[[Category:Biography|*]]
[[Category:New Reviews|Biography]]__NOTOC__<!-- Remove -->
{{newreview
|author= Adam Federman
|title= Fasting and Feasting - The Life of Visionary Food Writer Patience Gray
|rating= 4
|genre= Biography
|summary= For more than thirty years, Patience Gray--author of the celebrated cookbook Honey from a Weed--lived in a remote area of Puglia in southernmost Italy. She lived without electricity, modern plumbing, or a telephone, grew much of her own food, and gathered and ate wild plants alongside her neighbours in this economically impoverished region. She was fond of saying that she wrote only for herself and her friends, yet her growing reputation brought a steady stream of international visitors to her door. This simple and isolated life she chose for herself may help explain her relative obscurity when compared to the other great food writers of her time: M. F. K. Fisher, Elizabeth David, and Julia Child. So it is not surprising that when Gray died in 2005, the BBC described her as an ''almost forgotten culinary star.'' Yet her influence, particularly among chefs and other food writers, has had a lasting and profound effect on the way we view and celebrate good food and regional cuisines. Gray's prescience was unrivalled: She wrote about what today we would call the Slow Food movement--from foraging to eating locally--long before it became part of the cultural mainstream.
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1603587527</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author= Gill Blanchard
|summary=I think I'd like Ludwigsfelde. I wouldn't have liked it when it was an industrial village, with one or two huge mechanical plants and nothing else to its name. But now, even with the constant hum of the autobahn (one of Hitler's) keeping it company, it must have an appeal. It has been rebuilt, refashioned and remodelled since the end of East Germany, under the most prosperous and forward-looking mayor in the state, if not the country. He it was who put in a mostly-nude swimming spa. It has dispensers for doggy poo bags, so there's nothing as uncouth as taking your own. The mayor, bless him, even expanded the motorway to three lanes in each direction. It is within touch of Berlin, and in tune with so many business wants, yet is surrounded by woodland. Woodland where, between Christmas and New Year a few years back, the mayor's own wife and dog were found, both having been strangled…
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1925240932</amazonuk>
}}
{{newreview
|author=S D Tucker
|title=Great British Eccentrics
|rating=4.5
|genre=Biography
|summary= Some very strange people have stalked our green and pleasant land. In his introduction, Tucker asks us why. Is it our status as an island people which has made so many of our countrymen turn in on ourselves? Has our long libertarian tradition of the idea of individual freedom, as long as we do nobody else any harm, permitted weirdness to flourish among us?
|amazonuk=<amazonuk>1445660326</amazonuk>
}}