Dec 14, 2025 | News
Words by Chris Schuler These days, the figures who have loomed large in our cultural lives seem to be disappearing one by one. On the last weekend of November, I was saddened to learn that the playwright Tom Stoppard had died, aged 88. His work has inspired me...
Oct 27, 2025 | News
By Suzi Feay Social historian Hallie Rubenhold has followed up her pioneering account of Jack the Ripper’s victims, ‘The Five’, with an in depth new look at the case of gambler, fraudster and wife-murderer Dr Crippen. Rubenhold centres female victims rather than male...
Oct 11, 2025 | News
By John Walsh The news of Jilly Cooper’s death on 5 October was covered, in the 24 hours that followed, with the kind of comprehensive admiration usually reserved for a fondly-recalled member of royalty. Not only did every newspaper carry her image on its front page;...
Jul 31, 2025 | News
We are thrilled to see Claire Adam, winner of the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award (BFNA) in 2020, on this year’s Booker Prize longlist for her quietly compelling second novel Love Forms (Faber). Claire was our lunch speaker in June, interviewed by club chair Lucy...
May 11, 2025 | News
We were saddened by the news last week that the novelist Jane Gardam had died. She was 96 years old. Born Jean Pearson in Redcar on the North Yorkshire coast in 1928, where her father was a teacher, Gardam moved to London after the Second World War to read English at...
Jul 24, 2023 | News
Like many others, we were deeply saddened to learn of the death of the broadcaster and writer George Alagiah on 24 July. His novel The Burning Land (Canongate), a political thriller set in modern-day South Africa, was shortlisted for the our Best First Novel Award in...
