Nicholas Clifford (1930-2019)
14 books read for LibriVox
- Half the fun is watching Basil and Isabel March bicker their way through New York apartment hunting before the book quietly turns serious, with a streetcar strike and old Dryfoos's money pulling everyone apart. It's slow and talky in the best way, if you like your realism gentle but pointed.
- You’d enjoy this for Inspector Hanaud, a sharp, theatrical French detective who questions everyone at the Villa Rose in Aix-les-Bains. The pace is deliberate and the manners are very 1910, but the careful deductions and faintly sinister atmosphere reward you if you like your mysteries patient rather than breathless.
- You get a cool, sharp look at Washington through Madeleine Lee, a wealthy widow watching Senator Ratcliffe turn charm and principle into political machinery. It’s talk-heavy and a little chilly, but if you like social satire, its reading of ambition, reform, and self-deception still feels uncomfortably precise.
- Colville is forty-one, drifting around Florence, and half-talks himself into an engagement with a girl of twenty who thinks she's restoring his lost youth. It's gentle, funny in a dry way, and quietly wise about middle age; nothing explodes, but the conversations are a pleasure.
- If you want to see detective fiction before Sherlock Holmes existed, here's Lecoq crawling around a snowy murder scene reading footprints, matching wits with a prisoner who won't crack. Fair warning: halfway through it swerves into a long family backstory, so patience helps.
- You get Richard Hannay undercover as a conscientious objector, which lets Buchan play slyly with patriotism, conscience, and the absurdities of wartime Britain. It’s more reflective and morally uneasy than a straight chase story, but Hannay’s dry voice and Mary Lamington’s intelligence keep the long stretches moving.
- You read this as a string of sharp, compact encounters rather than a conventional travel book: river journeys, shabby hotels, missionaries, officials, and Chinese strangers pass before Maugham’s amused eye. It’s observant and often funny, though its colonial assumptions can make the distance uncomfortable.
- Elena is the reason to read it, a young woman so restless for a purpose that when the Bulgarian revolutionary Insarov shows up, you feel her whole life tilt. It's quiet and it will hurt a little near the end, but Turgenev earns every bit of it.
- You’ll like Rachel Ray for its quiet pressure: Rachel’s love for Luke Rowan has to survive village gossip, a domineering sister, and her mother’s anxious idea of respectability. It’s a slower, domestic Trollope, but his dry eye for small-town judgment makes Rachel’s eventual steadiness feel hard-won rather than sugary.
- Scrambles Amongst the Alps in the Years 1860–69 non-fictionWhymper spends years failing at the Matterhorn, dusting himself off after literal cliff falls, and his dry Victorian understatement makes it oddly funny until, on the descent from the summit at last, it turns terribly serious. If you like your adventure honest about its costs, this rewards you.
- A future prime minister wrote this angry, and it shows: the scenes in the mining towns and the tommy-shops still sting, and the famous line about England being two nations lands hard. Fair warning, the speeches run long and the romance is mostly scaffolding.
- Strether goes to Paris to drag a young man home and instead gets quietly undone by the place himself; his "live all you can" outburst still stings. The sentences wind and double back, so save it for when you're patient, then it pays.
- You get Trollope’s dry social comedy at its most pointed, with Elias Gotobed delivering blunt American verdicts on English aristocracy and fox-hunting society while Arabella Trefoil treats courtship as strategy. It’s sprawling and occasionally slow, but rewarding if you enjoy watching manners, money, and marriage expose people.
- Mr. Crawley, a proud, half-broken country curate accused of stealing a twenty-pound cheque, is one of the most painfully real people Trollope ever wrote, and you'll ache for him. It's long and unhurried, but if you like character over plot, this rewards every page.