• LIFE

  Big city, small town

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 11/05/2018

  » People are natural actors. Observe how they tell stories to their friends, passing on telephone conversations or what they saw or heard. They mimic and flap their arms for emphasis. Hoping for smiles or groans. Novelists aim to do the same with more words. Alas, only the better ones succeed. All too many try and fail.

• LIFE

  The Chinese spy

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 10/02/2017

  » If the majority of cloak and dagger scriveners are to be believed, look no further than the CIA for enemy spies (or MI6 as the case may be). In their espionage thrillers, both top secret intelligence agencies are infested with foreign moles and domestic traitors, often in high positions.

• LIFE

  A bit rich

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 06/01/2017

  » I learned the oldest of lessons as a social investigator in the Big Apple. The great wish of the poor is to become rich and the rich want to become richer. It was interesting to observe how they went about it. Unlike the middle class, the poor didn't have a work ethic. They felt entitled to unearned income.

• LIFE

  Fool's gold

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 01/08/2016

  » The search for lost or hidden treasure is older than Jason and the golden fleece. Legend and history assure us it exists, on land and beneath the sea. Fortune hunters have been searching for it, high and low, for millennia. The Templars squirrelled away their trove, but where?

• LIFE

  Renaissance history

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 14/07/2017

  » I am so conditioned when I pick up a new book about Italy that I expect it to be a historical novel about Ancient Rome. That period seems to fascinate historians and historical novelists. This reviewer finds it no more than somewhat interesting.

• LIFE

  An enduring spirit

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 18/01/2016

  » With the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the world entered the atomic age. More devastating hydrogen bombs were tested, weapons of mass destruction indeed. The US and USSR rattled theirs at each other over the next 44 years, until the Soviets called it a day and the Cold War was over.

• LIFE

  A Golden Age?

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 07/07/2014

  » Human nature being what it is, people are dissatisfied with the present. They believe that they would have been happy living in what they believe was a Golden Age in the near or distant past, ignoring or being ignorant of the fact that every Golden Age had downsides, invariably more than up.

• LIFE

  Iran’s nuclear bomb threat

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 07/04/2014

  » Ever since 1945, when the US used up its arsenal of two nuclear bombs to end the Pacific War, the rest of the world has been trying to get their own. The Soviet Union came next by stealing the secret, followed by other lands, claiming its necessity solely for self-defence. Iran means for theirs to wipe Israel off the map.

• LIFE

  That word again

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 11/03/2013

  » I was taught in school that the most commonly used letter in the English language is "e" and the word most often spoken or written is "the". However, from what I learned in the real world I must disagree. Actually, "eff" is the most basic, essential, keyword _ employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective.

• LIFE

  Smoke jumpers

  Life, Bernard Trink, Published on 12/11/2012

  » I'd thought that James Patterson, on his own and with co-authors, penned the most novels until I came across Nora Roberts. Under her own name and also the pseudonym JD Robb she has ground out 190 works of fiction to date without a co-author. To her credit, talent-wise she gives Patterson a run for his money.

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