Ms. J. Jones

An exemplary biography - engaging and important, 16 May 2013

This is an exemplary biography. Firstly, because it matters: before we perform the instinctive genuflection `Wordsworth'n'Coleridge! All hail!' we can pause a moment and reflect on the extent to which these wonderful poems could nothave come into existence without the selfless support of the sisterhood - the three Fricker sisters (Sarah Coleridge, Mary Lovell, Edith Southey), Mary Hutchinson (Wordsworth) and her sister Sara (Coleridge's `Asra'), Dorothy Wordsworth and the daughters of the next generation (Sara Coleridge, Dora Wordsworth and Edith May Southey) - who nurtured their male relatives at a terrible cost to their own happiness and sanity.

A Passionate Sisterhood is a… Read more

Timeless, 14 May 2013

The narrator of this trilogy is a learned cat on a golden chain and we are at once in the world of long dark winters and Slavic myth. The witches' houses run on chicken legs or cat's paws but their inhabitants are not as instantly terrifying as the iron- toothed Baba Yaga of Ransome's Old Peter's Russian Tales. They are old and wise and various. Their magics are the powers of words and music. They must be learned. At the beginning of the story it is the deepest midwinter night and a slave-woman, huddled close to the big communal stove, has given birth to a baby girl. An old witch is nearing the end of her three hundred year life. She needs an apprentice and has come to take the child… Read more

Outstanding, 12 May 2013

I've just re-read Anatomy of Murder. I am a huge admirer of Imogen Robertson's writing so read it eagerly as soon as it was published. Loved it then - think it even better now. Robertson's writing is richly energetic and she has a large cast of characters. No speed-reading or skipping permissible (or desirable) in her stories. You've got to be awake and involved and the rewards are tremendous. It may be Robertson's sense of history or her feeling for c18th London or her knowledge of music or her complex plot or her vivid characters that make this book so very good. I don't cry easily over books but, towards the end of this book, I had as much trouble holding back the tears on this second… Read more