Category Archives: Books
What made America great? On the trail of Laura Ingalls Wilder
It was the 2008 crash that somehow inspired me to finally read the Little House on the Prairie books. I was clearly craving comfort, safety, a kind of nostalgia for a vaguely remembered 70s girlhood in which I half watched … Continue reading
Filth, fury and the funny way Britain feels about Joe Orton
You never forget your first time. I was 19 years old. I descended into a dark, cramped basement where student actors brought to life a weird, twisted sexual triangle. Going to student drama productions in odd spaces around the University … Continue reading
The making of John Ruskin’s Eurythmic Girls
John Ruskin’s Eurythmic Girls is a Radio 3 Sunday Feature which airs this Sunday Feb 26th at 645pm Intellectual and art school champion of medieval art he may have been, but it is John Ruskinās alleged horror of female pubic … Continue reading
How to win the coming culture war in 2017
A version of this article first appeared in The Big Issue magazine in January 2017. Journalism worth paying for. Available weekly from street vendors or subscriptions here. History rarely falls into neat numerical decades. I would assert the 1980s (yuppies, … Continue reading
Adjust your privacy settings now, fool! Reading The Woman In White in the instagram age
(Warning contains some partial but not big spoilers!) “Habits of literary composition are perfectly familiar to me. One of the rarest of all the intellectual accomplishments thatĀ man can possess is the grand faculty of arranging his ideas. Immense … Continue reading
Ladybird books: Constructing the future past of modern Britain
I used to visit a beloved university English professorĀ and his wife. He had won the Military Cross for hand to hand combat in the liberation of the Netherlands in 1945 but never talked about the terrible things heād seen. … Continue reading
We’ll get the President we deserve: Suzan Lori Parks on Hillary Clinton & America’s woman problem
“You’ve consumed too much of the Kool-Aid that the man has been serving you.” Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Susan Lori Parks came into the Front Row studio last week to talk about When Father Came Home From The Wars opening at … Continue reading
From Jane Eyre to Mary Poppins – de-coding the Brontes on film
I wrote this blogpost for a panel discussion we held with a screening of Jane Eyre (1943) at the Picturehouse Cinema at the National Media Museum in Bradford last Saturday. Novelist Mick Jackson, Bronte Parsonage Museum arts officer Lauren Livesey … Continue reading
The men are weeping in the Oval Office…
Lucy Dichmont and I have made a Something Understood for Radio 4 about Weeping. I knew I wanted to talk about the Wailing Women in the Bible and especially that I wanted to talk again to award-winning poet Andrew McMillan … Continue reading
The Teen Within…
This week’s Something Understood gives voice to people who I reckon are rarely heard on radio. Teenagers. The readings are all done by young actors and much of the music and poetry you’ll hear was written by them, or about … Continue reading