The late actor Diana Rigg declined to call herself a feminist, noting: “Why would I burn my bra? I need my bra.” Nonetheless, her ideas on womanhood were ahead of their time.... Read more »
When I wrote an unadoring review of Stephen Hawking’s final book, a collection of essays published posthumously in 2018, New Scientist suppressed some of my criticisms on the grounds that it was... Read more »
In 1951, in a desperate attempt to raise the spirits of a shattered nation, the government came up with the Festival of Britain, a celebration of national creativity, grit and ingenuity. It... Read more »
When Huddersfield council proposed turning some local grazing land into a cemetery during the Covid lockdown, some nearby residents were unhappy. Not poet laureate Simon Armitage, who also lived close to the... Read more »
Elizabeth Jane Howard’s beloved family saga the Cazalet Chronicles spans three decades in the life of the upper-middle-class Cazalet family. The first four books, written in the 1990s, run from a bucolic... Read more »
Fetch by Colin Bramwell (And Other Stories, £14.99)Bramwell’s translation of Fernando Pessoa’s work into Scots won him considerable recognition: it took the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation prize and the Highland Book Prize. Between... Read more »
Terry Eagleton is not a fan of sloppy thinking, especially when it comes to the granite fact of death. He particularly doesn’t like the attitude of Dylan Thomas who famously urged his... Read more »
Early in this book, Jared Diamond proudly introduces “what I term ‘the Hamlet test’”, which helps decide whether prominent individuals really make a difference, or whether others might have done just as... Read more »
‘Dr Weiss, at forty, knew that her life had been ruined by literature.” The first fictional sentence Anita Brookner ever published, aged 53, in A Start in Life, certainly set a tone. If... Read more »