'The Scent of Death' by Andrew Taylor

 22 May 2026

Andrew Taylor is an incredibly prolific contemporary writer of historical fiction. I have really enjoyed reading my first Andrew Taylor novel, 'The Scent of Death' - a thriller (published in 2014) set in New York in 1778 during the American War of Independence. It was interesting to contrast this New York with the 1746 version described by Francis Spufford in his brilliant novel 'Golden Hill' (reviewed here in August 2017). By the 1770s New York is a stronghold of the British army, backed by American loyalists who are supporting the crown against the revolutionary army led by George Washington. The story follows Edward Savill, a civil servant in the American Department who has been sent from London to assess the situation in New York. He is quickly distracted from the wider political and military scene by a series of odd events involving the family with whom he is lodging, and finds himself investigating assault and murder. Andrew Taylor writes in the style and sensibilities of the period: while Savill is kinder and more considerate to the servants than some of his colleagues, his attitudes towards slaves feels upsettingly uncomfortable to the modern reader. The plot begins slowly but gathers pace, becoming genuinely thrilling and shockingly violent. It's well written and obviously carefully researched, giving a fascinating portrait of this transitional period in American history, without ever feeling like a history lesson. I chose this Andrew Taylor novel to start with because it wasn't labelled as part of a multi-novel series, but having finished it I was delighted to discover that Edward Savill appears in another Taylor novel, which I am now looking forward to reading.

'The Kellerby Code' by Jonny Sweet

12 May 2026

Jonny Sweet is a comedian and actor who I knew from Tom Basden's brilliant Radio 4 sitcom 'Party' - about a group of naïve students who have decided to start their own political party. His debut novel 'The Kellerby Code' (which I have just finished reading as an unabridged audio book, narrated by Jack Davenport) is a dark comic thriller which Sweet has described as 'Brideshead Revisited' meets 'The Talented Mr Ripley'. Edward Jevons is a lower-middle-class young man besotted with his upper-class university friends Robert and Stanza. His increasingly desperate attempts to ingratiate himself by being helpful seem to be casting him in the role of a servant rather than a friend. Through a series of small incremental steps Edward's journey becomes more macabre and his predicament more cringeworthy. While it might be unfair to expect a novel by a comedian to have to be funny, a novel by a comedian that specifically references 'The Code of the Woosters' by PG Wodehouse wasn't as funny as I was expecting. It's a thrilling ride but I didn't find Edward a sympathetic enough character. Jonny Sweet said he was aiming for a mixture of Wodehouse and the Coen Brothers. It's an interesting and very readable debut but the grand guignol needed a bit more light relief for me. 

'Driftwood' by Martina Laird

4 May 2026

On Saturday we were at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon to see 'Driftwood' - a new play by Martina Laird, directed by Justin Audibert, in a RSC production in association with Kiln Theatre. This is the debut play by Martina Laird - an actor who has previously appeared in a number of RSC productions in Stratford. We saw her playing an American political strategist in 'The New Real' by David Edgar, also at The Other Place, in 2024 (reviewed here in October 2024). 'Driftwood' is set in Trinidad and Tobago in 1956 as Eric Williams' People's National Movement is about to win the general election that will set the country on the path to self governance and then independence (which was achieved in 1962). The play focuses on a gentleman's club in Port of Spain, which is owned by an Englishman, managed by a local woman Pearl and her daughter Ruby, and is attracting the interest of a corrupt US Marine who wants to use the premises to store some form of contraband. The action takes place in one room of the club where the six characters interact with each other with the feel of a Tennessee Williams play. But the story of the club, its ownership, its future and the family who have been running it, is clearly an analogy for what is happening to Trinidad and Tobago. 'Driftwood' is enjoyable, emotional and unpredictable. Martina Laird's writing is strong, including a particularly clever multi-layered card game scene. But I think a little more reference within the play to the historical political setting might have helped us fully to appreciate the intended parallels. The acting is excellent, especially Cat White as Ruby and Martins Imhangbe as Diamond - the stranger whose arrival at the club opens the play. 

'There are Rivers in the Sky' by Elif Shafak

1 May 2026

I really enjoyed Elif Shafak's 2021 novel ‘The Island of Missing Trees’ (reviewed here in April 2023) - a beautifully written family saga through which she tells the history of the division of Cyprus. The British Turkish novelist's 2024 book 'There are Rivers in the Sky' is an even more ambitious combination of compelling narrative and a vast span of history, linked by a single drop of water that travels from the Assyrian court of King Ashurbanipal to Victorian London to modern day Iraq and contemporary London. In alternating chapters, Elif Shafak tells the stories of three characters in different historical periods who are linked by connections to 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' (the earliest recorded piece of literature), the Yazidis (history's most persecuted ethnic minority) and water. It's incredibly well researched, with some characters adapted from real historical figures. Narratively compelling, the three strands are obviously thematically linked but you gradually realise they are also going to have actual connections, which turn out to be quite surprising. 'There are Rivers in the Sky' deals with some grim topics, including genocide and sexual slavery, but it's a fascinating, impressive, epic tale. 

Andy Zaltzman

29 April 2026

I have been a fan of the comedian Andy Zaltzman since he started presenting 'The News Quiz' on BBC Radio 4 in 2020. Indeed, there was a period during the Covid lockdowns when I found the actual news so depressing that I avoided all bulletins, relying entirely on 'The News Quiz' to update me once a week. I then discovered Andy Zaltman's long-running topical comedy podcast 'The Bugle' ("the audio newspaper for a visual world") which quickly became essential weekly listening. On Tuesday we were at the Royal Theatre in Northampton to catch one of the last shows of Andy's current stand-up tour, 'The Zaltgeist'. It was great to see him in person for the first time. His apparently rambling - but actually meticulously constructed - show took us through current world events, cricket and reflections on Northamptonshire's gifts to the world. I particularly enjoyed his incredibly detailed snooker analogy for Keir Starmer's current struggles - all the funnier for being pedantically accurate to the laws of snooker. His mix of intellectual curiosity, absurdism and use of props and prepared texts reminded me of Simon Munnery (first reviewed here in July 2011). 

'Into The Woods' by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine

29 April 2026

On Monday we were at the Bridge Theatre in London to see 'Into the Woods', Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's musical mash-up of Brothers Grimm fairy tales including Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel. Jordan Fein's production is a hoot, managing to be charmingly silly, but also darkly serious, reminding us of how grim the original Grimm fairy tales were. The enormous cast are all strong and Sondheim's witty lyrics and corny puns come over clearly. I was also impressed by the movement (directed by Jenny Ogilvie) including the Baker and his wife twitching like puppets under the enchantment of the witch. And there is some very cute actual puppetry (designed by Cheryl 'Chuck' Brown, Max Humphries and Tom Scutt). There is a real wow moment when the black backdrop parts to reveal Tom Scutt's remarkably realistic stage forest - an excess of green foliage lit by shafts of sunlight, creating many dark, frightening corners as the characters move into the woods. The show is a weird mix of styles halfway between opera and pantomime but it's lots of fun. 

Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert

28 April 2026

Last Saturday's Northampton Symphony Orchestra concert at Spinney Theatre in Northampton was the third time we have played with the brilliant young pianist Julian Chan. Following stunning performances of the ‘Piano Concerto No 5’ by Saint-Saens (reviewed here in February 2023) and Amy Beach’s ‘Piano Concerto’ (reviewed here in July 2024), Julian joined us again on Saturday to play Rachmaninoff's 'Piano Concerto No. 3'. Julian gave a truly thrilling performance of this incredibly emotional showpiece, which received a rapturous reception from both the audience and the orchestra. It was a pleasure and privilege to accompany him. We started the concert with España - the popular rhapsody for orchestra by Emmanuel Chabrier. After the interval we played Arnold Bax's 'Symphony No 2'. In his pre-concert talk Eric McElroy, a trustee of the Sir Arnold Bax Society, told us that there were only two performances of Bax symphonies scheduled anywhere in the world this year - a performance of the Sixth Symphony in Tokyo a few weeks ago and our performance of the Second in Northampton. Writing in The Guardian a few days before our concert, Tom Service bemoaned the continued absence of Bax from the Proms schedule, saying: "There may currently be no less fashionable music than the hyper-romantic symphonies and orchestral works of Arnold Bax. The British composer’s music featured in pretty well every Proms season throughout the 1930s and 40s and early 50s, yet he has been the rarest of visitors to the Royal Albert Hall since then. When was the last Bax symphony heard at the Proms, you ask? 2011! Far too long for a fan like me." NSO performed Bax's First Symphony two years ago (reviewed here in March 2024) but the Second Symphony (completed in 1926) is a very different work. As we started to rehearse, it seemed incredibly challenging - chromatically unpredictable and rhythmically complicated. Yet the music felt romantic rather than avant-garde. I enjoyed getting to grips with the symphony - initially as an intellectual exercise but gradually coming to appreciate the piece as a whole. Bax draws on many different musical influences: there are elements of the symphony that sound like some of his contemporaries, including Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky and the Celtic-inspired music of Granville Bantock. But Bax mixes these styles to create a consistent and satisfying whole, with all the thematic material of the symphony introduced in the first section of the opening movement. And there are some beautiful passages, particularly at the beginning of the second movement. I think our performance on Saturday went really well, making sense of what had appeared to be a challenging piece and winning many of our audience over to Bax - a tribute to the excellent work of our conductor John Gibbons. The symphony starts and ends with the same slow melancholy cor anglais fanfare, wonderfully played by Harriet Brown, providing an unresolved epilogue at the end of the final movement as the music fades to silence. The conductor Vernon Handley, who recorded all seven Bax symphonies with the BBC Philharmonic, said: "He knows he's leaving the Second Symphony for something to be said in his next symphony". I'm looking forward to discovering what resolution awaits when we tackle Bax Symphony No. 3 in a couple of years' time.

'Die Kaiserin' by Katharina Eyssen

24 April 2026

Having recently returned from a week in Vienna (which I wrote about here earlier in April 2026) we have been enjoying watching 'Die Kaiserin' (The Empress) - the Netflix German-language TV drama about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Set, and filmed, in some of the Hapsburg palaces we visited in our holiday, the series tells the story of the marriage of  Bavarian duchess Elisabeth 'Sisi' von Wittelsbach and Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria - the outline of which we discovered during our visit to the Schonbrunn Palace. Katharina Eyssen's dramatisation, set almost entirely within the imperial court, feels like a more serious cousin to 'The Great' ‘- Tony McNamara’s irreverent take on the story of Catherine the Great (reviewed here in March 2021) but also reminded me of some aspects of 'Game of Thrones'. Devrim Lingnau is great as Elisabeth, delicately poised on the point of transition between naive innocence and calculated politics - and showing the Empress's changing moods and growing understanding with tiny incremental changes in her facial expressions.