Until the age of ten I lived in a street of mock-Georgian houses called Dickens Drive. Copperfield Way and Pickwick Close were just around the corner. Even now I regularly pass the Pickwick Guest House on the main road out of Oxford. None of this is especially surprising. Go online and you can buy a
The Mayflower’s journey did not simply end with landfall at Plymouth Rock, if indeed it ever arrived there in the first place — John Turner points out that no mention was made of the rock for 150 years after the Pilgrims disembarked; but the little ship has continued its voyage into mythology ever since. At
Twins are literary dynamite. For writers, they’re perfect for thrashing out notions of free will, the pinballing of cause and effect and fate’s arbitrariness. One twin reflects the other, darkly: living proof of the road not taken, the life not lived. In Maryse Condé’s The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana this point
‘Grief is the price we pay for love,’ the Queen once wrote. This memoir is steeped in the pain of unpaid debt. ‘When you were nine, you had a pink coat that you loved so much you wore it all the time, even on the early morning flight to Tunisia,’ Gavanndra Hodge begins, talking to
Those of us who write occasionally about military aviation can only admire the compelling personal experience that John Nichol brings to his work. A heroic RAF navigator, he was shot down, captured and tortured by the Iraqis during the first Gulf War before his release at the end of the conflict. Since his retirement from
Those who have been on creative writing courses may be familiar with the ‘I remember’ exercise. The two words become a prompt for whatever you recall, and can lead to a fruitful ramble into senses and impressions worth plundering later. It could be useful during a lockdown (‘I remember the water cooler/my girlfriend coming round/trains’)
What have the Akkadians ever done for us? As it turns out, rather a lot, as Philip Matyszak reveals in this lively, handsomely produced study of peoples and tribes whose PR departments were a smidgeon less muscular than the Romans’. Their obscure names are woven into our language: we sing ‘Land me safe on Canaan’s
