Man's inhumanity to man [or in this case woman] is always shocking. I didn't know about women still being burned at the stake in 1780 for petty theft whilst their male counterparts when condemned to die for their crimes were always hanged. The injustice of it shocked me.

Although I thought I knew about transportation, my knowledge, it transpires, is really wafer thin. This fascinating book tracks the progress of the first female convict ship from England to Sydney Cove and attempts to get under the lice-ridden skin of the convicts, the crew and the officers of The Lady Julian[a] which conveyed them to their destination.

The detail is fascinating. The atmosphere is tantalising in that it touches on famous names [Captain Bligh, he of the HMS Bounty, Captain Cook, he who 'discovered' Australia] and exotic places [Rio, Cape Town, Canton]. Most of all the book conveys the behavioural code under which the ever-so-slightly-criminal classes lived. No murderers, rapist or extremist political activists people these pages. It is a catalogue of the extraordinary lengths to which English society went in order to distance itself from its seamier underbelly.

Part work of historical fact, part detective story and part adventure yarn it's well worth a read and packs a lot into its 235 pages [2 fewer than the number of women who left England for Botany Bay aboard the Julian[a].

An easy read for someone equine and canine-enthused like me. A forthright tone. An honest acknowledgement of her own and her family's foibles and, for those of us who were brought up with horses, a very recognisable deference of human in favour of equine. 

The book stops before the author's seemingly meteoric rise to public prominence became common knowledge. It deals with her childhood and adolescence in such a way as I hope there is a second book which addresses her subsequent life in as much honest, straightforward detail as this one.

I never read the book so went in to see the film without any preconceptions. I came out of it wondering what all the fuss was about. Perhaps my faculties of comprehension and rationality have been compromised by an overindulgence in Christmas fare, but the film failed to move me, failed to stimulate my thoughts and failed to impress me other than by its technical achievements.

At best I was diverted but felt unable, or perhaps unwilling, to grasp what I was being asked to consider. Logic kept intruding - not a useful thing when being asked to consider a fable.

There is clearly not enough source material to make a decent biographical study of this enigmatic lady. This book, published in 1987, does exactly the same as that of Annibel Jenkins on the same subject. It pads itself out by quoting great swathes of Inchbald's own plays and novels in order, it seems, to attain the correct word quota. This is disappointing because somewhere in here is an absolutely fascinating woman who bucked so many 18th C trends that she deserves better treatment at the hands of her various biographers. 

By common consent she was beautiful, clever, witty and successful. She was also miserly, reclusive, acid tongued on more than a few occasions and cruel.

Having read most of her work I was looking forward to a penetrative and analytical study of the woman herself. No such luck. Interesting nonetheless.

I have read every Dick Francis book since he started writing. It has become something of a family tradition to give  me the latest one at Christmas. I dutifully read this one and quite enjoyed it but perhaps it should have stopped when the old boy died. This one is reasonably entertaining but the formula is now very tired indeed. I write only a couple of days after having read the book and have already forgotten the plot, the setting [except of course that race-horses are involved] and the characters.