Books

Doctor Zhivago: The banned book the CIA smuggled across the Iron Curtain

“May it make its way around the world. You are hereby invited to watch me face the firing squad.” These were the words of Boris Pasternak as he entrusted Italian...

Books Kavya Kapadia -

Sally Rooney, a Flaubert for today?

Like millions of other people in recent years, I have fallen victim to the...

Books Richard Kuehl -

Twenty-seven years on from The Satanic Verses: Can works of fiction be political?

On the 16th May, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie following a literary...

Books Ivett Berenyi -

The afterlife of stories: The art and ambiguity of literary retellings

Love, betrayal, justice, jealousy: these are timeless themes, woven into the human experience for...

Books Saskia Maini -

Latest

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....

Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

In 1881, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was published privately in 250 copies. It purports to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a...

Review: ‘American Dirt’

There was high expectation placed in American Dirt, what with Oprah Winfrey evangelising on Apple TV and a flood of celebrity endorsements on Twitter and...

Violent Music – Acaster’s ‘Perfect Sound Whatever’

Perfect Sound Whatever is comedian James Acaster’s part-memoir, part-encyclopaedic recount of the records that made 2016 the Greatest Year for Music of All Time,...

The Challenge of Maintaining a Legacy

January 2020 has brought with it the deaths of both Christopher Tolkien, son of J. R. R. Tolkien, and Stephen Joyce, grandson of James Joyce. The...

The Enduring Legacy of Pippi Longstocking

This year marks the 75th anniversary of Pippi Longstocking’s arrival at Villa Villekulla. In her first appearance Astrid Lindgren’s eponymous heroine fascinates her neighbours,...

The Death of Jesus

The world of J. M. Coetzee’s Jesus novels – a trilogy which has accounted for most of the author’s output in the last decade – is not easy...

Review: ‘Howards End is on the Landing’

Oxford time does not have the rhythms of ordinary time. There are very few moments for extended, contemplative, peaceful reading, of the sort which...

Local libraries: do we still need them?

What is a library? Most of us would describe them as a place to study (or at least pretend to), or somewhere to find...

Review: ‘A Portable Paradise’

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the British-Trinidadian Roger Robinson conjectured that his poetry ‘came out of storytelling at the dinner table’. The...

Orwell: a deserving modern hero

George Orwell should be declared a modern hero. The Etonian rebel was an interesting character, for he voluntarily subjected himself to poverty for many...

A Rediscovery of Michael Morpurgo

Oxford has made me used to reading huge, obscure academic texts. There is, it has to be admitted, something exciting about creeping down to...

Jane Eyre: A Victorian Heroine For Our Time

This year is set to be a big one for the Brontës, with the bicentennial anniversary of Anne’s birth coming up later this month,...

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Books

Doctor Zhivago: The banned book the CIA smuggled across the Iron Curtain

Sally Rooney, a Flaubert for today?

Twenty-seven years on from The Satanic Verses: Can works of fiction be political?

The afterlife of stories: The art and ambiguity of literary retellings

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