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Your support makes all the difference.CAN INSPECTOR Morse's sidekick Lewis really carry it off as John Braine's ruthlessly focused high-achiever Jo Lampton? I had my doubts, but from the minute Whateley begins his urgently intense, first person narrative of Lampton's arrival in the Yorkshire town of Warley, I knew that he was going to be not only alright but wonderful. Braine's story has become shorthand for social-climbing, but there was much more to it than that. Jo's morals are much less lax than those of the middle-classes he aspires, not so much to join, as to conquer, and it is his own inhibitions which lie at the heart of the book's tragic conclusion. Inevitably, some of the novel's subtle shading is lost in this abridgement, but this is a compelling production nonetheless.
BILL BRYSON is so popular now that it seems hardly necessary to recommend Notes From a Big Country, but since I spent two happy hours grinning like an imbecile while I listened to it, the nation's doctors should prescribe it instead of Prozac. The book was a collection of newspaper columns by Bryson about his native US territory, and his humour becomes rueful as well as knockabout as he reassesses New Hampshire after 10 years in Britain - a notable contrast with his previous roaming abroad as a wryly innocent anthropologist. Read (with perfect timing and emphasis) by Kerry Shale, it is oddly reminiscent of Alistair Cooke's Letters From America. Bryson can be just as authorative, but these are letters built around the revealing trivia of daily life rather than great causes.
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