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{{newreview
|author=A L Kennedy
|title=Doctor Who: The Drosten's Curse
|rating=4
|genre=Science Fiction
|summary=If, for some unearthly reason, you should follow the world of golf and hear of a bunker that's 'lethal' or 'a killer trap', point the speaker in the direction of a sand pit on the 13th at the Fetch Brothers Golf Spa Hotel. For it really is lethal – something under it will suck you down, handspan by handspan, anaesthetising you and making you incapable of crying out. David Agnew knows this, and uses it as a handy way to get rid of people he doesn't like. Elsewhere at Fetch there is a completely inept character – I needn't specify, as he's inept at everything – who's heartily smitten by Bryony, the hard-done-by receptionist. There is a grandma who it would appear is losing all memory, beyond for her beloved octopuses, two young children who are very wrong indeed, in lots of ways, and there's also a strangely metallic taste about the air in the place. A perfect site for the Fourth Doctor to pop up in, then – until a psychic attack leaves him with little opportunity to put the ageless problems to rights…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1849908265</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Alexander McCall Smith
|summary=Perhaps England should realise it's in trouble when King Edward the Confessor takes one look at his naked bride and decides to remain chaste. This signals a lack of royal offspring and a succession crisis that becomes so important the vultures flock to fight even before he's ill, let alone dead. The jockeying for position as next in line to the throne or next in line's favourite has begun. Indeed England is famous for its royal succession wars and this is one of the best; a story of a journey that will finish near Hastings as a deadly stand-off between King Harold Godwinson and Norman Duke William in that year that every British school child is taught: 1066.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1783062207</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=Peter Finn and Petra Couvee
|title=The Zhivago Affair: The Kremlin, the CIA, and the Battle over a Forbidden Book
|rating=5
|genre=Biography
|summary=One of the many things to come out of this incredibly clear and readable book is that we Brits, for all our literary heritage, have got nothing like an equivalent to Boris Pasternak. He or she would have to sell like Rowling, regularly capture the enjoyment and spirit of the nation a la Danny Boyle's Olympics ceremonies, and at the same time have the cultural heft of Larkin, Rushdie, Graham Greene and more combined. Someone connected with choosing recipients of the Nobel Prize declare him here to be the Soviet TS Eliot, but that's nothing like. So the reader probably has to stretch herself to see someone so well-respected and well-loved for his verse, who spent twelve years and more on a huge, society-defining novel, only for the country to nix every plan to get it published.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>0099581345</amazonuk>
}}