There have been many Heated Rivalry takes. This one — The Truth About Yearning – is the best one I have read. I haven't watched the show yet, because I'm saving it up for the next time I have to take to my bed with a lurgy, but I have enjoyed surveying the discourse.
This was an interesting, if somewhat singular, discussion of "how to make a lot of money as an author even if you're not an NYT bestseller". I applaud anyone who shares finances transparently like this, and I thought the writer did a good job of acknowledging the combination of luck and effort that this involves.
A debunking of some major literary conspiracy theories, including the one about how Francis Bacon wrote the plays of Shakespeare and — new one to me — that the KGB secretly assassinated Albert Camus.
This is the 1969 Pan paperback edition of Devil's Cub. The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1932.
My plan to read my way through Georgette Heyer's historical fiction in chronological order fell apart rather quickly. After my first two titles, The Black Moth and These Old Shades, I was so keen to keep reading about the character of "Devil" that I just skipped to his next book, 1932's Devil's Cub. Simon the Coldheart fans, I promise I will go back and read everything I've missed... Just as soon as I've satiated my desire for the Alastair family's adventures.
Devil's Cub picks up approximately 25 years after the end of These Old Shades. It follows the romantic entanglements of Dominic, Marquis of Vidal, son of Justin and Léonie who meet and fall in love in the previous book. Dominic is a rake with a capital R, and not in the toothless way that some contemporary historical romance writers like to gesture at. His behaviour is vicious and borderline criminal, as Heyer shows us in the arresting opening sequence. Dominic is travelling to a party and casually shoots a highwayman dead on the way, leaving the corpse still bleeding in the road. (I don't know if this is a sly wink at his father's sort-of outlaw origins in The Black Moth, but if it was I liked it.) I also appreciated Dominic's banter with his friend Charles Fox, who I think might be the first real-life historical figure with a speaking part that I have encountered in my reading of Heyer so far. Fox and the other high society types make it clear that they are less shocked by Dominic's habit of extra-judicial murder than they are by the fact that he doesn't bother to clean up the scene afterwards.
This becomes a recurring motif as we follow Dominic through the next few chapters. The denizens of the highest social circles of the early 1780s are not shocked by the same things that we would be today. Thus, Dominic's dalliance with Sophia, a "Cit", aka a bourgeois, middle-class girl, is far less acceptable than the time he spends with more professional paramours. "Opera dancers!", his Aunt Fanny mutters darkly at one point. The same goes for his duelling habit. He has killed at least one person in a duel before, in addition to his drive-by execution in the opening chapter, but it is only when he shoots someone indoors, in an impromptu duel in a gaming hell, that it is felt that he has crossed a line. By teasing out the subtleties of this flexible Georgian moral code, Heyer is able to gesture at the absurdity of Dominic's class without ever mocking or deriding her characters.
This was just one of many wonderful pieces of craft from Heyer that I admired while reading this book. I did feel like I had skipped quite a few phases of her development, because this writer from 1932 has many more tricks up her sleeve than the one who was writing in the early years of the 1920s. The pacing and plotting of this book is magnificent. Every time I thought to myself "I wish Dominic had a straight man to bounce jokes off" or "when is a parent going to show up and meddle in this", my wish was fulfilled on the very next page. Each character has a development arc, too. Dominic goes from dissipated rake to intense, protective fiancé, while Mary, his intended, learns to enjoy herself a little while still keeping her ethics intact. And the menacing appearance of Devil at the end, almost like a fairy godmother, to wrap the whole story up in a bow? Chef's kiss, no notes.
Mary Challoner is a much more complex and well-rounded character than any of the Heyer heroines I have encountered so far. She's the older sister of the lovely Sophia, who we learn is a "yallow-headed chit" with a "frippery brain". Sophia has indeed been blessed with gorgeous golden curls, limpid blue eyes and the ability to flirt like it's her job, whereas Mary is something bordering on a bluestocking. She's had a proper education and finds her mother's insistence on trying to convert Sophia's beauty into a place in the ranks of the nobility quite ridiculous. Mary is sensible and pragmatic, never letting her emotions get the better of her. No hysterics or vapours for her. My kind of girl.
The introduction of the Challoners allows Heyer to explore more class nuances than if the story was set solely among the haute ton. Mary's father was of noble birth and cut off by his family when he married her mother, who is merely the sister of a city merchant. The widowed Mrs Challoner takes her inspiration from Mrs Gunning, the real-life mother of two beauties who in the 1750s sent ripples through society when they managed to marry a Duke and an Earl respectively. What Mrs Challoner seems to have missed, though, is that even though the Gunning sisters were not at all wealthy, they were of aristocratic origin — both their parents were of the Irish nobility, with their mother being the daughter of a viscount. Sophia might be beautiful, but with her vulgar manners and nothing but a "bundle of Cits" in her family tree, she stands no chance.
The incident that pushes Mary out of her comfortable milieu and onto the path to wedded bliss is a typically cunning piece of work by Heyer. A note arrives addressed to "Miss Challoner", which is delivered to her as the eldest daughter of the house. It's from Dominic and was meant for Sophia, since it gives all the details of their planned flight from London together — he thinks they're going to have a lovely roll in the hay while he lives down the shame of his latest duel, while Sophia thinks she can trick him to the altar somehow and become a Marquess. Not only does the note allow Mary to pre-empt the scheme, taking Sophia's place to protect her sister's reputation and marital prospects, it also shows how little regard for Mary Dominic has early on in the book. He has forgotten that she exists at all, hence the application of her rightful title to her younger sister. This gives their early scenes together on the road greater tension and makes the eventual resolution feel completely earned.
What Devil's Cub has that my previous Heyer reads lacked is a very capable handling of shadow and light. Every sweet, happy moment has a drop of darkness to it, and every melodramatic scene is undercut with humour. From Dominic's first entrance as a cold-blooded lout to Mary's very serious conversation with Devil at the end, there is always something that makes the reader smile. By the time she published Devil's Cub, Heyer was the author of (I think?) eleven other novels. She had clearly learned from the writing of every one of them, because this one is a triumph.
Five Other Thoughts
The secondary couple, Dominic's cousin Juliana and her self-effacing beau Frederick, were my least favourite thing about this book. The latter amply demonstrates that there's nothing so annoying as someone who says "no, whatever you want" when you're trying to make a plan. It's a performance of courtesy and humility that actually throws the onus on the other person to do all the thinking and decision making. No wonder Mary comes to find him infuriating. An attractive romantic lead is also one who can think for themself! I have to imagine that Juliana will force him to be a little more decisive in future.
I enjoyed the scene where Dominic involuntarily snaps the sticks of Juliana's fan, so upset is he at the very idea that a lady of his, ie Mary, would ever flirt with another man. It's very like his father's habit of crushing snuffboxes when angry.
I'm getting the sense that Heyer really didn't like the colour puce. Only terrible bores — like Mary's cousin and unwelcome suitor Joshua — wear puce. And someone always comments on how much it doesn't suit them.
I adored Uncle Rupert's love affair with his six dozen bottles of port. I hope they all got home safely.
I felt slightly offended on behalf of the town of Dijon. I'm sure it is a nice place! The other characters were offensively astonished that someone as rich and fashionable Dominic would ever go there.
My Favourite Phrases
Juliana is a "rattle-pate".
Two good financial words — "dunning" and "milleleva" (I think the latter is a bit like a "pony" ie an amount of money one might lose while gambling).
Mary is at one point described as "Miss Prunes and Prisms".
A "sulky", a type of carriage.
Dominic says to Mary that her conduct in running away with him was that of "the veriest trollop".
Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.
Peter Watkins's strange and wonderful 1964 film Culloden is currently available to watch on BBC iPlayer. If you have access to it, I highly recommend watching it, as well as the making of documentary from 2006. It's a thought-provoking piece that presents a re-enactment of the 1746 battle between the British Army and the Jacobite rebels as a contemporary war documentary (Watkins was very inspired by 1960s Vietnam reportage). I've visited the battlefield monuments and site before, but from this I gained a deeper understanding of both the extent and horror of the British forces' crimes and how badly the Jacobite leaders handled the battle.
This is a fun interactive infographic that shows you the relative sizes of things, from a strand of DNA to a forest-sized organism that hangs out in Utah.
Katherine Angel explains why she likes The Archers. I've always blamed not my having English parents for my inability to listen to more than 30 seconds of it, but she grew up in Belgium and loves it, so maybe I need to accept that I simply hate it on its own merits.
I liked this book and it would definitely be an excellent reference work if you're newish to reading romance. The tone becomes a bit self-consciously quirky in places, but not so often that it is distracting.
Here's an extract from my review:
"Risbridger's knowledge of this type of fiction is both broad and deep. She hits all the expected subjects: the ever-evolving appeal of Pride and Prejudice; the global phenomenon of Fifty Shades of Grey; the endless fascination of fairytales and especially Prince Charming; the enduring, prolific powerhouse that is Mills & Boon. But she is well versed enough to go beyond the obvious. The connections she makes between genre stalwarts, literary greats and newer trends are delightful. Mr Darcy has correspondences with the creature of Beauty and the Beast and with the "grumpy hot billionaire" protagonists who brood at us from Kindle Unlimited covers. Fifty Shades of Grey is a partly epistolary novel like Frankenstein or Les Liaisons Dangereuses because its central couple are continually exchanging text messages and emails that are printed in full. A Prince Charming can be a science professor in late 1930s Vienna or Peter Wimsey in a golden age detective novel by Dorothy L Sayers, or even a blue alien with some exciting extra bits in his loincloth in the hugely popular recent series Ice Planet Barbarians. In fact, the chief joy of In Love With Love is that the reader will come out of it with a long and varied list of other books to read."
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This is the 1956 Pan paperback edition of These Old Shades. The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1926.
I finished Georgette Heyer's debut novel, The Black Moth, wishing that I could read more about the intriguing, unusual character at its centre — Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover, better known as "Devil". A small amount of research revealed that I could do just that by jumping forward in her bibliography to her sixth published novel, These Old Shades from 1926. I couldn't resist.
Heyer began writing this book in 1922 and intended it to be a more action-packed continuation of the 1750s world she had covered in her debut. However, she ended up putting it aside for a few years — publishing novels about other historical periods like The Great Roxhythe and Simon the Coldheart in the interim — and only picked it back up again in 1925, battling to complete it for publication in the difficult weeks after her father died. It's not a conventional sequel. Rather, it reworks Devil and a few of the minor characters into a new versions in a new story. Her title, These Old Shades, is a quotation from a poem and a nice little nod to the reader who might recognise her old characters in their new guises.
Her shadowy villain becomes Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon, an English aristocrat living in France who is now enjoying a period of prosperity after earlier gambling losses. He still has a reputation for coldness and dissolute behaviour, but his edges have been softened. There is light in his eyes now; he has a studied boredom about him, yet he's not the nihilist of the earlier book. To corrupt a phrase, in The Black Moth, we see a "Devil without a cause", who can bring himself to care for nothing. By contrast, "Satanas", as Justin is sometimes called, has passion and an object in life. Even if his "cause" is to revenge himself on a French aristocrat, the Comte de Saint-Vire, who twenty years earlier refused Justin permission to marry his sister. All of which is to say, while this version is still dark, he isn't abducting debutantes just to feel something any more.
The instrument of his revenge literally bumps into Justin in the opening chapter of These Old Shades. A poor young lad named Léon collides with him on the mean streets of Paris while trying to avoid a beating. Seemingly on a whim, Justin uses his diamond tie pin to buy Léon from his older brother — a grim transaction involving a human life — and takes the child home to become his page. Léon is pathetically grateful and declares his undying loyalty and obedience to his new master. Justin seems to find this rather droll. Over the next few nights he parades his new red-headed, base-born page through all of the fashionable establishments of Paris, to the general amusement of his social circle.
Of course, Satanas has a scheme afoot. He has discerned at a glance that Léon is really Léonie, a girl of twenty who for some as-yet unknown reason has been living and working at her brother's tavern in disguise as a much younger boy. Her red hair and black eyebrows instantly remind Justin of his enemy, the Comte de Saint-Vire. He can also apparently tell that she is no tavern-keeper's sister and by rights belongs to a much higher social class. All signs point to her being a wonderful way of embarrassing Saint-Vire and repaying him for the humiliation he visited upon Justin all those years ago. It works from the start: Léon causes quite a stir following Justin around Paris, including at Versailles. His enemy is provoked.
From here, Heyer keeps ramping up the drama. Léon is informed that she must be Léonie full-time now, a prospect that fills her with horror. Justin takes her to England to stay with his sister and aunt — propriety demands that she can't follow him around town now that she's officially a girl — and we are treated to a makeover montage worth of a late nineties romcom. There's plenty of humour in Léonie's reactions to women's fashions. She is very against having to wear skirts. Then Léonie is abducted by the Comte, drugged and smuggled back to France (she, hilariously, dubs her captor a "pig-person" and refers to him this way for the rest of the book). Heyer breaks with the conventions of sensational fiction, though, and has Léonie mastermind her own escape, rather than showing her as a helpless female who needs a male character's aid. She rides to safety with Rupert, Justin's younger brother, having already extricated herself from the Comte's clutches by the time he arrives. She's no damsel in distress.
Rupert's horse, by the way, has a lovely comic subplot of its own. He effectively steals it from a blacksmith's in his haste to chase down Léonie and is then pursued himself for several chapters by the horse's rightful owner, a middle-class merchant, who just doesn't think that aristocratic derring-do is a good enough reason for him to be both missing a horse and out of pocket. It undercuts some of the more melodramatic stuff wonderfully.
Because the melodrama is not in short supply in the second half of this book. Justin's scheme leads up to a grand denouement in which he monologues for several pages, gradually leading the assembled society worthies towards an understanding of Léonie's true identity. A gun is produced, someone shoots themselves right there in the salon, and Justin just laughs maniacally through the chaos of it all. There's still a touch of the old Devil about him, for sure.
But unlike the original Devil, Justin does also enjoy life on the way to this bloody finale. The chapters that deal with Léonie's introduction into Parisian society and all the different fashions everybody wears are wonderfully light-hearted and entertaining. The historical moment is rendered in much more detail in this book and the cameos by real-life figures such as Louis XV and La Pompadour are a good addition. There's a real Cinderella feel about this aspect of the novel, with Justin's sister Fanny playing the role of Léonie's fairy godmother. Rescued from her humble station and decked out in the finest silks and stains, she does indeed go to the ball.
The cross dressing aspect of the plot requires the reader to trust that Heyer can bring it all to a satisfactory conclusion in the end. Which she does, even though for the first two-thirds of the book, it's simply ridiculous that nobody apart from Justin has noticed or remarked on the fact that poor naive little "Léon" is really a woman of twenty wearing trousers. Sorry, breeches. I wondered if it might have been a little easier to read if Heyer had dropped a few hints that people had noticed, but were too polite or too curious to mention it. Léonie herself is also a bit implausible as a character, a confusing bundle of innocence and wisdom who seems to shift about in maturity as the plot demands. She's great fun throughout, though, so I forgive her.
Keen-eyed readers will have noticed that I haven't mentioned the romance element of this book at all. There is one, and it is the Cinderella moment that you might expect. It just wasn't very interesting to me. I was far more focused on the kidnappings and the witticisms. I know that Heyer is famous for her romantic fiction but I don't feel like I've read her at her best in this arena yet. I have that still to look forward to! That aside, this was a very enjoyable novel and I completely understand why it became an early success that solidified Heyer's reputation as a truly popular novelist.
Three Other Thoughts
I found it refreshing that Léonie, post-makeover montage, is continually begging to be allowed to be Léon again. She's sarcastic about it, too: "Monseigneur, do you understand what it is to be put into petticoats?". As much as she seems to enjoy rendering everyone speechless by appearing at a ball in a silver evening gown, for day to day life, she prefers breeches and being allowed to say exactly what she thinks. Who wouldn't? I feel like cross-dressing heroines in historical romances are usually shown to be more grateful for being "rescued" from the horror of having to wear trousers.
Early on in the book, Justin crushes a gold snuff box in his bare hands to show just how much he hates someone. Exemplary character work: we immediately know that he's melodramatic and rich.
The book is predicated on some pretty rigid class assumptions — Léonie is "obviously" too good to be the daughter of a farmer and must therefore be of noble birth. I have no doubt that this was representative of attitudes in the 1750s and it reminded me of how flexible modern historical fiction has become with this sort of thing.
Justin is "always a damned smooth-tongued icicle", according to a close friend.
"Avon swept the lady a magnificent leg" — I still love this phrase!
Someone is "seated mumchance", which from research I think means sitting silently.
Once Léon has become Léonie, she and Justin discuss which slang she is allowed to use now that she's a girl. He insists that she is not, under any circumstances, to say "lawks" or "tare an' ouns". The only permissible exclamations are "'pon rep" and "Lud!". It is not explained why these are more suitable for women.
Thanks for reading. I'm making making way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all the entries so far here.
Emma Orchard's debt to Georgette Heyer is evident throughout A Gentleman's Offer. Orchard, a former copy editor at Mills & Boon, makes this overt — she writes in her acknowledgements how she began with Heyer fanfiction during the Covid lockdowns and then moved onto her own original characters. As I've been exploring Georgette Heyer's work myself, I've become interested in her influence on contemporary historical fiction and was curious to see how it would manifest here.
I recognised a lot of her favourite tropes in A Gentleman's Offer. The hero, Dominic or "Beau" de Lacy, is languid, sardonic, and very concerned with his personal appearance, rather like Jack in The Black Mothand Alverstoke in Frederica. The heroine, Meg Nightingale, is an outspoken young woman with a very dysfunctional family, who is thrown into a high-stakes scheme to preserve her sister's reputation. There's also plenty of Heyer-esque slang (people are "in alt" and use epithets like "frippery fellow").
The actual plot of the book, in which Meg has to impersonate her twin sister Maria after the latter suddenly disappears three weeks before her big society wedding to Dominic, was of less interest to me than the world of London high society in 1817 and the characters who inhabit it. The action turns a bit farcical in the second half, although not to a degree that overly bothered me.
The big difference to a genuine Heyer novel is the time Orchard spends on physical desire; there are the sort of explicit scenes that Georgette could never have published. They help this book feel more like its own work and less of a pastiche, as does the introduction of themes around sexuality and race, which are handled in a manner that feels appropriate to the 1817 setting.
This was a quick and entertaining read, which pays due homage to the originator of the form.
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Every new year, I think about the bookshop where I worked as a teenager. Specifically, a shift I always did on 24th December. While the shop was open that day, we were very busy with last-minute Christmas shoppers. Then after closing the staff stayed for an extra two hours to turn what had been a festive wonderland of abundant decorations and displays of lovely books into an austere landscape of piled up diet manuals and memoirs of recovery against the odds. It had to be suitable for the "new year, new me" customers who would come through the door the next time we opened. It always felt rather jarring, given that at the time we were making this switchover, Christmas hadn't even happened yet.
I think about this because it makes me remember how utterly arbitrary our January interest in resolutions and goals is. I'm a sucker for a new hack or "one weird trick" — normally, purchasing a new notebook — if I get too invested in the idea that something about me has to change. I have to ask myself: is this really something I want to do, or am I merely reacting to the fact that the world has (metaphorically speaking) just replaced all of the Christmas decorations with diet books? In fact, I find that the best use for this season of self-improvement is to do some thinking about what has worked in the past rather than making any changes or rash promises for future change.
Last year, I made the first Thursday Thirteen post of the year a round-up of small habits or new activities I had acquired in the previous 12 months and which I planned to continue. I'm doing that again today. These are little things that have brought me joy, made my life a bit easier, or helped me get closer to my big-picture intentions. They are, of course, specific to my life and are not inteneded to be universal advice. Perhaps you will find a spark of inspiration below for your own version.
Normal service with links will resume next week, once I've spent enough time on the internet again to find some good ones.
Only subscribe to one streaming service at a time. I absolutely despise paging through the homepage of Netflix (or any other streamer) looking for something, anything, I can bear to watch. I usually get frustrated and just pick a show, which I then abandon twenty minutes in because I don't like it, and start scrolling again. It's the opposite of relaxing. Eventually, I came to realise that this was a problem caused by there being too much choice. Having subscriptions to multiple streaming services (a significant financial outlay) was creating such a vast pool of things I could watch that I was actually watching very little. Since all the major ones let you subscribe by the month and then cancel without penalty, I now just have one at a time. I keep a list of shows and films I'm interested in seeing (compiled from reviews and personal recommendations) and then when I'm ready to choose my next service, I pick the one with the longest accumulated list of things I want to see on it. If there's enough, I might even keep it for two months! You can also be quite broad in what you choose to define as a "streaming service" — one month, we had Dropout, for instance, a video library made by the people who used to run CollegeHumor. I watched lots of their show Smartypants, in which funny people give Powerpoint presentations about their niche obsessions/irritations (it has big Taskmaster energy). Since I implemented this system, there has been no more annoying scrolling or watching of terrible documentaries "just to put something on" while we eat dinner. If you keep the date that you join/cancel each one consistent — I aim for the last day of the month — it makes it easy to avoid being caught by an auto-renew.
Have a toilet bag that stays in your luggage. I had seen this tip a lot but only implemented it in 2025. It's incredible. I used to spend ages squeezing creams into smaller tubes and often forgot something vital, like toothpaste. Now I keep the complete travel toilet bag in my most-used rucksack and know that when I've packed it, I've packed everything I will need. The only maintenance you need to do comes at the end of a trip when you top up or replace anything in the bag before you put it away.
After cooking, wait until food is room temperature to eat it. Somewhere along the way while I was learning to cook, I internalised the rule that everything needs to be as hot as possible at the moment that you put it on the table and/or the plate. Hotter than the sun, if possible. Which is just not true, and is in fact a recipe for burning your mouth when you take the first bite. I've started letting dishes rest for a bit after coming out of the oven, or dishing up and then doing a couple of minutes of tidying up before tucking in. It's a revelation! I don't want my food to be stone cold, but I don't want it to be piping hot either. When it's just nicely warm, you can properly taste all of the flavours that you spent so long trying to cultivate.
Wash your head, not your hair. This one is very personal to me and my type of hair/scalp so your mileage may vary. However, I've found it much more useful when shampooing to think about washing the surface of my head rather than the strands of hair that hang from it. I get a much more thorough clean this way, more akin to the wonderful scrub they do when you go to the hairdressers.
Throw things away, even if it is uncomfortable. Overconsumption is awful, but hoarding things that you don't want/need but can't bear the idea of going to landfill is awful too. Especially if the things are now broken and useless and degrading the experience of being in your space. Get rid of things in the most responsible possible way (repurpose, sell, donate, recycle, throw away) and then don't buy too many things again. This last bit is the hardest part.
Do a pantry audit. One afternoon while trying to avoid doing some work I didn't want to do, I took everything out of the kitchen cupboards, checked the expiry dates, made a quick tally on a piece of paper of what we had, and then put back what we could still eat. I've been keeping up with my record since, and it's quite eye-opening how much less food we've been buying now that I know what we already have. I'm sure there are fancy apps and databases that you can use for this, although I tend to find that the lofi, quick way is usually the way that will stick for me.
Use chopsticks to eat snacks. I'm sure everyone who uses chopsticks as their primary cutlery already knows this. I've only just learned that using them to eat crisps/crackers/nuts is a great way to munch and keep your hands clean at the same time.
Mend things, even if you can't do a perfect job. This is connected to my throwing away point, above. I used to have a graveyard of clothes in the bottom of my wardrobe that needed a minor repair, like a darn or a patch or a missing button replacing. I wouldn't throw them away, but I also wouldn't just do the job because I was waiting for some mythical future moment when I would be "better" at mending. (This attitude might have been caused by watching too much aesthetic mending content on TikTok and Instagram, before I quit social media.) It got so bad that I stopped being able to close the wardrobe door so had to do something about the pile. It turns out, it doesn't really matter if my darning is unattractive or my sewing is crooked. It's just nice to be able to use my things again.
Enjoy inconsequential chats with strangers. It's pleasant to talk to people, even for a couple of minutes, about their holiday or their dog or what they're making for dinner that night. I don't pursue random strangers with my desire for conversation, obviously, but if we get chatting anyway because of a transport delay/our dogs playing together, I now let myself enjoy it rather than constantly scanning the horizon for the nearest exit.
Make your homepage blank. Methods for doing this will vary by device or operating system (just search for yours), but I highly recommend making the homepage for your browser a blank page of some sort. In Chrome, you can just make it about:blank. I find that it forces me to remember what I opened it for in the first place, rather than getting sucked into looking at recommended news stories or whatever other algorithmic stuff it tries to serve you.
Use bar soap. I have really got into solid soap in the last year. I'm very prone to dry skin and it seems to help with that (probably because I'm using less of it per wash) and it also generates way less plastic waste. It lasts for ages, too, and you can easily buy it from small businesses rather than big chains. I'm personally partial to the products of The Soap Dairy in the Lake District, but I'm sure there will be something lovely local to you. I have a sisal soap sack for in-shower exfoliation and a travel tin. You can also get dry bags for travelling with your soap, although I've been fine so far with the tin. As a bonus, you don't have to worry about it at airport security, as it counts as a solid not a liquid.
Replace paper towels with cloths. We've accumulated a lot of random cleaning cloths over the years. I also now generate more in my ongoing attempt to find uses for old fabric rather than sending it to landfill (just cut it up and roughly hem it!). They are now my paper towels. I lay them out in a long row on the kitchen counter, slightly overlapping, and then I wind the whole lot tightly around our paper towel spindle (we have the kind that is just a stick on a base, like this). Then you can just take one off any time you need something to mop up a spill etc. Ideally I would have a dedicated place to put the dirty ones, perhaps in a bin under the sink until I have enough for a wash, but I'm still working on that and currently just throw them straight in the washing machine with whatever is going next. They air dry on a spinner thing in the airing cupboard and then join the queue to be used again. I do still keep a roll of disposable paper towels in the cupboard for jobs that can't be done any other way (sometimes you just need one to germinate some seeds on) but the cloths do most of the everyday work.
Use your RSS reader for everything. I use my RSS reader for keeping track of all sorts of things, not just blogs and websites. My one of choice is Feedly and it can handle email newsletters, subreddits, YouTube channels, Patreons, podcasts and more. I like having all of my content easily browsable in the same place and find that it helps me spend less time aimlessly clicking around the internet getting distracted.
Do you have any little life improvements like this that you'll be sticking with for the next year? Tell us all about them in the comments.
This is the 1965 Pan paperback edition of The Black Moth. The novel was originally published by Heinemann in 1921.
I began The Black Moth with very little information beyond its biographical context. Heyer first invented the story to amuse her younger brother Boris during an illness; her father, overhearing its telling, encouraged her to write it properly for publication. She was nineteen when the first editor she approached accepted it, launching a prolific career she pursued with startling confidence — no plans for further education or a day job. That confidence paid off: when her father died a few years later, Georgette's writing supported her brothers through school and kept her mother's household running. A very important book for understanding Heyer as a writer, then, but not one with a titanic literary reputation of its own.
After a brief and mysterious prologue featuring an insolent duke writing a letter about a failed romantic affair, Heyer plunges the reader straight into the hurly-burly of a country coaching inn in the early 1750s. Here can be found one Sir Anthony Ferndale, a foppish baronet which is in fact, we are quickly told, a persona sometimes adopted by a disgraced peer, Lord John Carstares (known to his friends as Jack). He tumbled down from the heights of high society six years before after being exposed as a cheat at cards. He has since turned himself into a proficient highwayman, albeit one in the Robin Hood vein. He forwards the better part of his ill-gotten gains to the deserving poor. A year before the book opens, he had the bad luck to hold up a carriage containing his estranged younger brother Richard, which Jack thought was very funny but his sibling found both mortifying and confusing.
Within just a few pages, Jack emerges as a man of honour who also retains a sense of humour about his altered state in life. It is clear from the start that he, rather than the mysterious aristocrat in the prologue, will stand in the role of romantic hero for this book. During a visit from the Carstares family solicitor we learn that Jack's estranged father has now died and he has thus inherited the title of Earl of Wyncham and associated estates. He, though, prefers his disreputable life on the road to returning to high society and dealing with the social consequences of the cheating incident (this betrayal of honour while gambling seems to be of seismic significance to everyone in this book). He would quite like Richard to step into his shoes. Richard, meanwhile, has married Lavinia Belmanoir, who is a high society beauty and crucially sister of the Duke of Andover, our friend from the prologue.
It might seem like I've given away half the plot of the book here, but I promise that all of this happens in just the first dozen pages. Heyer, even in her first novel, showed great skill at conveying plot and character information quickly and without overwhelming the reader. Already, I felt connected to the characters and the scenario that she was presenting. Jack especially. He may have silly opinions about silk breeches, but he is a fundamentally decent person who has sacrificed his own comfort and prestige in order to give his brother the life he desired.
From here, the story jogs along briskly. Jack, despite his repudiation of title and wealth, is set on a course back to his rightful station in life. The universe (and Georgette) does not want him to be a highwayman forever. His true identity is almost discovered again when he holds up a carriage containing a justice of the peace and he is only saved by the fact that said justice is his own erstwhile best friend, Miles O'Hara. Jack wriggles out of that awkwardness, but his outlaw career is once again severely endangered when he fights a roadside duel with none other than the insolent duke of the prologue, whom Jack catches in the act of abducting a very attractive young woman from her aunt's carriage.
So far, so much derring-do. Exactly what I had expected for my first historical Heyer: aristocrats with elaborate wardrobes and complicated honour codes, much dashing about the countryside in carriages and on horseback, and a splendid sprinkling of era-specific slang (more on that below). While the wit exhibited by Jack and the cleverly-sketched minor characters — such as Molly O'Hara and Jim the valet — do show promise, there is little here to elevate it beyond the typical early twentieth century historical adventure novel. Yet there is one major element of this book that to me absolutely prohibits its dismissal as juvenile or derivative. And that is the Black Moth himself.
His Grace the Duke of Andover, or "Devil" to his friends, is an extraordinary character. He hovers menacingly on the edge of the Robin Hood, swashbuckling story I have just described, seemingly without a motive other than to make everyone else uncomfortable. His sister Lavinia's marriage to Jack's unfortunate brother Richard is rather tempestuous. Together with another brother, Andrew, the three Belmanoir siblings seem to exist to be extravagant, without deriving any particular pleasure from their profligate habits. They are perpetually quarrelsome and world-weary, the Duke by far the worst of them. Nobody ever seems to know where he is or what he is up to, either. He scorns predictability and the usual rhythms of society. He flits about the country restlessly, unable to settle to life in either the country or the town. He is always arguing with his family and looming menacingly at debutantes. Heyer gives him the moniker of "Black Moth" because he dresses only in black as a contrast with the apricot and puce and gold worn by every other character. In a novel where men's elaborate costumes receive as much description as women's, this refusal to take part in the general sartorial gaiety marks him as fundamentally apart.
The Duke comes across as almost a nihilist, taking pleasure in nothing and immune to the structures of honour that otherwise rule his social set. He seems incapable of love, either romantically or platonically. He is a fascinating character for a sheltered young woman to have written, a shadow-man who lurks on the periphery of the bright, gay world that she has otherwise created here. He is definitely not good, but he's not purely evil, either. Eventually the romance plot pushes him into the position of Jack's antagonist, but even then there is nothing truly villainous about him. The climax of the book involves another abduction of a young woman, committed by the Duke, yet you feel that his heart is hardly in it and he would probably have got bored before he did anything irreversibly awful. As such, he is allowed to fade away from this incident largely unscathed.
His punishment is of a more karmic kind. He eventually loses his heart, for real, to Jack's bride Diana. The book closes as it opens, with an epistolary epilogue in which the Black Moth acknowledges, but does not really resolve, the tragedy of his unrequited love for another man's wife. I finished it with the feeling that he was the true protagonist, not the swashbuckling aristocratic highwayman who gets the girl, even though we spend much less time with Tracy Belmanoir, Duke of Andover. Heyer could have written a conventional love story interspersed with action sequences. Instead we get this sly portrait of a restless, cynical, grim man who finally realises he has the capacity for love only when it is too late to do anything about it. It isn't romantic, but it is very interesting and even rather sad. I would read this book again, I think, but only to try and fill in the gaps of what "Devil" is up to while the rest of the lavishly-dressed adventurers are cavorting around. Heyer left me wanting to know what the Black Moth was doing while I wasn't in his company. For a romance novel written by a teenager as entertainment for her sick brother, that's a genuine literary achievement.
Three Other Thoughts
On the morning of a threatened flight from the marital home, neither wife nor husband can drink their morning cup of chocolate in bed, they are so upset. This little gastronomic aside is somehow both childish and endearing.
In fact, everyone in this book — with the exception of the Black Moth himself — is quite childish most of the time. Is it because Heyer was herself so young, or is she showing how facile the life of the idle rich is/was?
Jack has a very sensitive aesthetic sense. He cares very deeply about cravats and waistcoats. It's shown that he can sort embroidery silks into precise shades and tones better than any of the female characters. I like this as a trait for a male character.
My Favourite Phrases
From my reading of Heyer's crime fiction, I already know that she is quite handy with a turn of phrase and the period slang that she dug out (or simply invented?) for this book was marvellous. Here is a selection.
A woman is deplored as a "spendthrift jade".
Someone declares in a vexing situation that "tis a plaguey nuisance".
To express sympathy, a character says "my poor lamp!" (I think this means "poor thing").
When she is crying and crossed in love, Diana says "Oh, are all men such big stupids?".
Quite regularly, men are described as making someone "a marvellous leg". I think this is a bow or reverence? I love this phrase and yearn for reasons to use it in everyday conversation.
Thanks for reading. I'm making my way through Georgette Heyer's historical novels — you can find all entries here.
At the beginning of 2025, I set an intention for my year: Reading A Lot, But Differently. Now that the year has ended, I want to assess how I did. I certainly accomplished the first part of it — I read 121 books last year, the most since I've been keeping records — but did I do the second part, the "differently" part? No, I didn't.
If anything, I stuck more closely than ever to the genres and styles that usually comfort me. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with this as an approach to reading. It just didn't feel good to me this year. At certain points I had the sensation of being constricted, frustrated even, that I didn't seem to be able to break out of my habits. I wanted to read longer books, or books I've previously pegged as "challenging", or books in languages and styles that are new to me. Yet I didn't. The desire was there, but I still didn't do it. More on how I'm going to try and remedy that in a moment.
One aspect of my reading this year that did really work for me in 2025 is this space here, this blog/newsletter. Recording the books I read satiates my appetite for gradually accumulating data. Reviewing each title allowed me to flex a critical muscle I don't use much these days, now that I rarely write reviews for traditional media outlets. Discussing matters arising with readers and receiving recommendations was wonderful. Nothing to change there. I will make some tweaks to my process, though, so that I don't end up with a huge backlog of reviews to post as I did in 2025.
I was also conscious of feeling a little aimless with my reading this year. Outside of the books I needed to read for my podcast, I had no project or principle to what I read. I added titles that looked interesting to my Storygraph's "to read" feature diligently and then barely read any of them. I did a lot of scrolling on library apps and placing holds that I then never used. I think there's definitely a place for "mood reading"; just following your nose to whatever will satisfy in those particular circumstances. I did a little too much of it, perhaps. I am someone who responds very well to structure and I have plans to add a little more in 2026.
I certainly curbed my book-buying habits (as noted last year, I have already far exceeded SABLE status, or "Stash Acquired Beyond Life Expectancy"). I didn't make a noticeably larger dent in the books I already own, though. Rather, I got hooked on the ease of ebook loans from the library rather than browsing my own shelves. That's something else I'd like to work on.
Now, let's move on to:
My reading stats for the year: genre, format, and so forth
Recommendations for the ten best books I read
My aims for 2026
My new reading project
All the books I read in 2025.
2025 in Review
I read 121 books in 2025. See them all here. My goal was 120, or ten a month, and I just hit it. I reviewed every single book in my monthly reading roundups, so you can get more detail on any one title by browsing those here.
115 were fiction and 6 non-fiction, despite my intentions to achieve a more even balance.
My most-read genre was (as it probably always will be) mystery/crime. The second was historical, followed by romance. These are the Storygraph's genres and I don't entirely agree with them — it put "classics" fourth, but it considers most of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers to fit into that category so... Who knows.
My five most-read authors were:
Georgette Heyer, 16 books
Agatha Christie, 13 books
Ben Aaronovitch, 9 books (interesting; with the exception of one graphic novel, his books were all consumed as audiobooks)
Mary Westmacott, 6 books (this is Christie under another name, so I suppose technically she was my most read author)
Dorothy L. Sayers, 4 books
Approximately 44 per cent of my reading was done with physical books, 44 per cent via ebooks, and 12 per cent through audiobooks. This is a substantial change from last year (when my print/ebook split was 65/25). I attribute this to me replacing other scrolling on my phone with reading via the library apps, which is not necessarily a bad thing.
The Best Books I Read in 2025
My ten favourite titles break down like this:
all fiction
nine originally in English, one translated from German
of the ten, there are
three genuine "golden age" detective novels (published during the interwar period or very close to it)
two other novels from the interwar period by crime writers that don't quite fit the mould as "crime"
two works of literary fiction from the middle of the twentieth century
a really good new second chance romance
an accomplished Arthurian retelling from 2024
and a collection of crime short stories from the turn of the nineteenth century in the Austro-Hungarian empire
I must thank the Shedunnit Book Club (the book club that runs alongside my podcast) for this one, because they chose it as their book to read in February 2025. I had owned the recent Collins reissue of this 1932 for several years and never got round to reading it, so the push to do so was welcome. It's an accomplished detective novel set in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York City, concerning the apparently impossible murder of a local "conjure man" who tells fortunes for a fee. As tradition dictates, everyone in the waiting room at the time is a suspect and Fisher gives his own profession, that of medical doctor, to his police detective's "Watson". While it's a decent mystery, what really made this book stand out to me was its portrayal of Harlem and its inhabitants in the early 1930s. I always love learning about social history through fiction and this was a great example of that. In Fisher's rendering, Harlem is a small town where everyone knows each other — something that can be both good and bad when you're caught up in a murder investigation. I haven't independently verified this, but The Conjure-Man Dies is said to be the first work of detective fiction with a black detective and a full cast of black characters. Fisher was apparently keen to make it the first of a series and had planned out several sequels, but unfortunately died only two years after the book was published.
Another book that came my way because of the podcast: this time when I was researching an episode about Agatha Christie's Taste in Crime Fiction. Christie was a fan of Elizabeth Bowen, a Dublin-born novelist who spent time on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group in London and published her first novel in 1923. The Heat of the Day from 1949 is set in wartime London and concerns a love triangle that becomes an espionage triangle. The specificity of its WW2 scenes and the well-calibrated pacing of the book did remind me of the best detective fiction, but its strong emotional currents and intensely interior style makes it literary fiction, I think. A clever and unsettling read.
I have thought about this book a lot since I finished it in April. It's a 600+ page work that weaves something new and surprising through the Arthurian legends retold ad nauseam by Mallory et al. It's told from the point of view of a new young knight called Collum, who overcomes great hardship to get himself to Camelot only to learn that King Arthur has been killed in battle two weeks before. He joins up with the few remaining knights of the round table for a quest to salvage the moral ideal of Arthur's united kingdom before it is too late. On one level, it's a rollicking fantasy adventure read. What I found most arresting, though, was the way in which Grossman had successfully internalised the structural oddities of the old chivalric "romance", with successive quests and side-quests taking the reader on a meandering journey that seems to have no purpose until it finally does. I imagine that writing something that feels both aimless and, at the end, very focused, is really difficult to do and I am full of admiration that he chose to do this rather than staying in the safe zone of his highly successful Magicians fantasy trilogy.
I'm always really intrigued by crime writers who just write one or a small handful of good novels and then disappear off to do something else. Dorothy Erskine Muir was one such. In Muffled Night from 1933 was the first and best of her trio of detective novels, each of which was based partially on a real-life crime. I love this one for its moody, Victorian time capsule of a house and the contrast of this interior's perfection with the shocking crime that takes place within. It's a mystery that is clever both practically and psychologically, too. I made a podcast episode about this writer back in April.
Another Shedunnit Book Club selection. I think the member who originally proposed this book thought it was a crime novel in the manner of And Then There Were None. That was an entirely reasonable inference, given that Faber have republished it with a very crime-coded cover and a blurb about a group of people isolated in a remote Cornwall hotel before deaths occur. However, The Feast is not a conventional crime novel, with a detective or clues or a murderer revealed at the end. We learn from the prologue that in a week's time the hotel and anyone in it is going to be buried under a landslide. Then Kennedy takes us back seven days and shows us the sins of all the guests, all leading up to a tense finale right before the cliff cracks... It's a marvellous work of literature and I'm so glad it was put my way.
I fully recognise that this might not be for everyone. I'm a classical music nerd so an epistolary detective novel set among an orchestra that includes extracts from the score as part of the material was odds-on to delight me. And so it did.
The only novel published in 2025 to make my top ten. A gloriously well-written and plotted second-chance romance between two British actors. It has a dual timeline: one occurs when they are young and filming a romantic period drama film that will go on to become a cult classic, with the second covering the time thirteen years later when they have to reunite to make the sequel. The first time the leads hate each other, then they... don't.
I read 16 Heyer novels this year (all twelve of her crime ones and four historical romances) but only one makes this list. It's the least stereotypically "Heyer" novel of all, being a dark, Gothic-tinged thriller about an unhappy family trapped in their remote Cornish estate by their cantankerous patriarch. There's something a bit Du Maurier about it. I found it extremely compelling and quite disturbing at the end.
I've gone on at length elsewhere about how good I think this book is so I won't repeat it all again. Suffice to say, this is a psychological thriller by Agatha Christie that, had she published it under her own name, I think would be considered up there with some of her best work. There's no Poirot or Marple or clues revealed in the drawing room after tea, just a woman marooned by travel plans gone awry who must finally confront the truth about herself and her life. It's a pageturner, I promise.
Do you remember back in 2023 when everyone started talking about their "Roman Empire", ie the historical era or topic that they thought about a lot? Since I was about 15, mine has been the Hapsburgs and Austria-Hungary. Imagine my delight, therefore, when I learned this year that there was a series of short stories from Austria published in the late nineteenth century about the "Sherlock Holmes of Vienna", one Dagobert Trostler. Beyond the fact that both inhabit great cities and pursue criminal cases in an amateur capacity, there aren't really many similarities between Holmes and Trostler, though. This Viennese detective isn't interested in footprints or types of cigarette ash, nor does he have a Watson, or even much of a desire to see criminals punished for their crimes. He is a creature of Viennese high society, who would always rather effect the solution that hushes things up and leaves everyone's public reputations unbesmirched. He's good at deduction and observation, yes, but puts these talents to quite a different purpose. Fascinating. I wish someone would translate more of the stories into English.
Changes for 2026
No Reading Goal
I was about two thirds of the way through 2025 before I realised that having a set number of books I was aiming to read in the year was changing my behaviour, mostly for the worse. I noticed that I was starting and then abandoning lengthy audiobooks or novels that required me to read more slowly because they would stop me from reaching the ten books a month needed to hit the goal. Now that I seem to have fully recovered from my Covid-induced inability to finish books, I don't need the numerical incentive to keep reading. In fact, I'd be pleased if I manage to read fewer books overall this year, focusing instead on a wider variety of lengths and types.
Read The Books In My House
There are so many incredible-looking unread books in my house (and in my storage unit, eek). I want to read some of them this year, instead of haunting Netgalley and the library apps. Subsidiary goal: finally read the massive hardback copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell that I own. Many of you have told me it is just the kind of thing I will like and I want to agree (even though I have abandoned it thirty pages in about three times, probably because of the reading goal problem detailed above).
Seek Greater Variety
I'm repeating this goal from last year in the hope that I do it this time. I'd like to try reading more non-fiction, more poetry, more translations, more books of all kinds, really. Not aiming to hit a certain number of books in a year, removing limits and expectations generally, and mostly "shopping" for books in my own house will help, I think.
Read Short Stories At Bedtime
Since I quit social media, I've done a pretty good job of staying off my phone in the evenings. However, I quite frequently get into bed at a reasonable hour (say 10pm) and am then still up past midnight because I keep promising myself "just one more chapter" of whatever book I'm reading. I'm going to try instead to keep a book of short stories by the bed and read just one each night before lights out. Hopefully reading something short that has inbuilt closure will encourage me to go to sleep on time, and it will have the added benefit of creating a routine around reading something other than novels.
Write Reviews As I Go
I'm going to try writing and publishing individual reviews of books as I finish them rather than holding everything for an end-of-month round up (here's one I did a few days ago as a test). I'll do them as blog-only posts so I'm not cluttering your inboxes, and then still send a digest at the end of the month with some reflections and links to everything I've reviewed. If you do want to get each individual review delivered to your inbox, you can click here and opt into receive "all posts".
Have A Project
I'm going to attempt to read and write about a whole sequence of books by a single writer this year (don't worry, it's not a big departure — it's someone you've already heard me talk about a lot!). I want to read this body of work as research for something else I'm doing and I would like to talk to other people who enjoy this stuff, so posting about it seems like the best way to find them.
All will be revealed tomorrow when the first post goes out...
Thanks for reading along with me this year.
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This was a brilliant Christmas present from my husband. It's partly a non-fiction exploration of the history of British sheep and wool, partly a directory of all the different breeds with notes on their suitability for knitting/spinning, and partly a book of knitting patterns that suit certain heritage wools.
I've been interested in rare breed wool for a few years, having made a few small things with the Ronaldsay wool produced in Orkney and been gifted some hanks of Manx Loaghtan wool from the Isle of Man that sadly perished in a moth attack before I could use them. Now, after reading what this book had to say about fast fashion vs locally-produced fibres and garments, I'm feeling fired up to expand my stash and my repertoire.
I also learned a lot about the history of wool production and sheep breeding from this book, which was instructive. As cotton grew in popularity and affordability in the 17th and 18th centuries, the demand for British wool (previously a highly sought after and traded commodity) completely collapsed. This was especially nice for me to read about because one of my favourite books as a child was The Wool-Pack by Cynthia Harnett, which is all about the wool trade in 15th century England and the arrival of Medici financiers in the wool and cloth business. The Wonder of Wool filled in some gaps for me.
Everything changed for British wool in about the 1700s. Sheep farmers began to prioritise the meat only, ignoring the quality of fleece, so many previously excellent wool-producing breeds became indifferent or useless. There is now a movement to improve this again, although it will take many ovine generations for the project to reach fruition, of course. Similarly, there is a growing effort to conserve individual rare breeds for their specific wool attributes, also a long game.
This book also caused me to reflect on the complications of moving to a more sustainable way of making clothing. I'm probably just about an intermediate knitter, I have a flexible job with no commute, and I don't have caring responsibilities. It still takes me weeks of dedicated knitting, fitted in around other work, to make a single garment. I looked at the knitwear store run by one of these authors to see how much a finished version of one of the patterns was, and a single jumper costs £575. I'm sure that is a fair price given the materials and labour involved, yet it's a price that is completely inaccessible to almost everyone, including me.
As I was reading this book, I was having daydreams of a completely handmade wardrobe, from little vests made out of the softest underwool to sturdy coats made from more rugged fibres. Fun to imagine, even if it isn't remotely practical or possible. I will, however, be checking the provenance of all the wool I buy in future and doing my best to source it from UK rare breed suppliers.
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