"To write anything worth reading you have to put everything you have into every sentence. There can be no lazy thinking, no clichés, no borrowed tropes, no third-hand experience; there can be no hiding.” Miranda Darling
Friends and traitors

Friends and traitors

IMAGINE A GROUP OF BEST FRIENDS from university, now in their early forties, reuniting for a weekend to celebrate their enduring friendship. But this isn’t just any reunion – they’re about to open predictions they made about each other twenty years ago. This is the intriguing premise of Holly Watt’s...
Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

Dark, ingenious and daring: Pretty Ugly by Kirsty Gunn

THE WAY PEOPLE TALK ABOUT short stories often inclines to silversmithing analogies: burnished, finely wrought, beautifully crafted. That, or Fabergé eggs. And we say short story collection rather than group. Collection suggests careful selection from an array of available possibilities, white daisies on a vast lawn. In the afterword of...
Trevor Wood: A race against time and memory

Trevor Wood: A race against time and memory

With The Silent Killer, acclaimed author Trevor Wood introduces a new series of gripping Newcastle-set police procedurals. Seasoned detective DCI Jack Parker is battling early-onset Alzheimer’s as he races against time to solve a string of revenge killings – while seeking to conceal his diagnosis from both family and colleagues....
BFI London Film Festival 2024 unveils star-studded line-up

BFI London Film Festival 2024 unveils star-studded line-up

Lights, camera, action! The 68th BFI London Film Festival is set to dazzle audiences for twelve days in October. From Steve McQueen’s Blitz to French auteur-provocateur François Ozon’s latest, to animated marvel Flow, the festival promises a cinematic feast spanning genres, generations, original features and literary adaptations in a rich...
Harriet Constable: The Instrumentalist

Harriet Constable: The Instrumentalist

In 1696 a baby was posted through the wall of the Ospedale della Pietà, an orphanage in Venice. She was named Anna Maria della Pietà and become one of the greatest violinists of the eighteenth century. Her teacher was Antonio Vivaldi… YET THIS EXTRAORDINARY MUSICIAN remains largely unknown today. Numerous...
The Komagata Maru incident

The Komagata Maru incident

The colorful history of the Western passport does not account entirely for passportism against Third World countries. For the crucial piece of subtext missing in this history, we have to read between the lines. In the nineteenth century, the British had made it a common practice to move around indentured...
Without a trace

Without a trace

Ariel dragged himself out of bed and went to the kitchen. He wanted to sleep some more, but couldn’t. Books and newspapers were scattered everywhere in the living room. He had to tidy up. It took seven steps to get to the little kitchen. He opened the big silver refrigerator...
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Through a child's eyes

Through a child’s eyes

Penelope Delta was born in 1874 in Alexandria, where there was then a thriving Greek community. She belonged to the Greek aristocracy of her time, both extraordinary in its endeavours, and, like high Victorian and Edwardian society, decidedly structured in its make-up. She could easily have walked out of a novel by E.M. Forster, Marcel...
The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement

The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement

After graduating from Cambridge in 1791, William Wordsworth travelled to France and found himself swept up in the ideals of the French Revolution (and, not unconnected, into the arms of the passionately rebellious Annette Vallon, with whom he fathered a daughter). The subsequent Reign of Terror and counter-revolution would modify his views on revolution as...
Tanis Rideout: Striking for the summit

Tanis Rideout: Striking for the summit

Tanis Rideout’s debut novel Above All Things is a tense and seductive blend of historical fact and speculative fiction that weaves together the story of George Mallory’s ill-fated 1924 attempt to conquer Everest with that of a single day in the life of his wife Ruth as she waits at home for news of his...