest. I had given him the nickname of ‘The double-glazing salesman’, which I now think is a slur on all such people but at the time it seemed appropriate.

So you’ll have gathered that he was never my favourite person and I remember standing in the school-playground at the time telling my friend Molly just what I thought of Blair. Molly rather liked him, thought he was a good guy. I just couldn’t stop myself from pointing out to Molly that she was already divorced twice, so maybe she wasn’t the best judge of character. I can be a bit of a bitch at times.

He turned out to be even worse than I could possibly have imagined and it just amazes me that people are still taken in by him. I’ve been trying to ignore all the hoo-ha about his book because just thinking about him isn’t good for my blood pressure I’m sure. But I’ve heard along the grapevine that people in shops and libraries have been moving his book to the horror/crime sections, and that really cheered me up.

Originally I thought that whenever anyone buys a copy of the book, it should be put into an extra strong bag, something that could double up as a sick bag in fact, as I’m sure it would make me feel quite ill. But having heard that there are quite a few sex scenes in it, I’ve amended that idea and I think that every purchase should have a free bucket given out with it. I don’t think a sick bag would be adequate for me anyway.

I can’t tell you how angry I was when he said that he was nearly in tears when he met a young war widow, but he is still talking up a war with Iran. He hadn’t been in power long at all when you could see that mad look in his eyes. Just to be even-handed here, I must say that it was the very same look which Thatcher developed too.

I’m not at all impressed by the fact that he is giving the money from the sales of his book to charity. As conscience money, it won’t go very far and no matter what he does in the future, despite his conversion to Catholicism, there’s only one place for him to go when his time comes and that’s straight to HELL, or as my mum would have put it, THE BAD FIRE!

In the same week J.K.Rowling announced that she was giving 10 million pounds to Edinburgh University to set up a clinic to carry out research into Multiple Sclerosis, in memory of her mother Ann Rowling who died of M.S. at the age of 45, which is the age that J.K. is now. She has always been incredibly generous to charities and an all round ‘good egg’. She’s brought joy to millions of children of all ages and encouraged a lot of young people to read books for pleasure, when they might never have done so.

Conversely, Blair has brought grief to countless numbers of people, and I mean countless because nobody bothered to count the Iraqis