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The Stress of Her Regard
Tim Powers 1989 (Tachyon 2008)



"Michael Crawford is forced to flee when discovers his bride brutally murdered in their wedding bed. Yet it is not the revengeful townspeople he fears but the deadly embrace of the malignant spirit that is claiming him as her bridegroom.
Crawford will not travel alone; soon he is aided by his fellow victims, the greatest poets of his day—Byron, Keats, and Shelley. Together they embark upon a desperate journey, crisscrossing Europe and battling the vampiric fiend who seeks her ultimate pleasure in their ravaged bodies and imperiled souls.
Telling a secret history of passion and terror, Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates, Declare, Three Days to Never) masterfully recasts the tragic lives of the Romantics into a uniquely frightening tale."

I didn't enjoy this book and was pleased to get it over with. It is a long novel but still never manages to explain what's going on adequately. I found it unengaging, not scary and I never fully got into it.
The use of 1980s English dialogue in a book set around 1820 is constantly jarring and stopped me from immersing myself in the story.
Winner of the 1990 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award.

Best Science Fiction of the Year: 1, Part 1
Terry Carr (editor) 1976 (Peacock 1978)



Terry Carr edited this series for sixteen years in the seventies and eighties. Most of them were published in Britain by Gollancz as hardbacks only, but for some reason Penguin did a paperback edition for 1975 but didn't repeat the experiment in later years. It might have been more of a success if they hadn't tried to rinse the readers by splitting it unnecessarily into two volumes. I read part two about 30 years ago so I thought it was about time I finished the job.
Stories by John Varley, Gene Wolfe, Algis Budrys, Harlan Ellison and Gregory Benford are all decent but don't really stick in the memory. Also included is the first story that I've read from Cordwainer Smith's "Instrumentality of Mankind" future history. It was pretty good and I've put the rest of the sequence on the to do list.

Durham - A County Built on Coal
Maurice Boyle 1994 (Northeast Press 1994)



Maurice Boyle was a journalist from Sunderland and it was the colliery in the middle of the city, Monk Wearmouth, which was the last one to close in the Durham coalfield in 1993. Four years later The Stadium of Light opened on the site.
Before the first world war there were over 200 pits in Durham and Boyle gives a good little overview in 55 pages of the industry in the county. There's a nice set of photographs as well.

The Dying Earth
Jack Vance 1950 (Panther 1985)



"The Dying Earth is the first of Jack Vance’s Tales of the Dying Earth and contains six somewhat overlapping stories all set in the future when the sun is red and dim, much technology has been lost, and most of humanity has died out. Our planet is so unrecognizable that it might as well be another world, and evil has been “distilled” so that it’s concentrated in Earth’s remaining inhabitants.
But it’s easy to forget that a failing planet is the setting for the Dying Earth stories, for they are neither depressing nor bleak, and they’re not really about the doom of the Earth. These stories are whimsical and weird and they focus more on the strange people who remain and the strange things they do. Magicians, wizards, witches, beautiful maidens, damsels in distress, seekers of knowledge, and vain princes strive to outwit each other for their own advantage." (fantasyliterature.com)

Listed in "Fantasy The 100 Best Books", "Modern Fantasy: The Hundred Best Novels" and "100 Must-Read Fantasy Novels" but I can't really see what the fuss is about. It didn't draw me in and make me believe in it like a good fantasy novel should. It was ok and no hardship to read at 150 pages.
Supposedly the inspiration for the game "Dungeons and Dragons"

Zulu War 1879
Ian Knight & Ian Castle 1994 (Osprey 2003)



"In the late 1870s the British Imperial administration in the Cape colony in southern Africa engineered a war with the Zulu kingdom which they viewed as a challenge to their authority. The early campaigns went terribly wrong for the British with the decisive Zulu victory at Isandlwana ending the first phase of the invasion of Zululand. Ultimately however, in spite of this setback, the British won the war: the Zulus, primarily reliant on their skill with the stabbing spear at close-quarters, had no real defence or retaliation against the massed firepower of professional British soldiers firing Martini-Henry rifles. These single-shot breech-loading weapons decimated the Zulus as they tried to advance towards the red-coated British troops. Even at Isandlwana the Zulus lost more than a thousand men, and victory was only really guaranteed them when their opponents began to run out of ammunition. This title examines the British-Zulu war in general and its two key battles, Isandlwana and Khambula in particular. The reasons for the initial British defeat are discussed as are the shortcomings of the Zulu forces that led to their ultimate subjugation at the hands of the British."

Rorke's Drift only gets mentioned in passing as it was a minor engagement that had no real influence on the war.
Another excellent entry in the Osprey Campaign series.

Sargasso of Space
Andre Norton 1955 (Ace 1978)



"Sargasso of Space is the debut novel in Solar Queen series by Andre Norton. The book introduces the readers to Dane Thorson, a cargo apprentice who by mechanical pyscho selection is assigned to the Solar Queen, a trader ship. The ship’s crew pools all its entire earnings and wins a whole planet at an auction. The team then explores this mysterious planet known as Limbo where they discover the remains of a lost civilization, as well as space pirates, globular natives, strange artifacts and many others." (bookseriesinorder.com)

One of the many space adventure novels for children that the author published in the fifties when she was one of very few female SF writers.
I remember it from the library as a boy but I've no recollection of reading it. It's pretty standard fare; enjoyable but nothing special.
I'm not sure how far in the future it's set but it's an all male universe although several human (and alien) races are involved which was always an agreeable feature of Norton's books.

Shakespeare
Bill Bryson 2007 (HarperPress 2007)



"Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just fourteen words in his own hand–his name signed six times and the words “by me” on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives... We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over."

Picked up for a pound at a charity shop. Very readable biography about someone about which nearly nothing is known, aimed at a middlebrow readership which means just about everyone apart from scholars and the freaks and nutters who think that someone else wrote the plays.
Part of a publishers series called "Eminent Lives" which are "brief biographies by distinguished authors".

A Plot for Murder
Fredric Brown 1948 (Black Curtain Press 2013)



The protagonist is a writer for a radio soap opera in New York and is working on scripts for a radio whodunnit series when he finds that his acquaintances are being murdered using methods copied from his notes.

Readable and enjoyable without being gripping and not quite up to the same standard as some of the authors other crime novels.
The gun toting red headed femme fatale on the cover does not feature in the book. It's good that these small presses are republishing long out of print works but you sometimes find that the budget won't stretch to cover art that's relevant to the contents.

Waterloo 1815
Geoffrey Wootten 1992 (Osprey ?)



"Waterloo holds a special place among the great battles of history. The climax of more than twenty years of war, it was indeed a close-run affair, matching two of the world's greatest generals Napoleon and Wellington. This volume covers the entire campaign including the battles of Quatre Bras, Ligny and Wavre, with five full-colour maps and three highly detailed bird's eye views showing decisive moments in the action. An excellent sense of the closeness of the battle is communicated Wellington himself claimed it was "the nearest thing you ever saw in your life" and this gripping account shows the full justice of that statement."

Waterloo itself takes up less than half the book with the preamble and the other three battles making up the rest. Quatre Bras, Ligny and Wavre have now got their own books in the Campaign series but oddly, the main match itself hasn't been allocated its own volume.
The book states that the author has published a number of books on the napoleonic wars but all I can find apart from this one is a set of wargame rules. Despite that the book's a decent entry in the series and the text, maps and illustrations are all fine.

A Month of Mystery- Book Two
Robert Arthur (editor) 1970 (Pan 1973)



"Fifteen devilish refinements of mystery and the macabre from such experts as Sax Rohmer, Gerald Kersh and John D. MacDonald.
Read them and know that uncontrollable urge to look over your shoulder..."

I only bought the book because it has an excellent Kersh story that isn't in any of his own collections. The rest of the book is also very good; one of the best anthologies I've read for a long time. There's a nice mixture of detective tales, crime, ghosts, horror and the plain weird. Hitchcock didn't really edit the book but his name was often used as a force multiplier for book sales.
One of the stories is by E. C. Bentley who it turns out is Edmund Clerihew Bentley, the schoolboy inventor of the clerihew. On the same day that I read that story, G. K. Chesterton's "The Man who was Thursday" dropped through my letter box and I noticed that the dedication was to none other than E. C. Bentley. Spooky or what?