CLARENDON HOUSE PUBLICATIONS

I’ve wanted to be a writer from a very young age. I recall sometime in 1967, when I was 8 years old, our family was in the throes of preparing to migrate to the edge of the desert in Australia from the edge of the Peak District in Yorkshire, England. I didn’t want to go, but Decisions Had Been Made and at the age of 8 one doesn’t have a veto on such matters, so there I was in my living room watching my father go through a whole heap of stuff - literally, a heap, piled in the

Despite having a pile of books to be read that threatens to topple over and crush me, I could not resist the recommendation of acclaimed author David Bowmore when it came to British author Ted Lewis’s 1970 novel, Jack’s Return Home . It’s the original book behind the much better-known 1971 film adaptation, Get Carter . In fact, due to the movie’s success, the book was quickly retitled Get Carter . British actor Michael Caine plays Jack Carter in the film, a totally ruthless g

Having recently finished Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree , I thought it deserved a review. The novella is a gentle story, nostalgic for the middle of the nineteenth century. Back then, music in church was a cooperative affair, as Hardy says in his 1898 preface: “displacement of these ecclesiastical bandsmen by an isolated organist (often at first a barrel-organist) or harmonium player…the change has tended to stultify the professed aims of the clergy, its direct result being

I lived in London for about six years, and for most of that time was in Highgate, one of the most beautiful and romantic parts of the metropolis. Highgate gets its name from the Bishop of London’s old hunting grounds: there used to be a high, deer-proof hedge surrounding the estate, and the bishop kept a toll-house where one of the main northward roads out of London entered his land, hence the ‘gate in the hedge’. As the village of Highgate was about a day’s ride from London,