Ifitsworthdoing
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I had previously said that while PK clearly has a reasonable command of German there were a few (avoidable) clangers in the earlier books which should have been spotted by subeditors fully conversant in German. This thankfully seems to have been tak…
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Well done both of you. Literary detection is so much fun!
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I have always been fascinated by power tipping points when the populace, state infrastructure and its key personnel suddenly faced a radical change in sovereignty and/or beliefs; examples include the Roman conquest of Britain, the Crusades, the Mong…
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Just imagine you happened to live in Mosul, Iraq ... now the largest city in the "Islamic State". You'd simply have to adapt to the changed circumstances, especially if you are part of an established family. 'Joining the resistance' sounds exciting …
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The new book, perhaps inevitably, is a typical mid- to late-series instalment: Like the later Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe novels it feels a little jaded and painted-by-numbers, especially Bernie's dialogue with Dalia on the one side and Goebbels on th…
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Recently returned from 5 days in Berlin which I hadn't seen since before the wall came down - what a change! While my objective (family meet-up) precluded much exploration I did get to see quite a bit of the (new) Alexanderplatz, the Reichstag (now …
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On page 6 of AQF (set in 1950) Carlos Fuldner "snapped his thumb on a Dunhill [lighter], lit his cigarette ...". While Alfred Dunhill Ltd. had been making cigarette lighters since the 1930s, these were petrol-fuelled, initially table-top sized, fair…
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All very Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler ... "he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before." - Chandler on Hammett, in The Simple Art of Murder
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BG's "Forrest Gump" encounters with infamous characters are usually so intriguing - and provoke long trails through Wikipedia - that I was downright disappointed to be unable to trace 'Edgard de Boudel', the nefarious French SS officer who - though …
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Well, if he holds on until 1992 (admittedly unlikely) he can see Erich Mielke finally go on trial - and get convicted 2 years later - for the 1931 murders of Anlauf and Lenck. A rather nice piece of historical and poetic justice, that.
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Somewhat closer to home, life in a nazified Britain during the early 1950s is described in (un-)loving detail by C. J. Sansom in DOMINION. His alternative history which has Chamberlain's resignation as its point of departure (with Halifax taking ove…
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Just found out I'll be in Berlin around Easter 2015 - with a bit of luck I'll get to take a few pictures of BG sites and put them up on this site. Is there a web resource for pre-WW2 maps of Berlin?
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A very good question for PK and his editors - why the hell did you decide to forgo a Glossary of Terms? This would have been another opportunity to inject comments and cross-references to deepen the reader's understanding of this highly complex part…
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I would also be interested in hearing other readers' thoughts on the titles chosen by PK. Another related thread might consider the titles of the foreign-language translated editions where these differ from the English titles (or direct translations…
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I agree with a lot of what's been said above - PK's German is good but could be better, inevitably there are some spelling errors, a number of factual mistakes, etc. Pity his publishers didn't employ either a line editor with a background in German,…
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Thought it was excellent - filling in missing bits of the BG canon, developing BG further as a character, but most of all in evoking the dread of the German grunt in Russia after Stalingrad. The irony of the propaganda exercise over Katyn, with so m…