Books
Ten Years to Save the West by Liz Truss review: Revenge of the lettuce
I have met Liz Truss only once. It was in Oxford Town Hall in November of last year and I had tried (without success) to smuggle in an iceberg...
War, Peace and Writing
Throughout history, art has left an indelible cultural impact on humanity’s collective understanding of...
The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States, and the Middle East 1979-2003 by Steve Coll review
Tyrants should only be brought down by their own people; they become martyrs when brought down by foreigners.
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."
Friday Favourite: The Death of Ivan Ilyich
"The novella’s real focus is the inevitability of death itself, which is so gargantuan, physically and philosophically, that retrospection is crushed into irrelevance."
The future of bookshops is more uncertain than ever
"In the wake of Covid-19, it remains to be seen whether bookshops will continue to encourage our love of browsing."
“The frailty of everything revealed at last”: dystopian fiction in a time of crisis
"Dystopian narratives may be bleak, but they do not contribute to the barbarity of our times: they are, instead, a powerful reminder that in the midst of crisis, beauty and hope do remain."
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...
