British India to 1857: The Rise and Fall of the East India Company
If you follow me on Twitter or read last week's blog post, you'll know I'm just back from a holiday in India. I'd like to blog about India while the country is still top of my mind. Last week I did touch on how the war of 1857 (the Indian Mutiny or the First War of...
A taste of India
I'm back from three weeks in India. We went out with an Indian friend who has been talking about us visiting the country together for around 20 years. Finally we all decided that we're not getting any younger and if we were going to do it, we should do it now. It was...
Fouetté: Ailish Sinclair
I’ve been away for a few weeks and I’m well overdue a review of Foutté, the last book in Ailish Sinclair’s trilogy, A Dancer’s Journey. I’m quite glad to have had a few weeks to digest this one because Foutté is a wild ride. The first thing to say is that the book is...
Precious Words
Years ago I started blogging (originally on Blogger at https://thewhiterajah.blogspot.com/) and I wanted to prove that I could produce something every week. I think I sort of hoped someone would notice that I can turn out a regular column and that I might get some...
2023 Book Reviews
Every year I point out that this is not a book blog but every year there seem to be so many reviews... 2023 has been a comparatively quiet year with only 11 books. Click on the titles to go to the full-length reviews. As ever, the majority of the books reviewed are...
The Shadow Network: Deborah Swift
We're almost halfway through January and Deborah Swift's latest is published next month so now seems a good time to get my review out. The Shadow Network takes us back to the world of WW2 espionage that she introduced in The Silk Code. This story features Neil...
Hello 2024!
Here we are, five days into the New Year. How's it going for you? We started the year's tango early with an afternoon of dancing locally on New Year's Day but I must admit that, with that on top of the excesses of New Year's Eve, Tuesday was a bit of a blur. Despite...
Merry Christmas!
That's about it for 2023. I'm shutting down now until the New Year. Here's an appropriately Christmassy picture, courtesy of whoever in knitting pillar box hats round here. There are a couple of good ones locally but I picked this: I'm not writing a proper blog post...
A free short story for Christmas
I'm not a big short-story writer but once I got the idea for this one, I couldn't let it go. It features Galbraith and Pole and is set soon after they first met in Something Wicked. You can enjoy it even if you haven't read Something Wicked but I'm giving the book...
Why I don’t say I’m a historian
Over on Twitter people are reviving the old Academic Historians vs Historical Novelists debate. I’d been vaguely thinking about writing something about this and had just decided not to when this discussion got me thinking about it again. I'm not going to get into the...