How do you feel about exclamation marks? Otherwise known as gaspers, screamers, dog’s cocks, or shrieks. In his Modern English Usage, Fowler said that using too many betrays an “uneducated or unpractised... Read more »
By definition, utopia cannot exist. In 1516, educated readers of Thomas More’s Utopia would have appreciated a tension between two possible derivations of this novel word: the Greek “eu-topos”, meaning good place,... Read more »
“I’ve had a life and I’ve also had a life as a life writer”: Blake Morrison opens his tour d’horizon of arguably literature’s most expanding and expansive genre with a flash of... Read more »
There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent. There are older and more established outlets, like the London Review of Books and The New York Review... Read more »
Eva Ibbotson, a doyenne of 1980s romantic fiction, once said self-deprecatingly that her books were aimed at “old ladies and people with flu”. To which Ella Risbridger, who is in her early 30s,... Read more »