Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                    The Road Home by Rose Tremain. I came across Rose Tremain quite by accident and just wish someone had recommended  her books to me a lot earlier in life. The Road Home portrays the main character Lev, an Eastern European from somewhere such as Poland or Slovakia. We know for certain that his country was a communist one but the writer is vague about his country of origin. Not to think about it, not to feel inside him the finality of what had happened, that was all he craved now. Nothing else. Nothing beyond or after or yet to come. None of that. Only the feeling of not feeling. Amongst other things the book relates to displacement and through Lev, Lydia, Vitas and the gay Chinese migrant workers we are made aware of their struggles. That doesn't mean that the native British characters don't feel a similar sense of isolation because some of them do. Ruby, at the old people's home is lonely and feels ...

                  Saving Mr Banks Film Review. " It's not the children she comes to save. It's their father. It's YOUR father, Travers Goff." Walt Disney had a testy relationship with author P.L.Travers, a pen name for Helen Goff. He was unflattering in his remarks concerning the writer of the Mary Poppins' series. He used curmudgeonly and uncompromising, prim and sexagenarian. The film was inspired by true events and Emma Thompson's depiction of Travers shows what an irritable, difficult person she was to work with. Disney approved the following lyrics parodying Pamela's negativity: "My world was calm, well-ordered, exemplary, then came this person, with chaos in her wake, And now my life's ambitions go with one fell blow. It's quite a bitter pill to take." Eight books were written in the Mary Poppins' series between 1934 to 1988. Walt Disney's own daughters loved the series so much that he ( played by Tom Ha...

                                    A Matter of Honour by Jeffrey Archer. "The simple beauty of the golds, reds and blues left them both speechless. Neither of them had expected the icon to be so breathtaking." I loved this Archer classic and felt that I was following the trials and tribulations of 007 instead of Captain Adam Scott. The story begins interestingly with the discovery that the painting of St. George and the Dragon, displayed in the Winter Palace, Leningrad for more than 50 years under heavy guard, is a fake. The treasures inside the palace have been carbon-dated and it is now known that this painting in question was done 500 years after Rublev's original. Nicholas IInd, The Tsar's traditional silver crown was not attached to the back of the frame. It was believed that the Tsar had secreted something valuable inside the icon, something so valuable that it would have...