I have all Burke's Robincheaux series. Some come close to great american novels. Two films too , sadly I think they went streaight to DVD. But I enjoy them. I have lots of noir and shelves of all the Australian hardboiled and grit.

1). Wheatgrass - Nature's Finest Medicine  (I know most of the stuff, but it makes a good read occasionally)

2). Raw Food Controversies

3). The Water of Lifev - A Treatise on Urine Therapy

4). Long Life In Florida (a very high level book on the evils of food and talks about breatharianism, high level spiritual man being demi-Gods etc)

Trinny and Susannah
The Body Shape Bible
Forget your size discover your shape.

Its for and about women. I can't really fault it much it has good pictures of real people in real clothes with what not to wear and why and what to wear and why. Good stuff.

I have seen one there of their books, can't remember which and I think I thought it was OK too.

I'm aware they were on TV but haven't really seen any of their stuff on TV. I might see what I can download

I'm also aware that coming from UK and no doubt being wel known on the telly there will be a bit of the obligatory UK  class / accent baggage from UK denizens, but I found the content and approach more than OK in this book at least.

The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy - David Cannadine

Oh, I took it as surprise.

I'm also a sucker for history (minored in it), especially late 19th - mid 20th century European and US. I also tend towards Anglophilia not so subtlely. So it all adds up to reading a bunch of minutiae that would normally be used to treat insomniacs who don't respond to strong drugs. I'm not really sure being American and lacking an aristocracy has much to do with it, at least on my end. I just watch 'Downton Abbey' for that sort of voyeuristic entertainment into another world.

To the second part, yes, exactly. I have all sort of hypotheses about how the fall off the British Empire is still actively shaping the current British conscience and psyche.

Last edited by doghouse (2014-03-02 09:11:27)

'Up in the Old Hotel' by Joseph Mitchell; a collection of portraits of eccentrics and people on the fringes of society who lived in New York during the middle of the last century.

I will have to come up with something coherent to write. I'm relatively hungover from gin and have been chugging coffee and smoking some Dunhill tobacco, so I'm not terribly articulate at the moment.

Maybe there is an interesting speculation whether there would have been a WWI at all if (the much maligned) Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (Geo V's elder brother) had survived to ascend the throne, rather than dying just after his brother took delivery of clothes from Davies & Son which had been sweated in a workshop where cholera had broken out.

There is a school of thought (my own), which suggests that Clarence would have kept Fritz quiet.