John Louis: A Life in Speedway
Book
A well-known East Anglian scrambles star of the 60s before switching to speedway at the end of that...
Sarah (7798 KP) rated Machines Like Me in Books
Sep 12, 2020
Adam too is a fascinating character and any part of the book that featured him was a winner. The problem with this book is the two main characters Charlie and Miranda. They are completely unlikeable and self absorbed, and the way they treat Adam (and Mark in some respects) is absolutely awful. There's something Alan Turing says towards the end of the book that really sums up how much of a horrible person Charlie is. Whilst having unlikeable characters isn't necessarily a bad thing for some books, in this I just found them rather irritating and annoying. And Charlie's constant internal rambling monologuing got rather boring and really dragged on.
I really wanted to love this because the general idea is fantastic, and there are parts of this where I did love it. It's just a same it was let down by the characters.
Twelve Months in the Saddle
Book
Cycling's inexorable rise in popularity continued 2014 when more than three million people lined the...
The Prince Who Would be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart
Book
Henry Stuart's life is the last great forgotten Jacobean tale. Shadowed by the gravity of the Thirty...
The Indomitable Frank Whitcombe: How a Genial Giant from Cardiff Became a Rugby League Legend in Yorkshire and Australia
Book
Frank Whitcombe, described as 'one of the greatest Welsh rugby league forwards of all time', played...
The West Coast Lines: BR Steam from Euston to Glasgow
Book
The two decades following the end of the Second World War was a period of great change in Britain....
Great Railway Maps of the World
Book
From Mark Ovenden, the author of London Underground by Design and Metro Maps of the World, comes...
Awix (3310 KP) rated The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) in Movies
Mar 4, 2018 (Updated Mar 4, 2018)
Actually really, really tame as a horror movie by modern standards, obviously, but also of great historical interest as the birth of a legend in British cinema. One can't help suspecting the TV show was a lot more thoughtful, but this still works pretty well as an SF movie, and an influential one at that, and the juxtaposition of B-movie SF ideas and images with post-war Britain is interesting. Imported American star Brian Donlevy is not very good as Professor Q (original writer Nigel Kneale claimed he was on the sauce all the time); Richard Wordsworth is mesmerising as the doomed astronaut.
David McK (3425 KP) rated The Serpent Sword in Books
Jul 7, 2019
When reading this, I had no idea which came first: this, or Cornwell's The Last Kingdom.
Thta's not to set that this novel isn't enjoyable, and that we can't have more than one story set in and about the same time period (indeed, if anything, this is set even earlier than Cornwell's novels, i.e. before the time of Alftred the Great): I did, in fact, quite enjoy this.
Throughout the course of this novel, we follow the exploits and the coming of age of Harffy's main protaganist, Beobrand of Bernicia, from his arrival at the court of King Edwin through his first taste of a battle in a shieldwall, to his time at a Christian Monastery and travels throughout a lawless land before finally settling down (at least, until the next novel!)
What's Left? What's Right?: A Political Journey via North Korea and the Chinese Cultural Revolution
Book
What's Left? What's Right? is Muriel Seltman's political autobiography. Muriel and her husband were...