The Godfather: Peter Corris on revisiting books, again
This will be the last of my prison despatches – that is, columns to do with my two-months-plus time in hospital. Unlike some patients who are able to sit in their beds or on their chairs and stare at the walls or occupy themselves with television, I’d be crawling...
STELLA GIBBONS Cold Comfort Farm. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Gibbons’s parody is a masterpiece of comedy in its own right. Cold Comfort Farm was first published in 1932. Gibbons says at the beginning of the novel that it is set in the ‘near future’ though this only seems to manifest itself in television-phones and the...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on Hemingway revisited
We lay under cover by the side of the road for the ambush and Paco passed me the wineskin which was heavy with the resin-tasting wine of that part of the country which feels good when it hits the back of your throat in a spurt but you must be careful to cut the spurt...
EMILY BRONTË Wuthering Heights. Reviewed by Jean Bedford
Sophisticated narrative layering and emotional insight make Wuthering Heights an extraordinary novel. I believe Wuthering Heights to be one of the best (if not the best) English novels of the 19th century, possibly ever. I’ve read it perhaps 20 times, taught it in...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on his best books of 2015
To date this year I’ve read 16 books and listened to 28 audio books. Because I keep a record with a note on each book and assign each a mark out of 10 to assist me in this exercise, I’m easily able to list the five I ranked most highly. They appear here in the order I...
The Godfather: Peter Corris on the Victorians
I first read Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) at school when it was a set text. I was very impressed by it, answered a question on it in the exams and got a good mark, although I’ve long forgotten what I wrote. At university, Hardy’s poems were set for...The Godfather: Peter Corris on books he’s glad to have read
Recently I was asked to name five books that everyone should read. That old chestnut. I declined; people have such different tastes and read in such different ways that the idea makes no sense. I offered instead ‘five books I’m glad to have read’. This was accepted. I...
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