I'm quite confident that, if I start this blog with "remember the scythe?", most people reading it are going to immediately know where I'm pointing you to! That's right: Poldark. Now, I know that the series with Aidan Turner and his famous scythe was actually a remake of an earlier programme, but let's just focus on this more recent iteration of Winston Graham's novels about the eponymous Cornish hero. One of the things which is so wonderful about Poldark as a series - not only onscreen but even more so in the novels - is that it covers such a vast period of time. Because of the time in which it is set, there are huge local and global changes taking place around the characters and, when you have been invested in them for so long, you can really experience the upheaval alongside them. This is something I attempted with (what I hope) was a reasonable degree of success in my Early Story of the Rite trilogy. If it ever actually appears on bookshelves, it won...
For more than a decade, Derek Philpott and his son, Dave, have been writing to pop stars from the 1960s to the 90s to take issue with the lyrics of some of their best-known songs. But then, to their great surprise, the pop stars started writing back... Dear Mr Pop Star contains 100 of Derek and Dave's greatest hits, including correspondence with Katrina and the Waves, Tears for Fears, Squeeze, The Housemartins, Suzi Quatro, Devo, Deep Purple, Nik Kershaw, T Pau, Human League, Eurythmics, Wang Chung, EMF, Mott the Hoople, Heaven 17, Jesus Jones, Johnny Hates Jazz, Carter the Unstoppable Sex Machine, Chesney Hawkes and many, many more. When I agreed to review this book and be part of the blog tour for the launch, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. This book's subject and way of writing is most unusual...but it works! What a great hobby to write to celebrities, and greater still that some of them would reply, often matching the cheek and wit that was init...