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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."

Friday Favourite: The Things They Carried

In the perverse manner of a bored and immature conscript in peacetime, I spent my weekends off in 2015 and 2016 consuming as much...

Review: La Peste

‘Nous sommes en guerre’, Macron said in his address to the French nation on 16th March. At the time, my mother and I thought...

Friday Favourite: War and Peace

In this Coronavirus season, existing dystopian novels have suddenly become “prophetic”. The world may be grinding to a standstill, but Generation COVID can’t while...

Comfort Reading in the Time of Covid-19

David Nicholls  If rom-coms are the most comforting type of movie, then David Nicholls writes the most comforting type of novel. He is best known...

‘and all manner of things shall be well’

Jack Glynne-Jones explores how T.S. Eliot provides solace in periods of stress

Review: Diary of a Murderer and Other Stories by Kim Young-Ha

‘It’s been twenty-five years since I last murdered someone, or has it been twenty-six?’ A serial killer suffering from Alzheimer’s attempts to protect his daughter...

Review: Conversations with Friends

At one point in Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends, the protagonist, Frances, tells her best friend and former girlfriend, Bobbi: ‘If I could talk like you...

David Copperfield: strikingly modern?

We often speak of a ‘writer for our times’, the ‘voice of a generation’ – there is this need to define our age, to...

Review: That Reminds Me (2019)

Fragmentary, authentic and poetic – Derek Owusu’s latest publication, That Reminds Me, succeeds in its painfully honest exploration of a young Ghanaian boy’s journey into adulthood.  When...

Eco-Fiction

Last November, Waterstones named Greta Thunberg as their ‘author of the year’. Her collection of speeches, No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference, certainly...

The Modern Memoir

“I can’t believe that we’re on the fifth instalment of my autobiography. As usual with me, the three years since my last book, You Only...

Literary Blackface

When the largest book retailer in the United States, Barnes & Noble, launched their so-called Diverse Editions initiative in honour of Black History Month,...

Review: Caging Skies and Jojo Rabbit

When depicting the world and ideology of Nazi-Germany, the theme of childhood or the child-like figure is quite a well-used one. Key examples include...

Queer Theory

As we go into LGBT+ History Month, many figures throughout history - modern or not - are looked upon and celebrated, and rightly so....

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