Enjoy Life

Winter book reviews 2025

Simon Evans - a sad loss to Choice

I’m extremely saddened to have to let readers know that Simon Evans has died after a short illness. Simon was 65-years-old and had been a colleague and good friend for 25 years and had been reviewing books, films and his great love, music, in the magazine and lately on this website for most of those years.

Simon joined Choice in 2001 from the Birmingham Mail where he covered entertainment. He had interviewed and reviewed an amazing number of top performers and personalities and his contacts book yielded hundreds of his popular profiles and interviews in the print magazine before it closed. Simon was a proper journalist and looked after the production of the magazine, sub editing and proof reading every page. He cut his teeth in local papers starting in Dover.

As you can imagine he was an entertaining fount of stories from his days covering the rich theatre and music scene in Birmingham. He will be much missed by his family, including his first grandchild born earlier this year as well as his colleagues.

Simon’s knowledge and expertise will be a hard act to follow but I will do my best to bring you news of new books, films and CDs. Here are a couple of books I think readers will enjoy – history and biography with all the excitement of thrillers! Hopefully without Simon’s unerring review of my copy, I have kept any blemishes to a minimum.

Norman Wright, editor.

A Surgeon and a Maverick – The Life and Pioneering Work of Magdi Yacoub by Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman

For those of us born either side of the Second World War there are a few momentous milestones post war that mark the progress of our society and sometimes its backward steps.

It seems like yesterday that we were consumed by the race to land man on the Moon and, more significantly for human progress, the development of open-heart surgery and then heart transplants.

In scarcely 60 years surgery to correct invariably fatal heart disease has progressed from the daringly and dangerous steps into the unknown to the practically routine with excellent records of success saving hundreds of thousands of lives world-wide and improving the health and lives of many more.

Looking back to the pioneering early days of transplants the names of the surgeons in this country during the late sixties and early 70s were famous for controversy as well as their skill and courage to actually do the operations. Many of the medical and political establishment felt the procedure would never be successful and the programme should be stopped on ethical and financial grounds.

Magdi Yacoub was one of those whose persistence paid off and enabled the creation of a world-renowned cardiac centre at Harefield Hospital in North West London. But his legendary status goes way beyond the transplant story. He developed cardiothoracic surgery for children; has used stem cell technology to develop heart valves that grow naturally inside the body; founding new charity hospitals in Egypt, the country of his birth.

This is the story of a truly remarkable man with the ability and energy for almost superhuman achievement at work and in his private life. He raised millions for charities and heart programmes, with the ability to charm and relate to the good and famous. He performed life enhancing surgery on personalities like Eric Morecambe and Omar Sharif. He was a friend of Princess Diana, who witnessed two of his cardiac surgeries.

Written by veteran Times journalists Simon Pearson and Fiona Gorman who know how to recognise a great story and bring it to life, this biography has hundreds of such stories and is a thrilling read none more exciting than the story, that opens the book, of a high-speed trip in a police convoy from Plymouth to Harefield with a heart for transplant to avoid the donor heart being unusable after fog grounded the planned helicopter transport. Against a deadline of two hours, this must have strained Yacoub’s own heart to the maximum.

This paperback edition has been released to coincide with Yacoub’s 90^th birthday this November. He continues to work at that remarkable pace on his hospitals’ development and fund raising.

Published in paperback by American University in Cairo Press, 412 pages, £12.99. 

Eleanor: A 200-Mile Walk in Search of England’s Lost Queen by Alice Loxton

In 1290, England mourned the death of a queen, Eleanor of Castile, beloved wife of King Edward I (popularly known as Edward Longshanks, the warrior king).

After 36 years of marriage, 16 pregnancies, accompanying her husband on a Crusade, building a property portfolio and travelling the Kingdom, Europe and the Middle East extensively she was some remarkable woman.

She died while on a trip through the Midlands with Edward and the whole court in the little Nottinghamshire village of Harby near Lincoln and was taken to Lincoln’s magnificent Cathedral for preparations to return to the capital.

Her body was then carried on a 200-mile journey from Lincoln to London, for a state funeral at the newly consecrated Westminster Abbey, a solemn procession that would become immortalized in stone. To mark the places where it rested overnight, a heartbroken Edward commissioned twelve magnificent Eleanor Crosses.

Historian, Alice Loxton, followed the route of the cortege on the corresponding dates in November and December 2004 taking 17 days to complete the journey on foot.

On the way she discovered a lot of information about Eleanor and lots of fascinating historical facts about the places she passed through. She writes about history with a novelist’s style, making it far from dry and factual but interpreting what the characters in 1290 may have been doing and thinking.

Nine of the crosses have gone now, many destroyed during the Civil War, but there is plenty of evidence of their existence which the author uncovers and illuminates in her chatty and informal way, relating much of it to modern day examples.

The most complete Eleanor Cross, intact but for the actual cross atop the 43ft tall carved stone column, is in the small Northamptonshire village of Geddington near Kettering. We lived there for 20 years while our daughters grew up and I thought I knew all there was to know about the cross and its heritage that the village community jealously regards as its own. It turns out that I didn’t, but Alice Loxton put that right with lots more explanation and she surely does the same with all the other places where Queen Eleanor rested.

It’s a great read on a historical level and on the adventure of walking 200 plus miles to a deadline with little physical preparation.

Published by Pan Macmillan: 352 pages

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