Tag Archives: Germany

In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer

Posted on 26/01/2022 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – January 2022   What else lives here, among these trees? You recall the stories, your father’s gentle voice. There was no need to shout in the forest, he said, as he explained all the living beings that … Continue reading →

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Why the Germans Do It Better: Notes From a Grown-Up Country by John Kampfner

Posted on 16/09/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – September 2021 In 1994, when Angela Merkel was Germany’s environment minister, her British opposite number, John Gummer, invited her to stay with him and his family in his Suffolk constituency. They spent each evening in his sitting … Continue reading →

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The Sea View Has Me Again: Uwe Johnson in Sheerness – Patrick Wright

Posted on 28/07/2021 by Bobby Seal

Book Review – July 2021 It may at first seem puzzling that Uwe Johnson, one of Germany’s most accomplished writers of the twentieth century, should spend the final ten years of his life in Sheerness on Kent’s Isle of Sheppey. … Continue reading →

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 31

Posted on 23/04/2020 by Bobby Seal

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a water way leading to the … Continue reading →

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 25

Posted on 17/04/2020 by Bobby Seal

Flow on, ye lays so loved, so fair, On to Oblivion’s ocean flow! May no rapt boy recall you e’er, No maiden in her beauty’s glow! My love alone was then your theme, But now she scorns my passion true. … Continue reading →

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The Flow of Time: Lockdown, Day 18

Posted on 10/04/2020 by Bobby Seal

Many ravens flying south. The cattle keep stamping during transport, they are restless. The Rhine seems to me like the Nanay, although there’s absolutely nothing at all that could remind someone of the Nanay. I wish the ferry had taken … Continue reading →

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How Pale the Winter Has Made Us by Adam Scovell

Posted on 06/02/2020 by Bobby Seal

 Novelist, critic and film-maker, Adam Scovell is a prodigious young talent. In How Pale the Winter Has Made Us he introduces us to Isabelle, a young British academic adrift and alone in Strasbourg. She overwinters in this rainy corner of … Continue reading →

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The Riddle of the Sands

Posted on 10/01/2013 by Flaneur O'Connor

  We had an old copy of The Riddle of the Sands in our house when I was a boy.  It seemed to me that we’d had it forever, though the inscription in it told me that it was actually … Continue reading →

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