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Doctor Who: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead
Doctor Who: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead
Aug 8, 2025 1:07 PM

Author:Steve Cole

Doctor Who: The Knight, The Fool and The Dead

We live forever, barring accidents. Just like everyone else in the universe.

The Doctor travels back to the Ancient Days, an era where life flourishes and death is barely known...

Then come the Kotturuh – creatures who spread through the cosmos dispensing mortality. They judge each and every species and decree its allotted time to live. For the first time, living things know the fear of ending. And they will go to any lengths to escape this grim new spectre, death.

The Doctor is an old hand at cheating death. Now, at last, he can stop it at source. He is coming for the Kotturuh, ready to change everything so that Life wins from the start.

Not just the last of the Time Lords. The Time Lord Victorious.

Reviews

A middle-aged film producer, a novelist with writer's block and a glamorous young actress come together to make a Swinging Sixties movie in this jaunty page-turner. But everyone is living a double life. Even names can't be taken on trust. Full of neat phrases and quirkily funny scenes, it's an elating read

—— The Times, Best Paperbacks of 2021

What could be more reassuring in troubling times than a new William Boyd novel? Trio is immensely readable, its descriptions full of light and colour, its humour spot on, its mood a perfect mix of frolicsome and melancholy

—— Sunday Telegraph

An absorbing novel about lives spiralling out of control and the drastic measures required to right them

—— Economist

The characters are wonderfully written and I loved escaping to the gossipy world of the film set

—— Good Housekeeping, Book of the Month

Boyd keeps the plot racing along, yet for all the twists, the real delight is in William Boyd's wry portrait of a bygone age . . . Boyd's usual sure touch is evident throughout this tender, gently comic work

—— Independent

One of our best contemporary storytellers. . . Trio embraces comedy, tragedy and redemption. It succeeds impressively because of its dramatic, often sensational, revelations

—— Spectator

I am a huge fan of William Boyd and the tender way he writes about the flaws and frailties of his characters. Trio is his best novel in years

—— Red, The Best Books to Read this October

Reading William Boyd's Trio is like shrugging on a worn leather jacket on the first brisk morning of autumn: cosy but cool . . . He has enormous fun with the worlds - and egos - of page and screen

—— The Times

Enormous fun . . . Boyd's characters are vibrant, his prose elegant, comedy excellent: the result is a book that's compassionate and compelling

—— Tatler

Boyd's writing is as fluent as ever but it's the ideas pulsing beneath the surface that distinguish Trio

—— Financial Times

Trio is an intricate set of variations on the idea of alternative selves, well beyond the title's trio, unobtrusively elegant in its formal beauty

—— New Statesman, Books of the Year

Sending an affably satiric shimmer over the ceaseless rewrites, grotesque miscastings and behind-the-scenes chicanery, William Boyd simultaneously explores deeper issues of duplicity and divided personality

—— Sunday Times, Best Fiction Books of the Year

Consistently intelligent and compulsively readable... [Amis] applies his insight and curiosity as a novelist to this stylish and genuine account of his development as a writer. The result reaches the heights of his finest work.

—— Publishers Weekly *STARRED REVIEW*

Profoundly moving... If Experience was Amis elucidating the visible events of his life, the one-10th of the iceberg sitting above the waterline, then this book is a dark and tender exploration of the part that lies submerged.

—— Richard Strachan , Herald Scotland

You really feel that in this book you are getting to the heart of one of the most remarkable writers of our time.

—— Jake Kerridge , Sunday Express

[Martin Amis is a] master chronicler of the male condition.

—— Bill Prince , Daily Telegraph

As always with Amis the prose is beautiful, expressive, and precisely engineered... The book is a boundless treasure filled with hilarious anecdotes, heart-wrenching confessions, and eye-opening revelations.

—— Joshua Whitehead , Mancunion

A deeply engaging 'novelised autobiography' that focuses on love and death... Wonderfully readable, rich in the familiar Amis pleasures of wit, insight, and well-formed anecdotes. An intriguing, often brilliant addition to a storied career.

—— Kirkus *STARRED REVIEW*

The unexpected gift of Inside Story comes under the heading of "How to Write". Amis reliably provides synaptic pleasure whenever he pauses to give one of his didactic asides about the English language. It would be worth compiling these in a volume to stand alongside Kingsley's The King's English.

—— Thomas Meaney , New Statesman

In Amis's writing, [there is] that brilliant observational gift for ironies... There are perfectly crafted scenes that capture the creeping shocks of mortality.

—— Tim Adams , Observer

It is always a pleasure to read Martin Amis... [Inside Story] is a generous book in sharing so much with its readers... Brilliant.

—— Lynn Barber , Daily Telegraph

An account [of Larkin is] written with such empathy and insight that it is truly harrowing... grandly resonant, brilliantly suggestive.

—— Edmund Gordon , Times Literary Supplement

The book's most solemn task is perhaps that of honouring the dead...and this it accomplishes beautifully.

—— Keith Miller , Literary Review

[In Inside Story] humour and illumination flow.

—— Janan Ganesh , Financial Times

Sad and funny... Utterly compelling on grief.

—— Alex Clark , Guardian

This is a celebration of his [Amis's] life in all its exuberant brilliance and melancholy moments.

—— BURO

[Inside Story displays] compelling insights and observations, courage, tenderness; and above all, an undimmed passion for the written word.

—— Dan Brotzel , UK Press Syndication

Fascinating... Martin Amis at his best, and that is very good indeed.

—— David Herman , Jewish Chronicle

Inside Story is something particular, something unique... the tenor of his writing...about Israel, the Holocaust and 9/11 reveals a different Amis, and is the source of some of the book's best passages.

—— Neil McCarthy , Spiked

Captivating and moving.

—— Tablet, *Summer Reads of 2021*

Moving... Beneath the attention-seeking is a well-loved author who has gone through his cupboards, giving us all that he has.

—— Johanna Thomas-Corr , Sunday Times

A defiant and witty testimony to mortality and a tender remembrance of his friends and literary heroes… I’ve been reading and re-reading it this year

—— Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

Continues in the same superior vein as Restoration… The fusion of such an engrossing character, and the minutiae of another time, remains a marvel

—— Daily Telegraph

In this evocative and beautifully drawn novel of family and loyalty in the face of an uncertain future Tremain continues the story of a wonderfully unique character

—— Hannah Britt , Daily Express

Hugely enjoyable

—— Reader's Digest

Merivel’s hapless charm remains intact in this tour de force of literary technique

—— Sunday Telegraph (Seven)

A sequel that looks back to the earlier novel without ever quite recapturing its spirit is the perfect form in which to evoke that feeling of having to carry on, and of trying to make yourself have fun even with it eventually begins to hurt

—— Colin Burrow , Guardian

A marvelllously rollicking good read, and it is such a pleasure to meet Robert Merivel again. Rose Tremain brings the character to life in a way that makes you want to find out even more about the period. Enormously skilled and deft

—— Good Book Guide
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