The factual stories and prose-poems of The Dance at Mociu chronicle Peter Riley’s travels through Transylvania, Romania with their carefully crafted portrayals of the scenery, people, traditions and above all the music of the region. Through diligent wording and description, Riley brings to life a world we almost certainly have never experienced, and assuming we Read More
From its title, Olivia Laing’s book The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone might give the impression of being some solemn self-help manual or brooding biography; instead, it is an honest and heart-wrenching exploration into one of life’s inexplicable plagues: loneliness. Finding herself alone in an altogether unfamiliar and alienating city, Laing Read More
Likely every former Glasgow schoolchild – even those of us secretly from adjacent places like Renfrewshire – will have a notion of how Scotland’s largest city grew from its more easterly beginnings at one side of the Clyde. We all have a shadowy sense of how our city became something much bigger: more encompassing, and Read More
This book deserves a review other than this one. I must not be its ideal reader. The author, Gillian Rose (1947-1995) was a philosopher, schooled at Oxford, who last held a position as Professor of Social and Political Thought at the University of Warwick. I briefly looked at her book Dialectic of Nihilism (1984) while Read More
“I had at the end of 1968 become literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre. This had happened largely by accident.” This kind of lucky accident often happened to playwright and director David Hare, who in a poll in 2000 by the National Theatre, had five plays selected in the top 100 and was 10th Read More
Thomas Lynch is an American award winning poet and writer. He won the American Book Award for his publication, Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, which was also short-listed for the National Book Award, and his essays and poems have appeared in a host of distinguished magazines and newspapers including Harper’s, The New Yorker, Read More
Iain Bamforth’s A Doctor’s Dictionary: Writings on Medicine and Culture is a collection of essays, written by a doctor-cum-poet, which at first seems to offer little in the way of enticement to the reader: it contains copious amounts of enumeration and, as a consequence, lengthy sentences that are interlaced with heavy but necessary levels of Read More
Having missed hearing Linda Cracknell’s recent offerings on Radio 4, I was delighted to have the chance to review the book. Doubling Back is an account of ten walks undertaken by the author, in the footsteps of various famous writers as well as those of her own relations. These take place all over the world: Read More
“'[…] Do you realise what’s going on? There is an epidemic of autism in Silicon Valley. Something terrible is happening to our children.’ Her words were chilling. Could they be true?” In reviewing this title, I must declare an immediate disclosure of interest, having being diagnosed at the age of three as occupying a place on Read More
John Hemming is an explorer and writer especially interested in the Amazon region and its indigenous peoples. In Naturalists in Paradise, his focus falls upon the mid-19th century collecting exhibitions of three important British naturalists: Alfred Russel Wallace, Henry Walter Bates and Richard Spruce. Wallace is well-known to biologists, but is eclipsed in popular memory Read More