Writing

The cover image of Fiona Sampson’s seventh collection is bright and strange. Taken from photographer Charles Frèger’s Wilder Mann series (2010-11), it depicts a...

Some suggest that science fiction is a woman’s genre. In its purest form, sci-fi reimagines the structures of society and, in the process, creates...

In his latest eclectic collection of poems, Ian Duhig sings (and dances) for those marginalised in poetry and forgotten by history. The Blind Roadmaker...

Princess Ida, Finborough Theatre, Until 18th April 2015 One’s first experience of seeing a play at Finborough theatre is really rather charming. Located above the Finborough Arms...

It is tempting to read Frankenstein as a means of understanding Mary Shelley. 200 years after the novel was first published, Alice Dunn asks,...

Andy Armitage's pamphlet is among a number of new releases from the poetry press Half-Moon Books, which is based in Otley, West Yorkshire, where...

The work of Neapolitan director Paolo Sorrentino combines a compelling visual style with a unique sensitivity for psychological subtleties. The five feature-length films he...

Dur e Aziz Amna received second prize in our Short Story Competition 2017.  The year Asma moved in with us, we were living in a two-family...

John Singer Sargent – Portraits of Artists and Friends, National Portrait Gallery 12 February – 25 May 2015 If you did not know this was...

Fairy tales are not really for children. Bluebeard beheads his wives; Little Red Riding Hood’s beloved grandma is eaten alive and impersonated by a...

‘… no need of a story, a story is not compulsory, just a life, that’s the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to...

I recently spent a week in an unremarkable town in South West England. Throughout the day, which I spent alone, I found myself feeling trapped and anxious.

The joy of an episodic form is it can be appreciated multiple ways. You do not need to agree with every constituent part to...

  David Kim Whittaker’s current exhibition THE FLESH TO THE FRAME reveals a powerful vortex of chaos and harmony. Presented in two parts In the...

The Chameleon is a book narrated by the soul of a book, which can shape shift between any book that it pleases. Stretching across a time frame that goes from the Black Death of the 13th century to the aftermath of the Cold War in the late twentieth century, it is one of the most unusual love stories that you are likely to read.

The prestigious T.S. Eliot Award in January that kicked off the poetry establishment’s crowded calendar of poetry competitions served to highlight the ever widening...

Walking and climbing in a landscape of clifftops, glens, summits and strands, the speaker in Kathleen Jamie’s subtle and assured seventh collection journeys through...

They got on at Vico Equense. The carriage was almost full, but the two of them managed to squeeze into a seat diagonally opposite,...

Arriving at 48 Albemarle Street you immediately enter a stripped-back environment; surrounded by exposed brick, wood and metal. This industrial interior makes a refreshing...

Jhumpa Lahiri’s life has been marked by a sense of ‘suspension’. Born to Bengali immigrants but brought up in America, she feels ‘without a...

  When walking the streets of London, its minor and major roads, its arteries and veins, begin to enmesh themselves with the walker’s brain. Over...

Today, the idea of the theatre can evoke tradition and history, having perhaps one of the longest histories of all the arts. But when...

How much context do we need to appreciate a painting? Take, for example, Vanessa Bell’s Studland Beach, 1912. We might describe it in terms...

Salvador Dali At Home, Jackie De Burca, Quarto, 2018, pp. 176, Hardcover, £25 Salvador Dali at Home is a book that seeks to unveil the places...