Brian Thompson (1) (1935–2022)
Autor de Keeping Mum: A Wartime Childhood
Para otros autores llamados Brian Thompson, ver la página de desambiguación.
Sobre El Autor
Brian Thompson has written for the stage, radio, television, & is the author of four novels. He divides his time between Oxford, England, & the South of France. (Bowker Author Biography)
Series
Obras de Brian Thompson
Going to the Pictures 1 copia
Geezers 1 copia
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1935
- Fecha de fallecimiento
- 2022-03-04
- Género
- male
Miembros
Reseñas
Nightmare of a Victorian Bestseller: Martin Tupper's… por Brian Thompson
At a bookstore in Harvard Square, I bought this because Tupper is distantly related to me somehow, but I kept reading because it's such a sad book! When Elizabeth Gilbert gave her talk about maybe having only one good book in her, I thought of this guy, who really did only have one good book, and spent the rest of his life trying to live it down.
The author uses the Baker brothers to good effect as a centrepiece to explain British Imperial history during the mid 1800's. He also uses Charles Gordon and to a lesser degree Fred Burnaby to widen the view. It starts with a look at Mauritius and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), then moves to the Crimea and then into Africa. The second half of the book is a very good exploration into why Britain became involved in the Sudan. But here he uses people to explain his point. A good read.
Bella Wallis is the title character in Brian Thompson's The Widow's Secret; in 1870s London, she is able to make her independent way in the world by dint of her alter ego, Henry Ellis Margam, and the sensational novels that "he" publishes, in which the author skewers members of society whose bad behaviour has brought about Bella's opprobrium. If she cannot bring them to justice outright, she can at least shame them among their peers, many of whom read Margam's novels and most of whom can pinpoint the real individuals whose characters are being so pointedly shown up. When a young prostitute is brutally murdered, Bella gathers her friends Captain Quigley (a dubious character), Murch (most mysterious) and Urmiston (a former middle class official of the railroad fallen on hard times), and together they resolve to reveal the brute behind the savage attack. But that person has more resources than they know, and soon the friends find themselves fighting for their very lives.... This is the first in a series, the second of which I actually read before finding this one; I like the characters and the plotting, but most of all I like the very gritty Victorian England that Thompson portrays. Bella and her friends are not the sexually stultified creatures we expect from that historical period, and the poor of the city are shown neither as villains nor victims, only as human beings struggling in a very dystopian reality. I hope there are more novels to come in this series, and would recommend it to anybody who likes the genre of historical mystery and who doesn't mind some grime in their reading!… (más)
The Captain's Table, by Brian Thompson, tells the story of young heiress Mary Skillane, who is in love with a mad inventor, Kennett; but her father, Sir William Skillane, has promised her to a thoroughly bad scallywag, Robert Judd, who seeks her hand primarily to get his own hands on the stash of pearls (long ago stolen by Sir William) that form the basis of the Skillane fortune. Why, it's a scenario absolutely screaming for a fictionalized account, and the widow Bella Wallis is just the woman to write it, given her prior success as the author "Henry Ellis Margam." But Bella and her friends soon discover that scullduggery in fiction is far more congenial than the real thing.... I stumbled across this, the second novel in an apparent series, quite fortuitously, and I'm glad that I did. To some degree it is a light, humourous and somewhat fluffy Victorian pastiche, but unlike many such novels set during that period in England, here we find both frank talk about sex among unmarried people both straight and gay, and some very grimy and gritty descriptions of the impoverished underside of Victorian life. My one quibble is that some of the story takes place in Cornwall, my ancestral land, and its people are portrayed in a less than flattering light, but that's just my own bias. The prose is at times quite witty and at other times fittingly dark, and the characters are interesting and not always appealing. I enjoyed the story itself as well, although I still feel that Bella is a bit of a mystery - a positive thing in a series, I believe! I plan to read the first book in the series, The Widow's Secret, in the near future, and then to look for more stories about Bella, her paramour Westland and their accomplices. Recommended.… (más)
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Estadísticas
- Obras
- 14
- Miembros
- 209
- Popularidad
- #106,076
- Valoración
- 3.2
- Reseñas
- 10
- ISBNs
- 138
- Idiomas
- 2