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12 Werken 317 Leden 18 Besprekingen

Werken van Mark Mason

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I very much enjoyed this book. I found Mark's writing style naturally light and easy to engage with, and soon felt as though I was walking alongside him, listening to his commentary and coming to know him a little better with the turn of each page.

I learned a great deal about London. I've never lived there myself, but it was a city which as a young man held a lot of fascination for me. I could relate easily to Mark's thoughts about how city life does affect us though due to my time in other capitals and the effect this had on me.

A light read good for those times when you just want to coast leisurely through something interesting.

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IanGrantham | 3 andere besprekingen | Mar 23, 2023 |
A humorous irreverent overview of the worlds of 007 in print and film. It’s a quick read (took me just over an hour), but unfortunately the bluffer out-bluffs himself as the text has several factual errors and repeats some common 007-myths.

Having said that Mason clearly believes his own maxim that “the books are better than the movies,” and if this slim volume encourages anyone to go beyond the movies and explore the source material, then that’s a good thing.
 
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gothamajp | Sep 6, 2021 |
Mark Mason is better known for his travel books, but he is also a huge fan of quizzes. He did not take a lot of persuading to combine both interests and travel back and forwards across the UK to find the best quizzes in the country. It was also a quest to see if he could find that most perfect thing, the essential elements of the perfect quiz question.

Which comic strip took its title from the names of a French theologian and an English political philosopher?

People have been known to actually earn a living from quizzing, either by participating in the plethora of TV shows or by travelling from pub to pub answering the questions on the quiz machines. He meets quizzers old and new, those that frequent the TV circuits and those are happy sitting in a pub calling out the questions. He joins journalists fighting for prestige and credibility by winning the annual parliamentary quiz, travels to the Beaulieu in the New Forest to see the Quizfest UK and attends a corporate quiz in heart of England.

Who is the only person ever to receive an Oscar Nomination for acting in a Star Wars film?

I do love a good quiz, ideally, one that has a balance of straightforward questions and some that really make you think, but I don't want to sit down to one of those where you struggle to comprehend what the question actually is, let alone what it is asking. Mason is obviously a big quiz addict, something that is very obvious when you read this. Being a talented writer he has woven together the art of quizzing with a social and contemporary history of the parts of the country he visits. It was quite a lot of fun, my head is now even more crammed with random facts than normal and it was a pleasure to read. And if you want to know what the answers to the two questions posed are then you'll need to read the book!
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PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |
Every time you post a letter or card it is routed to the final address by a little seven digit postcode. Matt Mason has decided that he will visit each and every one of these postcode areas and endeavour to extract an anecdote or fact about that place as he travels from AB to ZE. But it will also be a journey back in time as he looks at the history of the postal service in the UK and discovers more of the strange world of the philatelist and pays a visit to the underground mail train.

On his journey he meets the great and the good, the famous and infamous, visits the smallest church, enjoys a pint in the smallest pub in Britain, goes to No Place and Pity Me, discovers that there is a village called Letter and that bits of William Wallace are interred in four different locations. Each postcode is celebrated with a single fact, like where the dartboard was invented or that there is only one hotel suite in the world with its own postcode. He does draw out much more from the people and places as he passes swiftly through.

Mason seems to delight in finding unusual ways of looking at Britain and mining our rich history for a subject and a story. Whilst the history of the postal service has been written about many times before, I quite liked the way he looks at each two letter coded area and bring alive the story from there. This is reasonable book that is written in a chatty style, amusing at times as well as being fascinating. What you don’t get though is a huge amount of depth to the stories; to get round all 124 postal codes means that he cannot fully absorb the character of the places visited. That isn’t a bad thing, as it is still an enjoyable read, but I thought that his book Walk the Lines was much better.
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PDCRead | Apr 6, 2020 |

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Werken
12
Leden
317
Populariteit
#74,565
Waardering
½ 3.6
Besprekingen
18
ISBNs
70
Talen
1

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