This is an aftermath statement which follows on from a devastating domestic fire. ‘Aftermath’ isn’t the word the narrator, Ruby Lennox, uses, but it’s what she means…
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Later in life the poet had trouble with her eyes; her sight was deteriorating. Still, the loss of one sense can sharpen another. Emily’s hearing was no doubt acute, and her sense of touch and smell, if all those flowers and birds are anything to go on in her letters and poetry, her herbarium…
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This emotional outburst of a line comes towards the end of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree,’ a poem which dramatises a carefully released, carefully pacedcry for existential hope…
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Orwell’s essay has been a relief from thinking about politics. Instead, it has allowed me to imagine small, awkward and absurd things: creatures going about the ungainly business of sex, which is to say spring…
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I turn to poetry to help sort and arrange my thoughts and feelings. I’m looking for a clear order of feeling and thinking, which comes from excellently formed verse. A strong poem offers an argument, and this stanza, from Ben Morgan’s poem, ‘Eavesdropper’, offers me the sort of clarity…
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This sentence, from Henry Fielding’s wandering picaresque novel, is English pantomime: pantomime meets a Punch and Judy show. Poor Molly Seagrim has been accosted by the rough and ready Goody Brown, who is quite ready for a bloody battle…
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Recently, I’ve been reading and teaching the essays of James Baldwin. I find myself once again moved, transported, by Baldwin’s rhetoric. I slip into the stream of his argument, what seems to be the flow of his consciousness…
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There is a hilarious moment in Spark’s 1960 novel, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, when the popularity of the charismatic central character, Dougal Douglas, is discussed by several other characters. It is an impromptu symposium on Dougal’s likeability that feels very contemporary…
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It isn’t true that men aren’t moved by flowers. D.H. Lawrence gushed over flowers and the sentence above, delivered from the point of view of Captain Hepburn in Lawrence’s novella…
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Why do I find George Eliot’s prose so reassuring? Because her narrator stands right beside us peering over our shoulder. Because we can hear her knowledge of her characters breathing down our neck…
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Beyond the village, the east, there is forest…
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Lowry is an experimental writer, by which we mean - (I think) - he believes writing can recreate its subject, can lean into other forms, other media…
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I’ve begun to write a ‘Biography of a Buttercup’. What on earth is that you may ask? I’m not quite sure; I’m experimenting. The nature of experiment is not to know quite what it is you are doing…
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I am trying to write up jangled nerves: the nerves of a young family that run firstly through the person of the father, then the mother. They take turns being nervy. Mess is the substance of this domestic entrapment…
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