Here the author perpetuates an ugly, misguided stereotype by implying that the corporal's brutal behavior is part and parcel of his sexual preference. year old Harry is on his own after his parents and younger sister are killed when their house is bombed. This is an excellent book following the adventures of a boy travelling alone up the north east coast of England having been bombed out of his home and losing his family. Robert Westall's books have been published in 21 different countries and in 18 different languages, including Braille. Looking around the house he sees there is a note left by a family, telling him to enjoy his stay, however long it was.

He even found some wooden seed markers, and wrote the rabbits’ names on them, and stuck them in for tombstones. Harry pushes on with a wisdom well beyond his years, even as his country fights for its own existence. Though the book is aimed at young adults, Westall doesn't patronise or shy away from more adult ideas, and for this reason, I found it still spoke to me, despite being many years outside the target audience. The repetition of these points doesn't build to any greater theme or purpose: it's as if Theroux just didn't re-read his manuscript and hadn't realized that he'd used the exact same phrasing against the exact same target five times before. Apparently it was common practice for people, on this train, to throw their finished newspapers out of the window as there would be somebody along the line to pick them up and read them.Wry, observant and always seeing the empty half of the glass (unless it's filled with sludge), he travels the length of the coast of the UK by train and on foot, avowedly skipping castles and cathedrals and under-sampling cities. The author weaves some interesting social history into the story but it is the boy himself who really captures the reader's interest as he steadily becomes more independent and confident, learning from the experiences he has and the people he meets. It was all activity and warm upholstery and then the clang of a carriage door and train pulled out and left me in a sort of pine-scented silence. He felt … he felt like a bird flying very high, far from the world and getting further away all the time.

He did this in the summer of 1982, as the Falkland Wars raged, Prince William was born, and England was in throes of massive unemployment and labor unrest as Maggie Thatcher pushed through structural reforms with profound impacts on the deindustrializing country. Bill Bryson's Notes from a Small Island is a rather more cheerful account, though nowhere near as well written. I wanted to give up when I was halfway through, but some sick sense of perseverance compelled me to finish it. He has a real gift for getting people to talk to him and includes lots of quotations from his many conversation with British people. The garden, every detail of it, the bird-bath and the concrete rabbit, flashed black, white, black, white, black.

Then there were a couple of parts that crossed quite far into uncomfortable and combined with the jarring, perplexing ending, took this from great to "it's ok" for me. In addition, John enjoys a more recent travelogue, Felicity Cloake's new book Red Sauce Brown Sauce: A British Breakfast Odyssey (Mudlark); while Andy reads two poems from Fiona Benson's stunning new collection Ephemeron (Cape Poetry). As a portrait of the British Isles during the early 1980s, Theroux's book is compelling, but far from complete.

The beginning on the south and west of England is slow at times, but the section on Northern Ireland was amazing, and Scotland and east England continue. all over the world and written about it in an excellent series of travel books, he had never actually explored or written about the British Isles outside London. It's always initially difficult to see one's country through the eyes of a foreigner and this was my first attempt.Trotzdem: gerade wenn man viel unterwegs ist um Länder und Leute kennen zu lernen, sollte man das doch auch in der Heimat tun. The reality of war is the chill current that runs through the five stories in Westall's latest collection. We use cookies to personalise content and ads, to provide social media features and to analyse our traffic.