Forgotten Books: Five Mysteries by Rhode, Rinehart, Jackson, and Vine

Very brief descriptions of five mysteries read at the fag-end of this year.The Murders in Praed Street by John Rhode (1928)A book which begins extremely well as a man receives a call from a hospital to come and identify a body. He reaches there only to be told that no such call had been made …

Forgotten Book: Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden (1928)

Virendranath Chattopadhaya, the younger brother of the Nightingale of India, Sarojini Naidu, came from an influential Bengali family settled in the state of Hyderabad. A man with a flair for languages (According to Wikipedia, he knew more than 12 languages), Chatto (as he was fondly called) was also a man devoted to the cause of …

Review: Orlando by Virginia Woolf

There is something intimidating about Virginia Woolf. As the High-Priestess of High Modernism, she has a reputation of being opaque and denying easy access to her texts. So, though I've read and enjoyed her texts like Mrs. Dalloway and A Room of One's Own, there are a couple of her texts still languishing on my shelves. …