Louise

The Ghost

There are some authors whose books you take to straight away – for me those authors include Jilly Cooper and John Grisham. There are others that can take a little more time to get used to. It took me a while to get into Ian Rankin, now I count him as one of my favourite crime writers so I generally find it worth persisting….

Hot Fuzz

In Shaun of the Dead Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost brilliantly parodied zombie movies, while at the same time creating a damn good film which fits nicely into the list of great horror films. The follow-up, Hot Fuzz…

“Biography” of cancer wins award

The Emperor of All Maladies, a biography of cancer by oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, has won The Guardian First Book award and the £10,000 prize. Mukherjee’s book beat four novels on the shortlist including Booker nominated Pigeon English. Started as a small journal attempting to answer patients’ questions about their illness, the book grew…

The Greenhouse

Last year, along with my husband and a couple of friends, I embarked on a challenge we called EuroFifty. We intended to visit all 50 countries in Europe within one year. Unfortunately we didn’t quite manage to visit the entire continent…

The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

I do love a good drag queen. The hair, the lipstick, the clothes that no woman in her right mind would ever be found dead in and most of all the absolutely bitchy as hell attitude. I once made the fatal mistake during a World Aids Day bingo game and got ripped to shreds by the host(ess) of the competition…

The Reluctant Detective

I was first drawn to Scottish crime novel The Reluctant Detective by the tweets of its author Sinclair Macleod who uses social media to promote this book and its follow up The Good Girl. He claims that his novels are as “Scottish as Irn-Bru and Haggis” and offer “Crime with a Scottish accent” …

Limitless

Bradley Cooper was recently named People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, much to the chagrin of Ryan Gosling fans who simply can’t understand why their man has been overlooked. In the past couple of years Cooper has managed to make the jump…

Q returns for Skyfall

It’s just been confirmed that the character of Q will return in the new James Bond film Skyfall. MI6’s technical genius and gadget boffin will be played by Ben Wishaw, a 31 year-old who has previously appeared Brideshead Revisited and the TV series The Hour. This is the first time that Q will be played by an actor younger than Bond and is certainly a bold move….