First Look: The Greater Thief
The day the man at the end of the road got shot was a fairy tale day. It was a day I’d spent in another world wondering if my prince would trot round the corner and along the grisly north London street on a white horse. I thought it all through thoroughly, as I sat...
The Often Overlooked Value of a Second Hand Book…
People who look through the dirt encrusted window of a second hand bookshop and see nothing but a dark, musty cellar of a room, full of aging tombs nobody wants; you are deluded. Those who peep, nervously through the highly polished window of a second hand book shop and see an immaculate and expansive, scholarly scene...
Novels and ‘the holy contour of life’
In his 30 point Belief and Technique for modern prose Jack Kerouac exhorts writers to ‘Believe in the holy contour of life’ and to be ‘Writer-Director of earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven.’ It seems almost impossible to dream of a modern, adult novel that contains no element of spirituality or moral questioning. Yet...
‘Step’ by Lynette Linton at the Theatre Royal Stratford East
I had thought that Lynette Linton’s ‘Step’ would speak to me in an equal and opposite manner. Knowing the character’s move from East London to a Middle Class University was a reversal of my own move it filled me with the suspicion that there might be some overlap between her fiction and my reality. I...
Talking Rubbish with Karla Marchesi
There is something strangely inviting about Karla Marchesi’s cluttered interiors. I imagine the must of old books and out of date newspapers blended with that smell that old people have… I picture myself diving into the rooms depicted, and rummaging about with wide eyes, desperate to discover something – anything. Within each painting, lies some...
Oxford: Dreams Inspired
-John Henry dips a toe into the warm waters of the Isis and Cherwell I once found, whilst strolling in Christchurch Meadow, a scrap of cardboard about the size of a playing card, lying discarded upon the gravel. On one side had been drawn in pencil a caricature of an unshaven man in a ducal...
A Thought on Mothering Sunday: Nature Versus Nurture?
Today, most girls in their late teens and early twenties are geared towards careers and education; furthering the self is purportedly essential to the modern woman, and it is the rare girl who chooses motherhood at a young age over the experience of a full and hedonistic youth. However, only twenty-five years ago, it was...
Charity begins…on Oxford Street?
The thing that annoys me most about Oxford Street is this: not the tourists, who wander at snails pace along London’s busiest shopping stretch and then stop, abruptly, in great swarming packs to take a picture of each and every tube station sign from the middle of the pavement. Its not the ‘model scouts’ who...
