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."
An Artificial Low
Reviewing Ottessa Moshfegh's 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation' (Jonathan Cape, 2018)
Menial Heroics
Reviewing Sayaka Murata's 'Convenience Store Woman' (Granta, 2019)
Reclaiming the Moment
A review of Lavinia Greenlaw's 'The Built Moment' (Faber and Faber, 2019)
The Funny/Not Funny Exercise
A review of David Sedaris' 'Calypso' (Little, Brown, 2018)
Troy Story Revisited
Reviewing Pat Barker’s ‘The Silence of the Girls’ (Penguin, 2018).
Going Wilde in America
“Audiences deserted his lectures, Harvard students mocked his outfits, and his failures left him drunk and dejected."
Reviewing Michele Mendelssohn's 'Making Oscar Wilde'.
The New Bridget Jones?
Reviewing ‘Queenie’ by Candice Carty-Williams (Trapeze, 2019).
An Old War in a New Light
Reviewing ‘Vietnam: An Epic Tragedy’ by Max Hastings (Harper, 2018).
In Search of a Poet
Exploring the history and the hype behind the role of the Oxford Professor of Poetry
‘In Search of Equillibrium’
A review of Theresa Lola’s debut poetry collection (Nine Arches Press, 2019).
The Power of Telling Tales in Ali Smith’s ‘Spring’
'This third instalment in Smith’s quartet is perhaps the best yet; a novel for our times that asks all the right questions of the current climate, but also of itself. '
The ‘happily ever after’ we seek only exists in fiction
Reading stories full of delusions allows us to escape from the modern world
The Intricacies of Married Life
Exploring the themes of illict love, friendship and bereavement in Tessa Hadley’s 'Late in the Day'.
Thinking Through The Flesh
A review of Lidia Yuknavitch's new memoir, The Chronology of Water.
