It’s a different emotion whenever I read the Urdu language. I’m not a native speaker, nor have I actively pursued learning the language, but as someone who finds solace in reading shayari (Urdu poetry), I wanted to follow it even in Oxford.
In my year out before my postgraduate degree, I made the momentous decision to start writing fiction. I’d recently got back into reading novels, and thought becoming a novelist would be an ideal way to commit my name to posterity.
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,...
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,...
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...
George Orwell should be declared a modern hero. The Etonian rebel was an interesting character, for he voluntarily subjected himself to poverty for many...
‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery/ None but ourselves can free our mind’. These lyrics from Bob Marley’s ‘Redemption Song’ course through Tara Westover’s 2018...
Another 20 or so years, another Little Women; this time brought to us by acclaimed director Greta Gerwig and starring some of the hottest young actors of...
Find Me is the October 2019 sequel to André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, which was popularised by the success of its 2017 movie adaptation. As a much anticipated...
Two clear streams run through Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing– a gut-wrenching tale of intersecting lives at the centre of the Troubles: that of revolution...