Books
Bust?: Saving the Economy, Democracy and our Sanity by Robert Peston and Kishan Koria- Review
"So long as we have an economic system geared towards the accumulation of wealth rather than the acquisition of it, inequalities will continue to widen"
Book recommendations from the editors’ desk
"It’s rare that I find non-fiction to be such a page-turner, but Tara Westover’s autobiography was just that."
Greg Heffley: A Hero of Our Time
Few modern comic heroes align with our distinctive age – an age which Dickens’s...
The man of the moment: Review of Keir Starmer: The Biography by Tom Baldwin
"Baldwin does his best to humanise Starmer and to deflate the view of him as “Mr Boring”."
Review: Chaucer Here and Now, Weston Library
"Mansplaining scribes, scandalised censors, and unfinished endings. Even from day one, there is no stable and single Chaucer."
Review: Florence Given’s debut book Women Don’t Owe You Pretty
Florence Given sells feminism as what it is: freeing and utterly delicious. She affirms and articulates precisely the points it feels so hard to put your finger on sometimes.
Fact and Fiction: Where Should the Boundary Lie?
Novels, TV shows, films. They are a form of art. And in art
there is no wrong answer. Yet this becomes more complex for historical...
Classic Letdowns: Proust
Disclaimer – I have not read the full 3000 pages of this story, nor do I intend to. The reasons for this will become...
Friday Favourite: David Harsent
There is something about poetry that makes it more potent than fiction in times of need. With its raw, brash and yet strangely beautiful...
Murakami’s ‘Killing Commendatore’: where art can transport you
Murakami’s Killing Commendatore got me thinking about art within literature. We can easily find examples of literature within art: Shakespeare’s Hamlet in Millais’ Ophelia,...
Classic Letdowns: Vanity Fair
Googling the words Vanity Fair brings up a popular publication, a 2004 movie starring Reese Witherspoon and a 2018 BBC show, and finally, the...
The Dangers of Genre-lisation
Within a week, the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s novel Normal People, which explores the oeuvre of two teenage lovers, was requested on BBC...
Friday Favourite: The Uninhabitable Earth
The book currently on top of my ever-growing ‘To Read’ pile
is David Wallace-Well’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth. Based on his
2017 essay of the...
Review: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes offers an origin story for everyone’s favourite evil-but-unequivocally-stylish dictator, President Snow. For the uninitiated, his achievements in the...
Thoughts on the gifting of a book
In search of a distraction in the gloom of mid-April, I sorted through my bookshelves, where half-read prelims texts obscured teen fiction and discarded...
Review: The Mirror and the Light
The final instalment of Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell trilogy finds her writing with more lyricism and force than ever before, and cements her prestige as...
Students review their favourite audiobooks
'Good Omens' by Terry Pratchet and Neil Gaiman, read by Martin JarvisI love the idea of audiobooks but often struggle to find one I...
The societal consequences of the prosthetic womb in Helen Sedgwick’s ‘The Growing Season’
Imagining a world where reproductive technology has evolved to popularise prosthetic wombs, Helen Sedgwick’s ‘The Growing Season’ toes the line between utopia and dystopia...
Classic Letdowns: Ulysses by James Joyce
There are some rites of passage simply not worth the walk - just ask David Cameron. From pig’s heads to pyramids of naked would-be...
