Tintin in Tibet is the twentieth book in the long running Tintin series of illustrated adventures by Hergé and was first published in 1960 – thirty years after the first Tintin adventure, Tintin in The Land of the Soviets. The story begins with Tintin on holiday in Switzerland with his good friends Captain Haddock and Professor Calculus plus, of course, Snowy, his beloved dog. Returning from a brisk walk in the mountains with Snowy, Tintin goes back to his hotel to meet Captain Haddock – who is unsurprisingly enjoying the holiday in a more sedate fashion and would much rather read the newspaper with a drink close to hand than clamber over rocks all day. The Captain shows Tintin a newspaper headline about a terrible plane crash high in the remote and icy mountains of Nepal.

Hergé, Tintin

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‘The destruction of a Russian hideout at SHAPE headquarters near Paris; the planned assassination of a Cuban thug in America; the tracking of a heroin ring from Rome to Venice and beyond; for Bond it is just routine. For anyone else – certain death.’

For Your Eyes Only is a collection of five James Bond short stories by Ian Fleming and was first published in 1960. Fleming had originally written the stories for a proposed series of Bond television adventures to be broadcast by CBS but that never transpired in the end. Two of the stories here were first published by Cosmopolitan and Playboy respectively. Although regarded to be an interesting offshoot from his series of Bond novels, For You Eyes Only is not generally regarded to be one of the strongest examples of Fleming’s work.

007, Ian Fleming, James Bond

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Oscar Wilde is a comprehensive (my paperback copy is well over 600 pages long with the index) and acclaimed biography by Richard Ellmann. The book took two decades to complete and was only finished shortly before the author’s death. Ellman completed the biography in the face of incurable illness and his affection and love for the subject shines through this astonishingly erudite and very sympathetic account of the writer’s life. ‘Oscar Wilde,’ writes Ellman. ‘We only have to hear the great name to anticipate that what will be quoted as his will surprise and delight us. Among the writers identified with the 1890s, Wilde is the only one who everybody still reads. The various labels that have been applied to the age – Aestheticism, Decadence – ought not to conceal the fact that our first association with it is Wilde – refulgent, majestic, ready to fall.’ The book is split into five sections (BEGINNINGS, ADVANCES, EXALTATIONS, DISGRACE, EXILE), each of which consists of chapters and is like a mini-book in itself.

Richard Ellman

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Masters and Commanders is a 2008 book by the historian Andrew Roberts about the Western Alliance between the United States and Great Britain at the highest level during World War 2. This is a comprehensive and absorbing study of the decisions that were made, the conferences, the disputes, the arguments over strategy, the friendships, the fractious relationships, and so on. It revolves around the four men who were key in the Anglo-American Alliance against Hitler; Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, the head of the British Army, and General George C Marshall, his American counterpart. The interactions between and around these four very different men and the ever changing problems they faced are fascinating to read about. ‘In all they had met seven times,’ writes Roberts of them. ‘And at these hard-fought meetings had hammered out a victorious strategy. There had been some individual defeats and disappointments in battle against the Axis, of course, but no campaign reversals. Above all the timing of the greatest amphibious assault in history had been justified by the only truly unanswerable criterion of warfare: success. Through their rows, standoffs, fist-shaking, charm offensives, hard-fought compromises and occasional tantrums, the Masters and Commanders performed that miracle and won victory in the west.’

Andrew Roberts, World War 2

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The Island of Doctor Moreau is a quasi-allegorical 1896 science fiction novel written by the great HG Wells. The story concerns the frequently terrified Edward Prendick, a shipwrecked sailor who is rescued in the South Seas and ends up on a remote and mysterious island where a hubristic scientist named Moreau is conducting all manner of strange and troubling experiments. Prendick is soon spooked by the strange sights he catches glimpses of in the jungle and the cries he hears late at night from his room and becomes very curious to find out what exactly is going on as this unsettling tale unfolds and the macabre secrets of Moreau are gradually revealed. ‘On January the Fifth, 1888,’ informs the wonderfully atmospheric introduction. ‘That is eleven months and four days after my uncle, Edward Prendick, a private gentleman, was picked up in latitude 5′ 3″ S. and longitude 101′ W. in a small open boat of which the name was illegible but which is supposed to have belonged to the missing schooner Ipecacuanha.

H. G. Wells

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Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the most pastoral and famous of his Wessex novels, was first published in 1874. The story concerns the elusive, beautiful and wayward young Bathsheba Everdene and the various men who develop a romantic interest in her over the course of the novel. Bathsheba arrives in the country to live with her aunt, Mrs Hurst, at the start of the book and soon attracts the attentions of local shepherd Gabriel Oak, who surprises Bathsheba by proposing marriage. ‘His Christian name was Gabriel, and on working days he was a young man of sound judgment, easy motions, proper dress, and general good character,’ writes Hardy.

Thomas Hardy

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From 1967 eighteen-year-old Susanna Kaysen spent two years at the famous McLean Hospital (of Sylvia Plath fame) in a psychiatric ward for teenage girls after a short session with a psychiatrist she’d never seen before. Girl, Interrupted (first published in 1993) is a memoir of her time there and told in a series of short non-chronological vignettes in which we, and Kaysen, slowly try and piece together the events that led to her spending so long at McLean and get a portrait of life in this strange and sometimes disturbing environment. ‘People ask, how did you get in there?’ writes Kaysen. ‘What they really want to know is if they are likely to end up in there as well. I can’t answer the real question. All I can tell them is it’s easy. It is easy to slip into a parallel universe. These worlds exist alongside this world.’ The book ruminates on society’s definitions of what constitutes sanity or insanity with Kaysen herself, despite her circumstances and location, sometimes feeling like a sane person in an insane world.

Girl, Interrupted is a relatively short memoir (my paperback copy runs to only 167 pages) but an interesting and very readable book that has unfortunately been a little overshadowed by the fairly average film version featuring Winona Ryder as Kaysen.

memoir, Susanna Kaysen

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‘Brought up by parents who were fanatical supporters of Oswald Mosley, Trevor Grundy became the youngest public speaker for the Union Movement, giving a speech in Trafalgar Square at the age of seventeen. Soon after, Trevor began to question his family and their beliefs. He discovered a new moral framework – and the shocking secret that his mother, an anti-Semitic Fascist, was Jewish.’

Memoir Of A Fascist Childhood was first published in 1998 and written by journalist Trevor Grundy. My paperback copy is just over two hundred pages long and the book is very readable and accessible with much humour despite the sometimes disturbing themes. The heart of the book is Grundy’s relationship with his mother but it also serves as an interesting and authentic glimpse into ordinary working class London life in immediate post-war Britain.

British fascism, Oswald Mosley, Trevor Grundy

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‘A frightening and powerful story of loss of freedom and identity in a totalitarian world. V for Vendetta is the chronicle of a world of despair and oppressive tyranny. A work of sterling clarity and intelligence, V For Vendetta is everything comics weren’t supposed to be. England Prevails…’

V for Vendetta is a 286 page graphic novel by Alan Moore collected from the original series of strips he produced with illustrator David Lloyd. The story is set in the near future after a limited nuclear war that resulted in Britain being controlled by a fascist government. However, the careful control exerted over the country by fascist party Norsefire is threatened by a flamboyant lone anarchist/terrorist known as only as V. This theatrical and mysterious vigilante, who wears a Guy Fawkes mask and flowing wig and cloak, declares war on the the government and his personal vendetta seems to be especially bad news for anyone connected to a secret and now obsolete concentration camp…

Alan Moore, Comics, David Lloyd

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‘It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight-back against the horde, World War Z brings the very finest traditions of American journalism to bear on what is surely the most incredible story in the history of civilization.’

‘World War Z‘ was first published in 2006 and written by Max Brooks – the author of ‘The Zombie Survival Guide’. The book is yet another riff on George A Romero’s classic ‘dead’ series of films and presents a scenario where the zombie epidemic was a worldwide phenomenon, leading to a protracted battle for control of the planet between the living and walking dead.

Max Brooks, world war, zombies

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‘Shattered by the murder of his wife at the hands of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, James Bond has gone to pieces as an agent. M gives him one last chance, sending him to Japan for a near-impossible mission. There Bond is trained in the fighting arts of Ninja warriors and sent to infiltrate a mysterious fortress known as the ‘Castle of Death’ – a place of nightmares where a lethal poisoned garden destroys all who go there – and awakens an old, terrifying enemy. You Only Live Twice sees Bond’s final encounter with an insane mastermind – one that could mean the end for 007…’

You Only Live Twice is the 12th of thirteen James Bond novels written by Ian Fleming and the last to be published (in 1964) while he was alive. The novel follows on from the shocking events of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – a book you should probably read before you pick up this one.

007, Ian Fleming, James Bond

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