book(ish) Summer 2021

book(ish) SUMMER 2021

M EGA N N O L AN ◆ KO S T YA TSO L A KIS ◆ J AY RAY NE R SATHNA M S AN G H E RA ◆ K ATE L ISTE R ◆ GEO RGINA L AWTO N

Illustration by Vicky Hughes

We’d love to hear your thoughts!

To get in touch with the book(ish) team, please email challisbecca@gmail.com and ellamollydoyle@hotmail.co.uk or contact Dr Sarah Lonsdale at City, University of London (sarah.lonsdale.1@city.ac.uk)

As we re-emerge, blinking, from our caves, it’s beyond time to rediscover the joys of the outside world. Reading has provided solace for many in the dark days of lockdown. It was a little piece of hope, and one that we will take with us into lighter times. Pack a bag, roll up your blanket and source some snacks.

The outside world awaits. book(ish) is a magazine for these moments.

Combining books, food, travel, music, film, art and culture, book(ish) unites us through reading. Full of trusted recommendations, fresh voices and powerful opinions, we hope it captures all that there is to love about the world of books.

Illustration by Flo Bull

The book(ish) team x

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Illustration by Georgia Haines

12 self help reads based on your star sign

Too cautious for a taurus? Too shy to be a gemini?

Self-help your way to the stars and upgrade your retrograde with the best books for your zodiac, by Katie Bell.

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“Mediating your victimhood is just part of being a woman.” Kay Ean Leong speaks to Irish novelist Megan Nolan about her debut bestseller, Bob Dylan and being a woman in the creative world.

Illustration by Paola Ascanio

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Photo: Megan Nolan

Megan Nolan

Maurice: a queer icon How to be a queer icon: As EM Forster’s Maurice turns 50, Simone Fraser asks the LGBTQI+ community why he’s still got it in 2021.

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Who killed cinema?

Illustration by Rowan Bailey

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There’s been a murder. Cinema, it seems, is dead.

So was it Professor Plum in the library with a candlestick, or is the killer even closer to home?

Film buff turned detective Jake Helm investigates the murder of the century.

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Breaking into the Asian kitchen

Illustration by @l.ttle.joys

Illustration by Gemma Lawrence

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Slurp, slice and stir-fry your way across Asia with the best cookbook recommendations from Samyama Kolhapuri.

Fire in the booth London is burning, and drill music is getting the blame. Isabelle Gray speaks to artist Ben BC about the politics of rap in the city and Black art as a space for joy.

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Becca Challis Design & Production Editor Reading: Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford

Ella Doyle Editor-in-Chief

Watching: Call My Agent

Cara Laskaris Features Editor

Reading: Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson

Reading: Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

Listening: Off Menu

Listening: Retrograde by James Blake

Our

Ilustrator Spotlight Rowan Bailey @byrowanbailey Front Cover & Feature Illustrator Listening: Hutson

by LeRoy Hutson

Paola Ascanio @pao.ascanio Illustrator Watching: Rocketman dir.

Dexter Fletcher

Gemma Lawrence ◆ Tim Nejad ◆ Phoebe Eaves ◆ Daisy Ferreira ◆ Beth Holton ◆ Will Huck ◆ Beth Holton ◆ Kamilla Heinze ◆ Vicky Hughes ◆ Becca Pankiewicz ◆ Emalee Wickham ◆ Deimante Judickaite ◆ Betty Kim ◆ Valerie Moore ◆ Ernesta Kurpeikyte ◆ Miriam Pritchard ◆ Xiaobin Wang ◆ Sophie Lawrence ◆ Callum Robson-Bain ◆ Tim Weaving ◆ Dr Sarah Lonsdale ◆ Jason Bennetto ◆ Dr Paul Lashmar ◆ Julian Linley ◆ Victoria Miller ◆ Sophie Laughton ◆ Sorcha Mondon ◆ Samyama Kolhapuri ◆ Chiara Wilkinson ◆ Cameron

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Carina Murphy Social Media Editor Reading: Love and Other Thought Experiments by Sophie Ward

Narzra Ahmed

Listening: Literary Friction

Reviews Editor

Subsection Editor

Reading: Fangirls by Hannah Ewens Listening: ‘Karaoke Mantra’

by CHILDCARE

Catherine Entwistle

Reading: Hungry by Grace Dent

Team

Flo Bull @florence.illo Illustrator Reading: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Enjoying: Martin Parr

Georgia Haines @georgia.did.it Illustrator Reading: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Henderson ◆ Frankie Lister-Fell ◆ Aisha Rimi ◆ Yasamin Karimi ◆ Chloé Meley ◆ Jake Helm ◆ Anna Barr y ◆ Sophie Ward ◆ Madeleine Killick ◆ Kitty Chrisp ◆ Eva Levy ◆ Lauren Sneade ◆ Matt Reed ◆ Isabella Mcrae ◆ Nick Harris ◆ Kay Ean Leong ◆ Nicola Blackburn ◆ Rhiannon Jenkins ◆ Isabelle Gray ◆ Katie Bell ◆ Bea Tridimas ◆ Charlotte Colombo ◆ Simone Fraser ◆ Emily Stearn ◆ Elizabeth Gregor y ◆ Eloise Feilden ◆ Ed Cunningham ◆ Nicola Lewis ◆ Charlotte Rawlings ◆ Shauna Lewis ◆ Patrick Sproull ◆

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READ ALL Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, is writing a children’s book called The Bench, based on a poem she gave to Prince Harry on Father’s Day.

A flight attendant has scored a 7-figure book deal for her thriller, Falling, set in the skies. After being placed on furlough, TJ Newman finally took the plunge and wrote her novel.

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In Yorkshire, a resident was so outraged at the presence of erotic fiction in the village’s mini-library she posted a note reading: “Stop!

Cornholme is a good God-fearing village. If this filth is to your liking, move to the cesspit that is Hebden Bridge!”

ABOUT IT A BookTok trend where users film their tearful reactions to the ends of novels is boosting sales.

Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles (2012) saw a 240 per cent increase and was placed in the New York Times bestsellers lists after the hashtag gained 22m views.

The Hay Festival has gone virtual. The lit fest kicks off on 26th May and will feature Margaret Atwood, Stanley Tucci and Benjamin Zephaniah among others.

The Book Fairies have distributed 250,000 books through their magical campaigns, hiding titles in parks, on the tube and in cities across the UK.

Illustration: Miriam Pritchard

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Bookcases of the year Frankie Lister-Fell ranks this year’s most enviable bookcases from Twitter’s ‘Bookcase Credibility’

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st Carmen Maria Machado, author of In the Dream House, has the most credible bookcase of all. Yet she

The reader has to work. Was her broken leg incurred from dropping one of her tomes?

The tomes in question loom ominously in e Cr @B

bookcase suggest entrapment, symbolising

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Carmen’s temporary physical impairment. A writer

ility

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that shows not tells: here’s to the Credibility Queen.

ng

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do

doesn’t hand us interpretation on a plate.

M aria M ac ha

with metaphor, leaves much to unpack. Carmen

the background. The wires strewn across the

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en

garners it by subtle means. This scene, rich

Car

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nd Coming in at a strong second is Angela Davis’ bookcase. Angela needs no introduction. Her books,

well-lit and ordered to perfection, do the talking. This is a lady who knows her books, and she wants you to get to know them too. The armchair to her right invites you to sit, pick out a volume and learn. It’s a

e Cr @B

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chair that enables such an activity, striking ility

the balance between comfy and sturdy.

Jas

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rd New York Times bestselling YA author Jason Reynolds doesn’t mess around with his reading. Spanning the

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width of his wall, Jason’s five-shelf bookcase is

on

y n o ld s

a feat of style and practicality. But credibility doesn’t stop at the bookend. Oh no. Stacks reside in the doorway, followed by cardboard boxes, which we can only assume contain still more books. This is a bookcase that defies convention. Learning knows no bounds; think again, don’t assume.

@

ility

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th Salman knows how to amaze. Are we

S

al

ma

BC red ib

n Ru s h d i e

looking at his bookcase or the walls of

the British Library? Such is the extent of his collection. The Caravaggesque lighting casts a dramatic spell over the room. And with it, a degree of seriousness. “Stop doomscrolling and pick up a book,” it hisses. In the presence

C @B

re d

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of the sublime, we have no option but to do its

ibil ity

bidding.

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Si m

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Poet extraordinaire Simon

m ita

Armitage instantly impresses with

his slanting, custom-built (we assume)

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bookcase. Two volumes of Keats’ poetry candidly placed left of centre don’t go unnoticed. This poet has done his each book’s credibility pushing over the next

e Cr @B

homework. The top shelf is set in motion,

to make way for new ideas. The scene is dynamic.

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Simon gazes into his webcam, an open book in his hand, on the precipice of a magnificent soliloquy. We, humble Zoom mortals, marvel in his glow of authority. ◆

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Influencer book deals in an age of authenticity They sell millions, but Emily Stearn asks if something is rotten at the core

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irst came Zoë Sugg. Sugg, aka Zoella, sold 78,000 copies of her 2014 debut novel Girl Online in the first week of publication, becoming the UK’s fastest-selling debut novelist since records began. But less than a week later her ghostwriter was outed, Penguin confessed and Sugg quit the internet (temporarily).

In 2019, the influencer Caroline Calloway was cancelled and subsequently un-cancelled, after a viral tell-all essay titled ‘I Was Caroline Calloway’ was published in The Cut by Calloway’s former friend Natalie Beach, revealing she was Calloway’s ghostwriter.

For years, readers have gleefully consumed book exposé after exposé, revealing an apparent rotten core at the heart of the influencer industry. So why are influencers offered book contracts? And what makes them so popular?

“Commercially, it’s great. Books are a different format for an influencer to engage and connect with their audience,” says Eleanor Rose, a production assistant at Bloomsbury. “Publishing houses always want to engage wider audiences.”

And the numbers back this up. Many of the nation’s beloved books have come from acquisitions of influencers, with recent releases

by Grace Beverley and Joe Wicks dominating current bestseller book charts. Wicks alone has racked up 3.2 million book sales for £27.9m.

Rose also cites the success of Sophie Hinchliffe, aka Mrs Hinch, the cleaning guru gone viral.

Three books of the 2020 bestseller list were written by Hinchliffe - her latest, a memoir This Is Me, was the biggest single-week seller of any title in 2020.

Hinchliffe is represented by talent management agency Gleam Futures.

Book deals have become so popular among their ‘talent’ that four years ago they launched their own in-house literary agency Gleam Titles. In December, their now-former Head of Publishing Abigail Bergstrom was named one of The Bookseller’s 150 most influential individuals in the industry. Influencer book deals, it seems, are going nowhere.

But the industry is changing. It has a new buzzword: authenticity. Keith Weed, Unilever’s

“the industry has a new buzzword: authenticity”

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Illustrations

scanio

by Paola A

chief marketing officer, called on influencers to “rebuild trust before it’s gone forever” in a 2018 speech. While influencers have traditionally created ‘aspirational’ content, now relatable and specialised content creators with loyal followings

are seeing most success. Hinchliffe offers niche cleaning content, Beverley and Wicks provide fitness. Platforms like TikTok and Clubhouse, which thrive on user authenticity, have surged in popularity: TikTok alone now has 689 million monthly active users.

But in this new social media age, where influencers’ power relies on their authenticity, why are they awarded book deals so freely? Surely the premise of being offered a book deal without any prior writing experience is inauthentic?

“It’s a collaborative industry. A lot of rounds of edits go into a book, regardless of how perfect it was in the very beginning,” Rose explains. Influencers are selected not for their writing ability but social media following - that is a typical risk of business.

“It depends on your agent as well,” she adds. “A lot of publishing houses won’t take submissions from authors individually. They’ll have to have an agent to sign them. If you’ve got quite a big following, you’re probably more likely to get an agent. As annoying as that is, it’s more realistic.”

But Rose stresses the importance of original ideas.

“In terms of copyright, if someone else has written something, then that’s essentially their intellectual property rights. Ultimately, we’re a business and if the story has already been done, we won’t take it on.”

And there’s also financial risk. Influencers are paid high advances so if sales are disappointing or the return on investment is low, a second book is unlikely. “Publishing is all about risks. The bigger the name, the bigger the risk.”

For influencer-turned-author Jack Edwards, this wasn’t an issue. With over half a million YouTube subscribers, the ‘StudyTuber’ was offered a contract with HarperCollins after being recommended by chance.

In August 2020 he published The Ultimate

University Survival Guide: The Uni-Verse, just two months after finishing his degree at Durham University. It has since seen huge success.

But Edwards has himself been critical of influencer book deals. In a YouTube video series published in August he rated popular YouTuber books: “The good, the bad and the ghostwritten”.

Marcus Butler’s part autobiography, part self-help book Hello Life fared worst. “This was the biggest waste of my time ever,” Edwards concluded.

“I’ve given it out, so I’ll take it as well,” he tells me. “It’s all about how much value the reader can actually get and whether it’s worth charging for. The only time I’ll ever give a negative review is when I think it has been a bit of a cash grab. Any projects or products that you put your name to, you need to know it’s worth the money for those who buy it and really trust your judgement.

So any YouTuber book that I think has a lot of value for their audience, I’m 100 per cent here for it.”

And Edwards firmly believes in their value.

“Ultimately, you’re putting money into the book industry. I don’t think we should be judgmental about where we get literature from, as long as we’re reading and engaging.”

Rose agrees: “Readers may go on to buy more books as a result. It can influence the book market as a whole.”

But influencer publishing has changed Edwards’ life. He is now a research assistant for another author, on a secret book set to be released later this year. “I always found publishing interesting, but I never considered a career in it,” he says. “I just fell in love with the industry.”

“I feel really lucky to be involved in the book making process. Hopefully I’ll create books that someone will one day think of as their favourite.

That’s all any book lover could ask,” he says. “It’s about putting literature into the right people’s hands.” ◆

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Welcome to BookTok

Selene Velez rose to BookTok fame after her video ‘books to make you sob’ sent Madeline Miller’s 2012 novel to the top of bestseller charts. Ella Doyle catches up with her about TikTok, Hannah Montana and the power of Gen-Z

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elene is like any other college student.

She Zooms from her parent’s house in California. She keeps her bookshelves out of view. “It’s too messy!”

But she’s also known as @moongirlreads, at least by the 140k followers she has on TikTok. Her now notorious video, ‘books to make you sob’, went viral back in June 2020. It featured Madeline Miller’s 2012 novel, The Song of Achilles, about queer love in the Trojan War. “Ok, subtle flex, but the books I recommended in my video became number one bestsellers on Amazon, and the ‘frequently bought together’ books were the ones I’d recommended. I don’t want to say it’s all just me... but it is crazy that a few videos can

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change a book’s sales. Super crazy.”

The novel subsequently made its way to the top of the New York Times Bestseller list (and remains there after 20 weeks). “I’ll check the video now for how many views it has,” she says, casually. It’s got five million.

Since then, boxes of books have showed up at her door from publishers. But until recently, even her own friends didn’t know about her BookTok fame. “I couldn’t manage more than one social media presence,” she says, “Only my family knew.” A bit like Hannah Montana? “I know right,” she laughs, “Secret life you guys!”

BookTok’s influence is no secret to the publishing industry – publishers have noted sale boosts of over 200% of popular BookTok titles.

“It’s just crazy that all these bigger publishing companies have noticed BookTok,” says Selene.

“They’re noticing that these kids, basically, can help get people to read the books that we want them to read.

“You know, it’s hard trying to figure out my rates. I have to factor in how many followers I have and all these view counts. It’s weird asking for money.”

But ultimately, the success isn’t monetary. It is empowering for Gen-Z to carve out their own space. “I think Gen-Z especially have gotten to this part where we just do what we like and we don’t really care about what other people think.

This community is so loving and so supportive of each other, I’m so glad I became a part of it.” ◆

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ook nooks are perfect little worlds created from wood, cardboard, metal and fabrics. What was a niche hobby has now boomed under lockdown. Reddit’s book nook group, formed in December 2019, has over 37,000 members. There are countless book nook sellers on Etsy too, with those featured collectively bringing in over 1,000 sales.

Here are three book nook creators doing the absolute most. Have a gander, visit their shop, or take inspiration for making your own.

When you think about it, these are like mini versions of a stage set. And so it’s fitting that freelance scenic and theatre set designer, Paige Hathaway, turned her hand to book nooks when theatres closed due to the pandemic. Based in Washington DC, Hathaway explains that “creating book nooks felt like a perfect way to stay creative, learn new techniques for model making, and make a little bit of money during these stressful times.” ◆

By Alexandra Lashina

Book Nooks Victoria Miller holds the key to your newest obsession

By Paige Hathaway

By Alexandra Lashina

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12 self-help reads based on your zodiac Katie Bell explains how to self-help yourself to the stars, using your zodiac for inspiration

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ccording to Maxine Wan, Harper’s Bazaar Hong Kong’s resident astrologer, now is the perfect time to change direction and do some work on yourself. From May, Jupiter leaves Aquarius and enters Pisces.

“This only happens once a year and it affects everybody,” says Wan. “Jupiter is the planet of abundance and expansion. It encourages new vision and philosophy.”

If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve created a guide to the perfect self-help books based on your zodiac.

Illustrated by Georgia Haines

Fire signs Aries

“The problem with Aries is that they can’t see the problem. They’re unscathed by negativity and don't take criticism personally. They’re very self centered with a lot of ego. With so much confidence, the downside is they think they’re always right and they don’t always listen to people,” says Wan. Self-help yourself by: Learn some lessons in humility with Ego is the Enemy: The Fight to Master our Biggest Opponent by Ryan Holiday. Holiday argues that ego is the ultimate enemy for success and ambition, drawing on examples in real life, philosophy and literature.

“Leos stand in the limelight, they love being centre stage, they love the applause. One of the problems is that they depend on other people giving them all the claps. One thing they could learn in life is to start clapping for themselves.”

Self-help yourself by: Find internal validation rather than seeking outside approval.

Honouring the Self: Self Esteem and Personal Transformation by Nathaniel Branden tells you how to free yourself from fear of disapproval.

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Leo

Sagittarius

“They’re seeking answers to a universal truth, but once they find it, it’s the only answer. They can preach to everyone else, forcing their beliefs on others. They can think their truth is everyone's truth, and if someone doesn’t agree, they’re wrong.”

Self-help yourself by: Being receptive to other people’s opinions and not shoving yours down people’s throats. In What’s So Wrong with Being Absolutely Right, Judy J Johnson offers strategies to reduce the harmful effects of dogmatism in our personal lives and social institutions.

Earth signs “This is a fixed earth sign so it’s a double whammy of stubbornness. But they’re stubborn because they don’t like change and they’re overly cautious as they fear losing what they have.

They can be materialistic because of the insecurity and so can equate money and material possessions with self-worth.”

Taurus

Self-help yourself by: Take some more risks and embrace change with Embracing Uncertainty by Susan Jeffers. Jeffers teaches you how to stop trying to control everything and to let go of certainty.

Virgo

“Virgo is a mutable earth sign. The difference with Taurus is that they are very particular rather than stubborn. Their insecurity comes from being perfectionists, and having to do things a certain way. They can be anxious, nervous or overly health conscious. If something doesn’t work out they won’t accept it.”

Self-help yourself by: Stop being so hard on yourself. The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown is about finding self acceptance. It encourages us to be compassionate towards ourselves and accept imperfection.

“This is a cardinal earth sign, good at building wealth and status. Unlike Tauruses, who want material security, Capricorns associate money with honour and status. They're the most ambitious of the earth signs. If they overly identify with that, they can be too success driven, and go to great lengths to get it.”

Capricorn

Self-help yourself by: Reading Enough: True Measures of Money, Business, and Life by John C. Bogle is a guide to finding value that lies in more than just your bank account.

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Air signs Gemini

“This is a mutable air sign. They’re very changeable and get bored easily. They’re impulsive and can’t stick to one thing.

They also talk a lot and they’re known for being gossipy. They don’t get very deep and stay surface level. Even with their emotions, they can laugh things off and push the issue away.”

Self-help yourself by: Learning to gain emotional intelligence skills including empathy and impulse control. Reading Emotional Intelligence

by Daniel Goleman can help.

“This is a cardinal air sign. They’re very sociable and very good at starting friendships. One problem is they like to keep up a very harmonious front and can be too nonconfrontational. Problems will arise if they don’t say what they mean - the resentment gets locked up, and either it burns them, or they lash out.”

Libra

Self-help yourself by: Stop people-pleasing and find out how to be assertive in the right way with The Art of Everyday Assertiveness. Speak Up. Say No. Set Boundaries. Take Back Control by Patrick King.

Aquarius

“A fixed air sign. They’re stubborn in their own ideas and the way they think. They can be detached and aloof, because they work in the mind and not the heart, similar to Gemini.

Everything has to be logically explained, and feelings and intuition are shrugged off. They should work on their softer, more emotional side.”

Self-help yourself by: Being less cold and more human by reading The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Life’s Most Essential Skill by Karla McLaren. McLaren teaches you how to perceive the feelings of others and connect to them meaningfully.

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Water signs Cancer “This is a water cardinal sign. They’re introverted and protective with their home and family. They can be very moody and emotional with a tendency to blame others and hold grudges.”

Self-help yourself by: Working through your issues and not being a victim. Unfu*k Yourself by Gary John Bishop is about spending less time in your feelings and more time taking action. He teaches you that taking responsibility for the highs and lows of your life will lead to success and happiness.

Scorpio “This is a fixed water sign. They’re stubborn but in a different way to other fixed signs. The stubbornness is more emotional - they can’t let go. They have a lot of dark emotions to work through, jealousy, paranoia, betrayal, abandonment. They tend to see the worst in human nature, so they should work on bringing lightness into their dark psyche.”

Self-help yourself by: Just lightening up? Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe: How to Stop Worrying, End Negative Thinking, Cultivate Positive Thoughts and Start Living Your Best Life by Reese Owen is a good place to start.

Pisces “A Water mutable sign, so it’s a double whammy. Water itself is boundaryless and mutable signs are flexible, so Pisces’ emotions are all over the place with absolutely no boundaries.

They are emotional sponges and can be too empathetic. They can take on too much and get upset easily.”

Self-help yourself by: Work on creating healthy boundaries with Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin by Anne Katherine, which uses real life stories to show how boundaries are essential to our wellbeing and will improve our relationships with others. ◆

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Acts of Desperation:

Megan Nolan

Kay Ean Leong speaks to debut novelist and journalist Megan Nolan about Acts of Desperation, her love of Knausgaard and the creative landscape for women

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ike many of us, lockdown wasn’t easy on Megan Nolan. When we meet on Zoom, we are about five days to 12 April, a date etched in our minds as the coming of freedom, when the months-long restrictions in the UK ease partially. The Acts of Desperation author is “super excited”, especially as one downside to the lockdown is that she hasn’t been able to celebrate the release of her debut novel properly.

“It’s been too hard to feel true joy in lockdown,” she says, adding that living alone makes it even more difficult. “Doing all this alone is actually quite hard; I’ve just been in my house. I don’t have anyone to celebrate stuff with or enjoy it with.”

Still, she is proud of herself and the book,

an unnamed 20-something narrator in Dublin and her relationship with the beautiful but emotionally unavailable Ciaran. It’s a tumultuous journey as their love unfurls, and her journey is all the more painful as she struggles with body dysmorphia and self-harm. Presented in short chapters that sometimes only fill a single page, its epistolatory structure provides rich insight into feminine desire and eroticism, vulnerability and suffering, all at a granular level.

The detail and minutiae that Nolan delves into for Acts of Desperation is an approach borrowed from a literary hero of hers, Karl Ove Knausgaard.

Nolan has been vocal in her admiration of the Norwegian author, writing previously in The Guardian that it was after reading Knausgaard’s

“a relentlessly intense glimpse into love and infatuation” and is relieved at the overwhelmingly positive reception that it has received so far – Acts of Desperation has been hailed as a “stunning debut” (iNews) and “bracing, poignant, and devastatingly accurate” (The Irish Times).

Citing the sort of irrational anxiety that most writers will surely relate to, she says: “Before it came out, there was this thought in my head that it could conceivably get unanimously bad reviews. There’s been enough of a good response now that I don’t feel like, ‘Oh God, everyone’s going to hate me’.”

Acts of Desperation is a relentlessly intense and disconcertingly relatable glimpse into love and infatuation at its most extreme: obsessive, complex and all-consuming. The novel follows

A Man In Love that she began her own novel in 2016 and that in its writing, she “took in almost nothing but Knausgaard”.

How does she feel, then, that Knausgaard himself has read and endorsed her novel? Calling it “a love story like no other” and Nolan “a huge literary talent”, Knausgaard’s endorsement sits in the centre of her book’s back cover and is the lengthiest endorsement on the page. “It was probably the highlight of the whole process for me. It’s hard to overstate how much I respect him,” she says, her pride palpable over the phone.

To have your role model affirm your own work must certainly be a big deal, especially for someone like Nolan, who was raised on an

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appetite for books. Born in Waterford, Ireland, in 1990, and the daughter of the playwright and theatre director Jim Nolan, she was always provided with new books, even when her family was short on money, according to the Irish Times.

She adds that it’s been especially hard during lockdown, which has made everyone “quite insane”, simultaneously bored yet overstimulated and anxious. “If I’m really busy, the idea of sitting down and dedicating two

“there was this thought in my head that it could conceivably get unanimously bad reviews” So, when I ask her who early literary heroes were, it’s not surprising that she can rattle off a quick list that includes Stephen King, John Irving, The Virgin Suicides, Little Women, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, and even Albert Camus, who she discovered at 16 was “actually very readable and beautiful”.

Becoming an adult has changed her relationship to reading, however – she admits that “I was a really good reader then, that I’m not anymore” – which she reasons is a combination

hours to reading seems a bit frivolous, almost.”

In a post-lockdown world, she envisions that she’d be reading alone peacefully in a nice café or pub. (Her recommendations? Camberwell’s Hermits Cave and the South London Gallery, where she’d read after seeing a show and taking “a nice little amble through their gift shop”.)

But Nolan’s life hasn’t always been as tranquil.

She dropped out of university twice, first from Film Studies and French at Trinity College Dublin and later from English and Cultural

“there’s an assumption that women lack proper creative imagination” of a shortened attention span, her work as a reviewer and New Statesman columnist, and, well, coronavirus. It’s not that she doesn’t read anymore. In fact, she reads relatively frequently.

But reading is no longer the escapist salve that it once was. “It was all I wanted to do then. Now it’s definitely something that I have to set aside time for,” she says.

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Studies at a smaller college. In an essay for The Guardian, she writes that “even without the legitimate traumas I can wheel out to explain myself to others” – mental illness, alcoholism, a pregnancy – her stint with higher education was likely to be a short one. While there, Nolan was becoming unstuck. Her experience of higher education violently dislodged her sense of self

as “essentially clever and interesting”, which was cultivated by an upbringing of books and success in earlier education. Of her beginnings at university, she writes, “I felt I had failed already, fumbled the opening pass.” This feeling would go on to incapacitate, as days of procrastination induced by the fear of failure turned to weeks, rendering her increasingly out of step with a system that rarely affords any leeway.

Existing at odds with the wider world is an underlying theme of Acts of Desperation. We get the sense that the narrator’s sometimes erratic behaviour is driven by the compulsion to feel something, to feel less displaced or alienated by the world, whether that is achieved by means of male validation or heavy drinking – also the topics of Nolan’s intimate columns in her journalism.

“the only things taken from real life were the emotional currents of the novel”

Photo: Megan Nolan

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Given the narrator’s emotional and biographical resonances with Nolan’s own life, whether Acts of Desperation is autobiographical in any way is a question that appears over and over again in interviews.

And is it? The answer is that the only things taken from real life were the emotional currents of the novel. The dynamics of the central

good answer, it would be so boring to go through every page and point out what’s from life and what’s not.”

Seeing as she’s addressed this constantly, I’m more interested to find out if Nolan thinks that it’s a condition of being a female author, that parallels are drawn between fictionalised lives and real life. Nolan is hardly the first to be asked

“such nuance is born of Nolan’s hesitancy to flatten the spectrum of human experience into labels or diagnoses” romantic relationship, for instance, are an amalgamation of Nolan’s observations of others.

What remains is fiction. Nolan tells me: “I had known that the question would come up. And it’s just one of those where you can’t really give a

Photo: Megan Nolan

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this question. Other female writers have gone to great lengths to detach themselves from their work - Italian author Elena Ferrante goes by a pseudonym for this reason. In Nolan’s case, she thinks that the question is “reasonable” due to the biographical similarities she shares with the narrator.

However, she explains of this phenomenon: “There’s an assumption that women lack proper creative imagination, that they wouldn’t be capable of inventing things. I think a part of it is just not believing that women are as skilled as male authors. The baseline for a writer is just a man.”

Just how complex men, women, and the politics of desire can be is strongly emphasized by the novel. Ciaran is patently unhealthy for the narrator – he is cold and temperamental, stuck on an ex, and knows exactly how to withdraw and dole out his love so as to drive the narrator almost insane.

But neither is she a hapless

victim, a puppet manipulated on strings of affection. She almost revels in her degradation as she adjusts every detail of her life to suit him, a “singularity which obliterated other concerns”.

But later, she is implicated in her own way as she fights back.

She is self-aware of it too: “Mediating your victimhood is just part of being a woman. Using it or denying it, hating it or loving it, and all of these at once.” So while it is easy to label Ciaran as toxic or abusive, reality is far messier.

Such nuance is born of Nolan’s hesitancy to flatten the spectrum of human experience into labels or diagnoses. In an essay on alcoholism, Nolan writes: “It is one of my personal bugbears that we seem as a culture flatly incapable of discussing many of life’s most complex issues without urgently needing to name and solve them, preferably with formal medical interventions.”

Does she think this tendency is a symptom of our digital world? “There’s definitely a tendency I didn’t really experience when I was a teenager and that I see in the generation below me, who

had access to the internet all the time, of being able to diagnose things in themselves. And I don’t think that it’s wrong for people to try and treat themselves, but I think we’re too happy or eager to call each other and ourselves names, to simplify what actually are just pretty normal human experiences.”

With its searing depiction of obsessive love, and the lengths to which we fracture ourselves in search of it, Acts of Desperation is a profoundly unhappy book. And although its creation was not easy – she admits to being in tears for parts of its writing – Nolan seems to be in a better, and more stable place now. She’s got another book on the way, as part of her two-part book deal with publisher Jonathan Cape. “My priority is to write novels for the next five to ten years,” with journalism on the side, she says. And Nolan has a new companion too. A fuzzy, excited little thing, Miso the kitten. “It’s my first time being solely responsible for something else. It’s great taking care of this tiny animal who depends on me, it’s a reason to get out of bed every morning.” On to happier days. ◆

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North

&South

Photo: Adam Fawcett

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Shauna Lewis on northern literature, classism within UK universities and reclaiming regional narratives

t was the first time I’d ever felt ‘seen’ in literature, as someone from a working class background who was going to university and pursuing a creative career. I related to that experience of feeling geographically ‘on the margins’ of the action and feeling a pull to London that felt necessary, not something I actually wanted,” says Kate Baguley, co-host of Up North Books, a podcast which focuses on northern literature.

Kate is talking about Saltwater, the 2019 Portico Prize-winning, debut novel by Jessica Andrews which documents student Lucy’s move from working class Sunderland to London.

Although regional literature is typically defined by “characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region”, Lucy’s journey is rooted in the exact opposite – the particularities of what is unfamiliar.

“London is built on money and ambition and I didn’t have enough of either of those things.”

Heads and shoulders above her classmates at home, in London she finds herself without economic stability, unused to the intense work environment, and out of place.

Lucy notices every minute detail that sets her apart from wealthier students. “There is another kind of skin that I did not know about. It is posh-

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girl skin. Expensive and gold... It is lustrous and shiny where I am mottled.” Lucy’s supposedly working class appearance, which others do not notice, leaves her feeling ostracised – a rusted coin among shiny coppers.

Lucy and Kate’s experiences are familiar to many working class students from regional backgrounds. A 2020 investigation by The Guardian revealed a culture of mockery towards working class students and regional accents at leading Russell Group universities. At university, working class students are silently ostracised through a lack of shared experiences with their middle class peers, sharper accents amidst home counties voices, and a lack of connections to those mysterious post-grad jobs.

Lucy does move past her sense of ostracism, but her experience being the odd one out is not an isolated incident. The Office for Students revealed that 55 per cent of young people in London go into higher education, but only 40 per cent in the north-east make that leap.

Previously a form of literature which seeks to encapsulate the intricacies of small town life, regional literature has taken on a new, social and political purpose. One which mirrors the experiences of working class students from regional

towns, and their experiences of climbing the social ladder.

A string of novels have emerged in the literary mainstream which seek to reclaim regional and working class narratives. Along with Saltwater: Exit Management by Naomi Booth, Theft by Luke Brown, and Boy Parts by Eliza Clark – all published in 2020.

“he has diluted

his accent in his efforts to fit in” Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts approaches regional classism with more cynicism. Newcastle-born Irina enrols at Central Saint Martins university in London. After standing up for herself against a classmate, she writes: “I went from like hot, edgy, novelty-northern girl to weird, fighty, state school chav.” Earlier on, she had labelled herself “practically middle class”, but the novel’s characters have already decided who she is and this idea of her permeates her university experience. Irina dismisses these attitudes, but others find those long-held assumptions harder to shake off.

Luke Brown’s Theft approaches the issue of language and dialect. Paul, originally from Lancashire, finds himself moving between both London and Fleetwood in the aftermath of his mother’s death. Like many working class people from regional towns, he has diluted his accent in his efforts to fit in. Speaking to a softly-spoken Glaswegian, he writes: “I imagined her plan-

ing the edges off it, like I had done with mine, sliver by sliver, to wedge between where we had been and where we now wanted admittance.” It is uncertain whether it was consciously or subconsciously done, but Paul’s experience mirrors the many who have attempted to assimilate and climb the social ladder.

Historically, DH Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers stood out as one of the few examples of a novel that painted a picture of a particular community. It was a grim and two-dimensional picture of the working class community in rural Nottinghamshire. Its most prominent working class character – Walter Morel – alienates the reader and his family with his dialect: “tha niver said thankyer for nowt i’ thy life,” and his presence hovers around the edges of the novel like a bad smell.

Now, working class authors from outside of London are choosing to reclaim these narratives. In Comma Press’ The Book of Newcastle, Angela Readman writes: “Within the context of an industry largely based in London, many writers felt discouraged from writing about where they were from… some agents and publishers [advised] their clients to lose any accents in their work and write more upwardly mobile characters.”

Perhaps then, regional literature started as a means to encapsulate small town life, rural areas, and misjudged lifestyle, but its definition has certainly evolved to mean much more. The omitted h’s at the beginning of words spoken with Lancashire accents and the way Newcastle girls dress up for a night out are now points of pride. Regional literature has become a means of owning your identity and your class position, rather than one of alienation. ◆

Photo: Adam Fawcett

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Q&A: Yousra Imran Narzra Ahmed talks to the author of Hijab and Red Lipstick about moving to Qatar as a teenager, her Muslim faith and feminism.

Y

ousra Imran’s debut YA novel, Hijab and Red Lipstick, is a semi-autobiographical story about growing up in the Arabian Gulf with a very strict dad.

What is Hijab and Red Lipstick about?

Hijab and Red Lipstick is actually based on my own life. I was born and brought up in London and then, when I was 14, my dad got his dream job in Qatar and we all had to move out there.

Within months of moving, the family dynamic just suddenly took a very drastic, downward turn... When we moved out to the Gulf, things went from being strict to controlling and coercive to then borderline abusive... I just found myself in a very difficult situation going through very horrible experiences, and being unable to talk about it publicly, due to lack of freedom of speech and press out there.

How do your beliefs influence your writing?

I feel like my experiences and the things that I’ve witnessed happening to the women around me are what turned me into a Muslim feminist today. Intersectional feminism is vital: I think my personal experience and my journey has led me to that. I feel like, in the articles that I write, I tend to lean towards sharing the stories of other women in parts of the world where sharing their experiences openly is still considered a taboo.

For me, I want to keep amplifying those experiences and their stories. Because I’m able to now - before I wasn’t - I didn’t have that freedom of expression or speech or but now I do. It’s one of my aims to use my pen to write about and amplify their experiences and stories.

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What is your message for readers?

I think if there was one message for readers and that’s regardless of their background - I think that it would be, whatever your faith background is, the male members of your faith community are not the gatekeepers to your religion.

That, as a woman, you are fully capable of interpreting your faith and religion in a way that you feel speaks true to yourself.

I’m hoping that when people read the story that it will resonate with them, and if they’ve gone through a similar experience, they feel that they’re not alone out there and that their feelings are not abnormal, because that’s what happens - perpetrators of this sort of controlling, coercive behaviour... when you try to talk about it, they gaslight you. I hope that readers, especially young readers, will pick up the book and feel like there is light at the end of the tunnel. ◆

Photo: Roxy van der Post

playing the

Illustrations by Becca Challis

Is our government

FOOL?

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Lauren Sneade looks to Shakespeare to make sense of the political landscape in a ‘post-truth’ era

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t’s a common trope in literary studies, sermons and intellectually masturbatory dinner party conversation that we look to Shakespeare to make meaning of our experiences. What, then, could the Bard illuminate for us about Texas lawyer cat, Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘vagina’ candle sparking an inferno in Kilburn, or the TikTok icon who styled her hair with Gorilla Glue, and Gorilla Glue’s subsequent statement cautioning against the use of Gorilla Glue for any such purposes?

Order, it seems, has ceased to exert its influence; we are in the age of chaos. And now that chaos has come to its logical conclusion: our current cabinet.

But while UK politics in 2021 does not provide us with a people’s hero (King Henry V) or a sage authoritarian (Prospero, The Tempest), it has served us a strikingly effective band of fools.

Shakespeare’s plays often present us with fools who don’t answer questions, don’t understand the topics they’re speaking on and are ridiculed over the course of the play. Today’s political hell-scape presents us with such fools, and the effect is not comedy but tragedy.

One of Shakespeare’s most hapless fools is written into Much Ado About Nothing: Dogberry, the chief of citizen-police in Messina. He hires George Seacole as a Watchman declaring: “You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch.”

Let us turn first to Gavin Williamson, Minister of Education. He was sacked by Theresa May in 2019 after being implicated in a scandal over leaked confidential National Security Council information related to the Chinese firm Huawei’s potential involvement in the UK’s 5G network. Well, that meant peanuts to PM Johnson.

Of course Williamson would make a fine minister, nurturing in his every waking moment the future of the country! Who better to set sail, to lose the map over the starboard side, to navi-

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gate into an iceberg, to send the children pitching into the icy waters below or, colloquially, the most significant exam results fuck up this country has ever seen?

But what is the Conservative party if not Gavin Williamson persevering? The venerable Gav would rise again. The venerable Gav would vote against Marcus Rashford’s motion to extend free school meals into the Christmas holidays. Perhaps, if the children could be starved, this pesky notion of schooling would be out of his hair for good. Alas, thwarted! The children returned. But not for long, children. Not for long. He initially pooh-poohed the notion of mass Covid testing in schools, and teachers are still nowhere to be seen on the priority list for vaccines.

But perhaps, in the way that Donald Trump manufactured such a network of lies that it was impossible to have him banged to rights on any of the lies which really mattered, foolery has

“but what is the

Conservative party if not Gavin Williamson persevering?” prevailed. It is the cabinet’s very lifeblood. In King Lear, the Fool is paradoxically wise, serving as a dichotomy to the King’s fatal ignorance.

He highlights Lear’s preference for flattery over truth: “Truth’s a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out.”

In our political climate, questing after truth is the vain project of nuisance busybodies; a project unworthy of contribution from cabinet ministers. The ministers wear their NHS badges, grit their teeth and avoid questions until they are rescued by the time allocation constraints of broadcast programming.

In an interview on Good Morning Britain in

November last year, Matt Hancock was asked why the government target to test 100,000 people for COVID-19 each day by the end of April had not been met. Matt Hancock said that that had never been the government target at all; what they had meant was 100,000 tests would be carried out. Many tests were administered on the same people, and that’s why the number of people tested was much lower. When shown a government tweet which proved the contrary, Matt Hancock grinned and said that

it was the capacity which really mattered. Yes, I suppose if one were seconds away from being mauled by a bear, and the government had a shotgun in its old Eton-issued school satchel, but instead defended one with a water pistol, one might find the presence of the shotgun in the satchel rather comforting.

And I’ll leave you with these lines from Twelfth Night: “Well, G-d give them wisdom that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.” ◆

For the Love of Shakespeare: Q&A with Professor Emma Smith Emma Smith is a Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford’s Hertford College, and author of This is Shakespeare.

Nicholas Harris catches up with her about feminism, getting into Shakespeare, and the dum-di-dum-di-dum.

Why are young people put off Shakespeare?

I think people are put off Shakespeare because there’s too much of it to get to grips with, and we are trained to think that he wrote beautiful but massive poems where every single word is of vital value. We should be more prepared to radically cut Shakespeare and shouldn’t be ashamed of reading the ‘good bits’.

You say that Hamlet was to the 19th century what King Lear was to the 20th. Which play will define the 21st century?

It’s got to be Othello. That sense of the Mediterranean, of North Africa, the Islamic world, of a displaced but still domesticated conflict with Christendom. And also of what it means to be a multi-ethnic or multicultural society like in early modern Venice. Othello is very much ‘for now’, but in some very difficult ways. Reading Othello from an anti-racist and a feminist perspective simultaneously is difficult: the play seems to want us to choose whether to sympathise with a victim of white supremacy or male violence.

What did you want to achieve with This is Shakespeare?

One of the things I had the opportunity to do was to try and think a bit more about what literary criticism might be for a more general audience. It seems to me that fifty or sixty years ago, you would have books about poetry or literary authors which were quite widely reviewed in newspapers and were quite accessible to a public outside the university. There’s popular history, popular psychology, popular social science, but there isn’t really popular English literature, and if there is then it’s historical or biographical. I wanted to ask what kinds of analysis and frameworks do we bring to bear on literary works when we study English, and show that they’re a great set of tools for people to have more widely outside the academy. We need to pick out the bits that speak to us now. ◆

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Georgina Lawton

Illustration by Paola Ascanio

Raceless

Narzra Ahmed speaks to Georgina Lawton about her debut book Raceless: In Search of Family, Identity, and the Truth About Where I Belong, identity, and family secrets Photo: José Sarmento Matos

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hat would you do if you discovered that you were a different race to the one you had been raised as? Journalist and author Georgina Lawton found herself in that predicament. She grew up believing she was white, like her mother and father. Lawton wrote the non-fiction book, Raceless, which explores identity in a new way.

Lawton describes Raceless as “part memoir, part analysis”. She says: “It covers my journey growing up in a white family, and that of other people who have grown up in white families, or have also had that identity erased or eradicated due to family secrets or things being hidden from them within their families.

“The title comes from that feeling of not having your race acknowledged in all-white spaces, or being adopted or raised by white parents and not having your racial experiences acknowledged while simultaneously living a racialised existence beyond your home.”

Lawton explains this is a struggle faced by many mixed heritage people. She hopes the book will resonate with those facing similar identity battles: those “dealing with privilege, or perceived privilege, because of how they’ve been raised and because of how they look, but also dealing with discrimination and othering, because they’re not white”.

She says: “The book was inspired, fundamentally, by not having a reason for my existence. I had two really loving parents, but we didn’t talk about why I was Black and why they were white.

That was always in the background of my childhood, even though it was a really loving upbringing. Then, when I got older, and I started to think about who I was, as a Black woman, or how to identify as Black, I realised that I didn’t have that pride in my identity. I didn’t have that reason for why I looked the way that I did... I started to

question my mum, after my dad who raised me passed away, and I found out that my biological dad was actually a Black man that she doesn’t know anything about.”

“when I got older, and I started to think about who I was as a Black woman, I realised that I didn’t have that pride in my identity” Lawton started to write about race and identity online, about family secrets and being lied to, and her stories began to gain attention. She then wrote about it in The Guardian, where she was offered a column, and decided to write the book after being approached by agents and publishers.

Raceless was very emotional for Lawton to write, but not exactly cathartic. It also taught her a lot about herself and her family. “People asked me if it was cathartic. It wasn’t cathartic, because I had therapy for that... It was difficult at first, because I was trying to work out what I stood for and what I wanted to say, whilst also balancing the emotions of my extended family,

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all of whom are white, all of whom have never spoken to me about the lie at the heart of our family or identity erasure or even what it means to be Black in a white family. No one had ever asked me how that was and we’d never acknowledged it even.”

The process left her feeling fearful that talking about race would isolate her further from her

“the time is now,

because people are listening to our stories, and they are interested in what we have to say” family, but speaking to others with similar experiences helped. “As I spoke to more people, it made me feel more confident about my writing and I just carried on.”

The Black Lives Matter movement was taking place as Lawton was editing her book. “It really spurred me on... When I saw everything that was going on, with the protests in London, I realised that, you know, there are parts of the book where I hadn’t gone far enough. And the time is now, because people are listening to our stories, and they are interested in what we have to say, whereas maybe 10 years ago it would have been a lot harder to write a book like this. And I wouldn’t have had the confidence either,” she explains.

“When I saw what was going on, I realised that we were at this turning point and I realised that I could add more to the book. I could go a bit deeper and question my mum a little bit further.

“It is important to have nuanced discussions about privilege and discrimination in our clos-

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est relationships,” Lawton says. “Because, as society’s mixing, and as interracial relationships continue to the UK, you know, we’ve got more mixed heritage people in the UK than any other country in Europe. Society is changing really fast. Issues like my own, where we used to not talk about race because we thought it was too awkward or we used to not acknowledge the reality of our partners’ experiences or our child experiences, that can’t happen anymore.

“The colourblind approach to race in our interpersonal relationships is not helpful... And keeping secrets at the heart of the home is hugely detrimental to the development of people’s relationships and people’s identities. So that’s what I want people to take from it.”

Lawton also thinks that there should be more “nuanced conversations” about cultural identity, especially the identities people of mixed heritage should be allowed to identify with. In her words, people of mixed heritage should be able to identify with “whatever cultural identity they see fit”.

“I think we need to stop making judgments on Black and brown people as to how they should identify. We shouldn’t make assumptions based on what we can see. The way that our society is changing: it’s no longer easy to put someone in a box and we need to make sure that all of our stories are given the breadth and space to be explored individually.”

Lawton’s next book is a “joyful” travel guide, coming out this year. “In the book, I talk a lot about travelling to Black spaces to work out a little bit more about who I am, so I’ve got a travel guide for Black women coming out in the summer. It’s called Black Girls Take World and it’s really fun.” She adds, “Part travel guide, part inspiring collection of essays and advice on how to travel the world as a Black female.

“I’m also working on a novel, which is in very early stages, but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do.”

Georgina’s latest book, Black Girls Take World: The Travel Bible for Black Women with Boundless Wanderlust, is out now ◆

Empireland

Cameron Henderson speaks to Sathnam Sanghera about the history of Empire, reforming our education system and “the last gasp of the elderly white man”

Photo: Kate Lister

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athnam Sanghera is a prize-winning journalist who has worked for both The Financial Times and The Times. He has been shortlisted for the Costa Book Award twice for his previous book The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton (which was adapted and made into a BBC2 drama) and the novel Marriage Material.

Released in January, his latest book, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain, is a Sunday Times bestseller which attempts to shine light on the dark and misunderstood portions of our history.

Photo: Sathnam Sanghera / inaki del omo

How much did you know about the Empire before writing the book?

Very little. I guess we studied the Irish Potato Famine at school but nothing about India and nothing about the Empire. When we had endless Remembrance Day services it was never pointed out there were loads of imperial troops involved and when we did the potato famine it was never pointed out that there were similar famines going on in India for similar reasons.

Given that the Empire is the biggest thing that ever happened to the country, it’s a bit odd we never talked about it.

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You talk in the book about British society being anti-intellectual. How did you find the process of taking a subject which is quite dense and complicated and making it approachable for the average reader?

That’s a challenge with any book to be honest.

Readability is a much-underrated literary quality. Someone like Bill Bryson who takes loads of complex material and makes it accessible to the general reader is doing amazing work and doesn’t get the credit he deserves. I guess my writing style has always had an emphasis on clarity and humour… but it’s quite hard to get clarity and humour out of the British Empire. It’s not funny, and it’s not clear! It’s really hard work.

Did you ever feel particularly unsettled by any of the things you learnt in your research?

Yes, loads of it. All the massacres were hard. The punishment of Sikhs being strapped to the ends of canons and blown to pieces – that was hard.

I actually made myself stop reading that stuff after 3pm because I found if I read it any later, I would have dreams about it. It’s really difficult stuff. The stuff about Edward Said [his theory of Orientalism], I found that difficult because I found I’d been colonised. That’s not a very comfortable thing because when you think you’ve

In general, no, because I have got a very close relationship with my family and they’re all in Wolverhampton. I more or less live between London and Wolverhampton. Wolverhampton voted Brexit and I feel like I am in touch with Britain.

But they are more or less two countries. There’s London and there’s not London and there’s no doubt my London world is rarefied and slightly detached from where I came from. So yeah, I probably have become slightly poncey!

What’s your connection like to your family in India? Do you feel a deep sort of gut connection to what is going on in India at the moment and to your family there?

No, actually. I think in early life my mission was to get away from all of that because I found it oppressive. So, I ran away and basically became a British journalist. I do feel very English, but as I get older, I feel more and more interested in India and where my family was from. It’s a long way away though, and it’s been hard this year because you can’t really visit. I think I will continue to increase my interest.

had a really good education, you don’t want to think that it was deficient in any way – I realised it was and that was quite sobering.

In the book you talk about an idea of British exceptionalism. Do you think you could unpack that for me very slightly?

It’s basically the idea that Britain doesn’t need to obey the normal rules. It’s different because we had the greatest empire in human history, so we don’t have to behave like any other country. But Britain’s not the only country that suffers from it. There is something called American exceptionalism. It definitely applies. There’s probably Chinese exceptionalism, increasingly, because they are the world’s great superpowers – they don’t have to do what everyone else does. But in Britain there are so many manifestations of exceptionalism. Brexit is probably one, but also the way we reacted to Covid - this obsession with being world beating when we should just try to be averagely competent.

Having been educated at Cambridge and now being very much part of the metropolitan journalist establishment, do you ever feel cut off from the environment of your upbringing?

What was your mission when it came to writing the book? Was it to disentangle that web? How did you see you fulfilling your goal?

I wanted to do several things. First of all, I wanted

“it’s quite hard

to get clarity and humour out of the British Empire”

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to make sense of the history of British Empire, which took a long time because it’s really complicated. I wanted to provide an accessible guide to the general reader on empire because there aren’t any. What I most wanted was a Bill Bryson book on Empire but it didn’t exist. Hopefully I’ve given people an entrance into history and they’ll go on and read other stuff. Then I wanted to unpack this weird balance sheet view we have of

“politicians can

rant and rave, but it’s the last gasp of the elderly white man” Empire because that debate kind of overshadows everything when it comes to Empire in this country. I wanted to make sense of it myself and hopefully I have, in that I think it’s stupid and we should view empire a different way.

Are you hopeful that we are entering a new age of multicultural acceptance in this country and a greater understanding of Empire?

In some ways I’m more depressed because the right-wing nationalist sect of the Conservative party are waging this increasingly demented culture war. The stuff in the Sewell report about history was insane, but I am optimistic overall just because I feel like young people have a completely different attitude. They are really animated by BLM. They’re much more informed than we ever were. They’re getting their history from the internet and from Instagram. And films like Black Panther are really woke and actually chime with a lot of young people. I feel like whatever happens in politics, society is getting more progressive. And also, society is increasingly interested in history. So, the politicians can rant and rave, but I feel like it’s the last gasp of the elderly white man - they’re having one last go, but ultimately, they’re on a losing wicket.

You mention the possibility of introducing an Empire Day – only semi-seriously - in your book. Is education crucial to progression?

I think it’s not just that. There does need to be a change in the education system, but I think that’s happening quietly anyway because not every school has to follow the national curriculum and I get the sense loads of teachers are doing it anyway. Also, it’s books and documentaries. I’m making a two-part documentary on Empireland coming out in autumn and I think that reflects the fact that there is appetite.

The media is a big part of our delayed understanding - our film scene has never properly confronted colonialism. It’s quite hard. The only films we get about colonialism are rosy nostalgia films about the Raj, but nothing about the darker aspects. I sense that’s about to happen. I sense there’s going to be loads of stuff this year.

Who gets more offended by being confused for the other, yourself of Matthew Syed?

He’s a bestselling author so I don’t mind taking the credit for his work. I don’t think I’ve ever played ping pong though.

What’s your favourite childhood book?

Boy by Roald Dahl. I loved Roald Dahl as a kid. ◆ Photo: Sathnam Sanghera

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The art of the protest Four photographers capture the past, present and future of protests, introduced by Becca Challis

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he right to protest is a pillar of democracy, implying that it is set in stone. Yet, the proposed Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill demonstrates the potential for stone to crumble under pressure. The bill gives the police new powers to tackle ‘disruptive peaceful protests’, effectively removing the people’s right to challenge authority. Oppression of this kind is present wherever democracy is compromised and should serve as a red flag for the future of our fiercely democratic nation.

The events of the last year encapsulate the necessity for change. People took to the streets in the name of climate change, Black Lives Matter and women’s rights. Natalie Finch perfectly frames the traditional protest, a sharing of ideas and representation of change, while Tim Weaving showcases the art of creative demonstration. Jason Little offers a visceral snapshot into the feeling and heart behind the BLM movement. Finally, Joshua Windsor communicates the deep-rooted inequalities still present in our society. We have work to do, so stand up. ◆

Natalie Finch: Climate change protests, Sydney, Australia

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Tim Weaving: Extinction Rebellion protests, Cardiff, Wales 37

Jason Little: Black Lives Matter and education protests, New York City, USA 38

Joshua Windsor: Kill the Bill protests, London, UK 39

Noughts & Crosses

turns 20

Illustrated by Ernesta Kurpeikyte

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On its 20th anniversary, Aisha Rimi explores her lifelong relationship with Noughts & Crosses, from childhood representation to what we can learn from it today

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was 10 years old when I first read Noughts & Crosses. I lied to the school librarian that I had my mum’s permission to borrow the book - due to a rather tame love scene, the library’s copy had a “Warning: Mature Content” sticker stuck on the cover. Nonetheless, I left my school library that afternoon filled with glee both at getting away with the lie I’d told, but more so about reading the book clutched in my hands.

I’d rarely read books with a Black character, let alone a Black female protagonist, that looked like me. That was until Sephy Hadley came into my life. She was determined, caring, strongwilled, a little stubborn like me, and her character sparked my love affair with the book series that would span over the next 17 years.

At that age, I hadn’t given much thought to race or how I could be perceived as one of a handful of Black girls in my predominantly white school. Despite its alternate reality, Noughts & Crosses ignited a new world perspective I hadn’t considered before reading it.

Set in a racially segregated world ruled by Crosses (the Black elite) and where white people, (Noughts) are marginalised, the book follows Sephy, a Cross girl, and Callum, a Nought boy, as they go from best friends to lovers.

While Noughts & Crosses was first published in 2001, the novel remains culturally and socially relevant to this day, with Malorie Blackman’s much-loved series culminating in a sixth book this summer, Endgame.

Central themes to the novel - racial politics, classism and inequality - are all issues still ingrained in our society today. At this point, the government’s recent race report asserts that the UK no longer has a system rigged against people from ethnic minorities. When faced with criticism from the Duke of Sussex, the board of the Society of Editors released an initial statement claiming the UK media “is not bigoted”.

However, we have a prime minister who has made racist comments in the past, comparing Muslim women to “letterboxes” and referring to Black people as “piccaninnies” with “watermelon smiles”. And yet the notion still exists that we live in a post-racial Britain.

One of the reasons Noughts & Crosses is enduringly popular is because of Blackman’s powerful spotlighting of white privilege and representation that we still talk about today. It was this book that first exposed me to the concept, under the guise of Cross privilege, before the term had become widespread.

A notable scene where Sephy gives Callum a plaster has always stuck with me. In their world, plasters were all brown to blend in with the superior Cross’ skin colour.

While in the real world, my young mind was slowly realising that many things weren’t catered to me and my skin colour.

Another poignant moment that mirrors our current situation is when Callum complains about the lack of Nought history taught in his predominantly Cross school. This small scene in the book is reminiscent of conversations today, sparked from the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement last summer, about the lack of Black British history taught in schools. Given Noughts & Crosses was published 20 years ago, it’s shocking to think its subject matter still makes up conversations we have, or are just beginning to have, today.

Sephy’s journey of recognising her own privilege in her world is reflective of the journey that many of my white peers took last summer after witnessing the death of George Floyd. I do not doubt that in her fictitious reality, she would have taken to the streets to show her opposition to racial injustice.

Although it shouldn’t take a role reversal storyline to make people empathetic and more understanding of the racism endured, Noughts

“back then, Callum and Sephy’s world felt so much farther away from my current reality, when in fact Noughts & Crosses was a reflection of my world”

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& Crosses cleverly forced a generation of young people to confront the realities of racism.

Revisiting the book later in life, I realised the story was a lot more complex than my younger self understood. Back then, Callum and Sephy’s world felt so much farther away from my current reality, when in fact Noughts & Crosses was a reflection of my world.

At times, I would find myself forgetting that Sephy Hadley and the other Cross characters in the books were Black.

I was so used to reading about white characters and imagining them, that my mind couldn’t always visualise these main Black characters.

Although the craving I had as a young girl for representation in books was somewhat satisfied by reading Noughts & Crosses, I still longed for more. Discovering the novel as a 10-year-old has influenced my choice of books throughout my adult years thanks to Blackman inspiring a generation of Black British authors today. These days it’s not difficult for me to imagine Black characters, as I mainly read books written by

Black writers. The sense of comfort and recognition I get when reading books by Black authors now takes me back to my 10-year-old self and the joy I felt reading about a girl with a head full of curls like mine.

Blackman’s work had such a lasting impact that Noughts & Crosses was added to the national curriculum at Key Stage 3, with young teenagers up and down the country now seeing the world from a completely new perspective. The novel was also brought to the stage in 2019 at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, and became a critically-acclaimed BBC mini-series last spring, much to the pleasure of those of us who had been anticipating this for years.

With yet one more story to tell and these multiple adaptations, the alternate world Blackman created twenty years ago isn’t one I’m ready to say goodbye to.

Its brazen depiction of structural racism helped a generation of young people to understand racial inequality - now we just need to make sure we learn from it. ◆

“reading books by Black authors now takes me back to the joy I felt reading about a girl with a head full of curls like mine””

Illustration by Ernesta Kurpeikyte

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Anthony McGowan:

How to get down with Carina Murphy talks to the children’s author about toilet jokes, the Carnegie Prize and being a ‘cool’ teacher

the kids

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he only job that Anthony McGowan can see himself in (other than professional novelist) is teaching. As someone who’s written almost 40 books for kids, this isn’t much of a surprise. With small glasses, neat hair and ruffled shirt, he even looks like a teacher. Still, he’s not convinced.

“What I can’t do is any of the admin – all the complex business of interacting with people and documents. I can’t fucking do it,” he sighs from his daughter’s bedroom in North London, where he’s been shacked up all day on Zoom.

“There are quite literally hundreds, possibly thousands, of book groups in schools who read the Carnegie shortlist,” McGowan explains. “You’ve got all these book groups discussing your stuff. And as a writer, that’s just what you dream of.”

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Photo: Anthony McGowan

But it’s not all about being down with the kids; to get through the Carnegie’s rigorous selection process you’ve also got to impress the librarians, or as McGowan calls them, “the gatekeepers”.

“You don’t fluke your way to the Carnegie prize,” he shudders.

Yet, like any teacher worth their salt, McGowan does have some wry tips on how to play into the examiner’s hands.

“I knew that I was in the gun sights of the committee, because Lark’s prequel Rook got shortlisted. The only reason Rook got shortlisted was because the prequel Brock is really good.” (He scrabbles around to produce copies of each book – cool teacher loves a visual aid). “So when it came to writing Lark, I knew what they wanted from me. I wrote it deliberately to win the Carnegie Prize.” He shrugs. It’s as easy as sticking to the mark scheme, folks.

But it’s not just literary prizes McGowan talks about like they’re a particularly hard pop quiz.

He has the same breezy, know-your-audience approach to writing novels – and, so far, it’s worked. The florid, smart-ass prose of his early young adult fiction impressed the sort of precocious teen reader McGowan remembers being.

Since then, he’s moved to Barrington Stoke – a publishing house targeting reluctant readers – and pared his writing down to the bones. The result? Monosyllabically titled novels - Brock, Rook, Lark and Pike – and fantastic success.

“People see a novel as a Fabergé egg inside the writer, where you lay it and present it to the world. Whereas I have this more interactive view of literature,” McGowan explains. “The whole time I’m looking at the reader, asking: are you finding this amusing? Are you finding it scary?

Are you challenged? Are you interested? So I tend to think about literature as a conversation.”

This conversation has worked wonders for the last two decades, but now in his mid-fifties, McGowan is starting to worry whether he can keep it up. He already writes at a phenomenal pace (roughly two books a year) because his young audience has an annoying tendency to outgrow him. But with the ever-widening gulf between McGowan’s teenage years and the twenty-first

century, he’s staring down the barrel of every cool teacher’s nightmare: am I too old to get down with the kids?

“When I was a teenager there were no mobile phones, and quite a few of my plots just wouldn’t work with them. So I’ve always got to work out why the characters don’t have phones. But it’s more than just plot technicalities. Kids today have so many places to turn to that I didn’t.”

McGowan shakes his head. I wonder if he’s imagining the tragic fate of cool teachers everywhere: still desperately throwing gang signs and begging to be called ‘dawg’ as they’re wheeled away to the nursing home. And of course, the only thing worse than being old is being dead – something which, he muses, books may be soon.

“The more challenging question is, can you live a full, rich, complex life without books? And

“can you live a full, rich, complex life without books? You probably can” the truth is, you probably can. Video games and Netflix provide a lot of those things that we get from from books. It may well be that in fact I’m a dinosaur, and in 20 years’ time books will be a minority interest.”

A moment of silence – then he shrugs this grim prophecy off. Cool teacher is nothing if not upbeat. And staying down with the kids is a lot less tiring when you remember youth is eternal anyway – a notion which, understandably, McGowan is keen to protect.

“Those teenage years, the real teenage years that we all went through, they’re so full of the stuff of fiction. Of conflict and love and excitement and fear. What I’m hoping is that there’s enough connection between teenagers over generations, and that the kind of things that obsessed me still obsess teenagers now.” ◆

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Holly Bourne:

“Dave the Laugh is my ultimate book crush”

Cara Laskaris speaks to Holly Bourne, bestselling author of Pretending about cats, boys and embracing your voice Here at book(ish) we’re partial to a bit of a ‘loo read’. What’s on your loo bookshelf?

I must say, I have never read on the loo. I’m a real germaphobe and the thought of a book near a loo and what would float onto it whenever anyone flushed, and then you get poo pages...no.

Sorry. And sorry if I’ve just ruined your hobby!

How have experiences like supporting young people through your work for charity The Mix shaped your writing?

Working at The Mix for five years was one of the most transformative times in my life, and I wouldn’t be the writer I was without that experience. It was an incredible privilege to have young people share such personal problems with me, and I really hope my books have helped many teenagers feel less alone.

Who would be your dream dinner party guests (living or dead) and why?

I would, quite frankly, love to be sat around the table with the whole cast of Girl, Woman, Other as I am beyond obsessed with that book. Then throw in Adrian Mole (maybe he can bring some offal along), Scout Finch, and Dave the Laugh from the Georgia Nicolson series, as he is my ultimate book crush.

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Is there a book that inspired you to love reading when you were young?

Angus, Thongs, And Full-Frontal Snogging. It is some of the best comedy writing I’ve ever read, and also a brilliant ode to female friendship and how giddy and hilarious girls are away from the male gaze (and how you should STILL be like that even when boys are watching).

Where do you normally write?

We have a spare bedroom that I’m gradually making my writing room, but my cat is obsessed with my orthopaedic chair so most of my writing time is spent fighting her for it. Whenever I dare go to the toilet (to not read a book), she has commandeered it the second I leave.

“nobody can write like you because they haven’t had your life” Are there any books you wish you had written?

It has taken me a long time to make peace with the fact that the only writer I can be is me, and the only books I can write are mine. When I go into schools, my writing advice is always to embrace your own voice, and know that nobody can write like you because they haven’t had your life.

The Yearbook, Holly Bourne’s 10th novel for young adults, is out now ◆ Photo: L Bourne

Let’s talk

Publishing book(ish) speaks to three young publishers about working in the industry and the future for books, introduced by Ella Doyle Last year, the Rethinking Diversity in Publishing report revealed that Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) as well as working class authors and audiences are undervalued in the industry. “It’s ridiculous,” said author Bernardine Evaristo of the findings. book(ish) spoke to some of the young trailblazers in publishing who are paving the way for improving diversity and access in the industry.

Meet Hannah Chukwu, Katie Packer and Amy Baxter.

HANNAH CHUKWU

Photo: Hannah Chukwu Interviewed by Ella Doyle hukwu started at Penguin’s Hamish Hamilton (HH) as an intern just as it was in the process of editing Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other. She is now assistant editor, and in March won The London Book Fair’s 2021 Trailblazer Awards, which celebrates young talent under 30, along with four other women from the publishing world.

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The award came just after the publication of Evaristo’s newest endeavour, Black Britain: Writing Back, which Chukwu had been working on as the commissioning editor since November last year.

It’s a series of six texts by Black authors which were published within the last century but didn’t receive their deserved platform. The six books

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were curated by Evaristo and all feature striking covers designed by Black British artists. It features CLR James’ Minty Alley, Jacqueline Roy’s The Fat Lady Sings, S.I. Martin’s Incomparable World, Nicola Williams’ Without Prejudice, Mike Phillips’ The Dancing Face, and Judith Bryan’s Bernard and the Cloth Monkey.

Chukwu says of Evaristo: “It’s been amazing to see how she’s used her platform entirely to support other writers and underrepresented writers.

It’s such a joy to see someone who has been advocating for these causes for years now be in such an elevated position. That comes across in her writing as well – you can tell she has such generosity for everyone she platforms.”

Next February, HH will publish an additional six non-fiction books into the series. “Hopefully it will become a real legacy project, to have this rich resource of Black writing in the UK.” The project is a perfect example of her dreams for publishing: “To have Black authors and authors of colour being KATIE PACKER Interviewed by Isabelle Gray

Photo: Katie Packer

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adequately celebrated, and become central to the way we think about our literary history.”

Chukwu also works as policy campaigns consultant on the Lit in Colour campaign, which was launched in direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests of summer 2020. It partners with the Runnymede Trust, a leading race equality think tank, to research the lack of diversity in the UK curriculum. She says, “I think every company is reckoning with what happened last year and what that means for colleagues of colour, and whether they’ve been supporting them up until now.”

Lit in Colour found that there’s only one novel, play, or poem by a Black author on any English GCSE curriculum. “And that’s one option,” she urges. “Teachers can still choose not to teach it.”

And the next steps? “We’re working on creating lots of resources, sending out free books, having our authors record video and audio around texts, and hosting talks at Penguin. It’s a really exciting campaign. There’s no limit to how big it can get.” ◆

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atie Packer is the commissioning editor at Hachette’s Headline Non-Fiction. She describes herself as being quite a “mouthy” kid at school and a chatterbox who once dreamed of being Beyoncé.

Since then she’s channelled her loud, sassy attitude into networking skills, and becoming a real presence in the industry. She recalls walking into the Hachette building for the first time, mouthing to herself, “Oh my god, I’m in the big time.”

Packer joined the publishing giant in September 2017 through their ‘fresh chapter’ internship scheme - a programme targeted at those from underrepresented backgrounds. Apparently, Packer has not always been seen as an ‘editorial person’. “I guess they just had never met anyone in editorial like me as it usually attracts quite introverted people. But that also doesn’t mean you don’t get extroverted mad women like me who also want in!”, she laughs.

Fast forward to summer 2020, and 24-year-old Packer was promoted to commissioning editor.

Since then, she’s been shortlisted for The Bookseller’s Trailblazer Award, and Bolu Babalola’s Love in Colour, a book Packer commissioned and edited, became a 2020 Sunday Times bestseller.

After the Black Lives Matter protests last sum-

mer, many companies vowed to be more inclusive in the voices they chose to champion. But Packer is concerned about editors suddenly choosing to pay lots of money for books from authors of colour. Getting a big book deal means a lot of books have to sell, and if they don’t, the author may struggle to get another book deal as a result.

Packer hopes the spike in enthusiasm for diversity continues and doesn’t peter out. One of the reasons she loves being an editor is getting marginalised creatives heard and helping get their work published.

“This system has been against these people for a long time,” she says, “so you have to put in the extra work. You’re not going to make a change unless

you’re proactive about it.”

Although eager to not come across as a ‘white-saviour’, she is excited that change is slowly happening and is happy to encourage people at the top to implement those changes.

Packer references a New York Times article that highlights the pressure on people of colour to exceed expectations and have highly successful books.

“When it comes to people of colour, there is no room for average. It’s something I’m really against.

We need to allow books by these authors to be ‘alright’, before we can say the industry is ‘more diverse’. She mutters, “I hate the word diverse. But you know what I mean.” ◆

AMY BAXTER Interviewed by Becca Challis

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my Baxter is an Editorial Assistant at Penguin Random House, as well as the founder and editor of Bad Form, a literary review by and about Black, Asian and racialised community writers.

What steps would you like to see the Big 5 publishing houses take to improve inclusivity in publishing?

Hiring ‘diverse’ people in roles that aren’t just entry level, and making more of an effort to retain those people once they’ve joined. Inclusive hiring practices mean nothing if the environment people are hired into is prohibitive or even hostile.

to learn that sometimes the most worthwhile projects take time to implement.

Which recent trends in publishing do you love and which do you wish you could veto?

I love the trend of more Black, Asian, and racialized community authors gaining publishing deals! But I wish that they’d be less likely to be based around the exploitation of trauma. Why does every author have to write a telling of the horrors of their family history? Why does every non-fiction book focus on the history of the West, colonialism, and racism? May we have no peace even in escapism? ◆

What words of encouragement would you give to Black, Asian, and racialised community writers who want to pitch to publishers?

Agents have jobs for a reason! Go through an agent who has experience with publishing contracts. You’d be shocked what sneaky additions I’ve seen in authors’ contracts of late. And don’t take a fixed fee if you can help it. Get those royalties!

Do you have any small presses/publishing houses you would recommend our readers check out?

Absolutely! I’m a huge fan of Myriad - their book with Susheila Nasta, Words, is one of my favourites of all time. I’d highly recommend all of their lists!

What has been the biggest learning curve for you with Bad Form?

To recognise how much it is feasible for me to do.

You can’t dismantle a whole industry in a day. I had

Photo: Amy Baxter

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Spoken word Rakaya Fetuga Photo by Sylvia Suli

Ella Doyle speaks to Rakaya about performance, the pandemic and Maya Angelou

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akaya Esime Fetuga is a poet, performer and creative from north-west London, best known for her spoken word poetry about identity, faith and culture. This summer she’ll perform at Roundhouse’s The Last Word festival, featuring Queenie author Candice Carty-Williams and poet and playwrite Inua Ellams.

How has the pandemic impacted your work?

It just changed everything. I had a one-woman show that was going to go on at the Roundhouse in June of last year. And that just dissipated. So I’m really, really happy to be eventually bringing that back into action. There were a lot of things cancelled - all kinds of performances that were

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live, and I couldn’t go into schools anymore.

But I was also really, really blessed to have a lot of different opportunities come up - a lot of that was workshops online and performances online.

Especially those collaborations for art’s sake, not jobs, but across countries - I’ve connected with poets in Zimbabwe and Abu Dhabi and America, like literally, everyone’s online and so easy to reach. There’s so many different collaborations that you just wouldn’t have thought of before.

When did you first get into poetry?

So I’ve always kind of been writing something.

And I think it started off for me as writing songs and stories. And I was always connected to communities that were producing events and giving

these people a platform. But I probably found poetry from seeing open mic events and poets and rappers perform in person.

It was a great atmosphere. I think the really random events like those can be the best ones.

Which themes come up in your work?

What’s the relationship between your act- A lot of my poetry is about heritage and identity. ing and your poetry?

And I write about faith and spirituality as well.

Drama was definitely one of my first creative loves. But I think they all feed into each other.

With drama, you can hide behind the character, you know, you can be someone else, and you’ve got that confidence of the collective as well. But being on stage by myself, talking about things that mattered to me - I found that really nerve-wracking at first. But I definitely got used to it and found my feet. And in 2018, I won a poetry slam at the Roundhouse. And before that, actually, I won a poetry competition by Spread the Word. And those two really helped me to get my work seen by people and meet other poets.

How does speaking poetry change its impact, as opposed to reading it off the page?

It’s the kind of performance element that you can bring to poetry. I’m not that theatrical a performer, but I do believe in the power of how you deliver. One of my kind of biggest inspirations is Maya Angelou - I just love how she performs and how she can bring an emotion out of you through the way she’s delivering the poetry.

So I think I bring elements of that drama, improv background into poetry performance.

Just anything that’s interesting to me, or anything in society that I’m trying to work through.

I kind of write to whatever my inspirations are, but I also get asked to write about different topics. Sometimes it involves research. I think that’s really cool as well, to be able to delve into a different topic and find yourself in that space.

“with drama, you

can hide behind the character. You can be someone else” How do you come up with new ideas?

I love listening to people’s conversations, so I feel like a lot of it comes from that.

Do you have to memorise it all?

Do you have a favourite performance?

There was a night at an event called Soul Strip Sessions. It was a night that is normally for musicians. It was just such a fun performance. That audience wasn’t used to poetry, which was an interesting space to be in and bring something different to, and to collaborate with musicians. I got to perform with a guitar player.

At the end, they get all the singers to do a cover together. They let me sing, which was brave. I was a poet, so they just trusted that I wouldn’t mess up and be really off key. We did an Alicia Keys song... I’m like okay, it’s my moment!

I mean, I do memorise a lot of my work. But you don’t really have to in a lot of situations. For slams and things like that, they usually want you to have it memorised. But even with that, the rules are changing for some of them. I always prefer to have my work memorised because then, you know, I’m more comfortable in the words. And I can share them differently when I’ve got them in my mind.

Do you practice in the mirror?

Oh yeah, I say it to myself a lot, washing the dishes... ◆

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Claire Tomalin Writing the greats

Becca Challis catches up with biographer Claire Tomalin, who has written about the lives of many literary greats

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laire Tomalin is an award-winning biographer whose subjects have included Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. She was also literary editor for the New Statesman and The Sunday Times, and her autobiography, A Life of My Own, was a Sunday Times bestseller.

If you could travel back in time to meet any one person, who would it be?

I suppose Dickens would be extremely interesting.

One would hope to sort of chat and slowly things would arise. I would ask him about his feelings on London, because he’s so associated with it. But in many ways, he hated it.

Have you ever been unable to write?

I wanted to write about Mark Rutherford, who is a minor nineteenth century novelist. I did a lot of research among letters and things and went over to France to see his granddaughter, who was a very old lady. She said to me, “I have to tell you I didn’t really like him, my other grandfather was much better.” Somehow, it made me rethink and I decided to give up. It’s painful giving up a project like that.

What are your tips for good writing?

I often think of Muriel Spark. She said if you’re finding it difficult to write, try saying to yourself that you’re writing a letter to someone about your subject. If you’re writing a letter, it sort of unblocks your nervousness.

Do you have any books you wish you’d written?

I would have liked to have been a poet, so Hardy’s poetry. I re-read poets, such as Andrew Marvell.

He was a really great poet. He didn’t write

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very much and his biography would be almost impossible to write because we know so little about him, aside from his politics.

So if you could give everyone in the world one book to read, what would you give?

I suppose I would give the complete works of Shakespeare for the variety of the dramatic writing and the poetry. Shakespeare is absolutely ‘it’.

Twelfth Night is probably a perfect play.

Which childhood book made you fall in love with reading?

Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty. I remember reading it when the war was declared. I said to my father, “Oh, the poor horses”, and my father said, “You silly child, there are no horses”. But, my father was wrong. I think David Copperfield was the first book that I felt the passion for reading. Don’t be put off by the first page, as I always tell my grandchildren. ◆

Photo: Angus Muir

The lost beauty of sadness

Illustration by Xiaobin Wang

We often think of the Victorians as emotionally repressed, but when it comes to the art of sadness, Cara Laskaris wonders if there is something we can learn from them

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t is freshers’ week at Bath University. A group of students gulp down shots of vodka, but 19-yearold Yasmin Western is careful not to drink anything strong in case it slips out. She can’t let herself get too involved in the raucous fun around her because all her mental energy is focused on keeping her secret. She is used to steering conversations away from anything that might risk exposing it.

What secret could be so shameful that she had to keep it buried at all costs?

It was grief. Yasmin was working tirelessly to avoid revealing the difficult, complex emotions that she had been living with since she discovered her father’s dead body a few months earlier, the day she finished her A-levels. Post-Covid, more of us than ever may be facing this difficult emotion.

“I can only describe it as feeling like 50 per cent of me had been ripped away; the rug had fully been pulled out from underneath me,” says Yasmin.

“You smack your head on the floor and you get back up and everything looks the same. But you feel so different.”

Although some friends were supportive, Yasmin didn’t want to become “that person” who was up-

Arthur Hughes Back from Sea (1862) Photo: Ashmolean Museum

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set in public and defined by her loss. She found that people didn’t always want to talk about it because it would ruin their mood, even though they were happy to talk about other difficult things like break-ups or arguments. It seemed there was an acceptable level of sadness, but hers was too much for people. It had to be kept private.

But it hasn’t always been this way.

The Victorians might not seem an obvious inspiration when it comes to psychology and how we live our lives today. After all, these were the people who frowned upon women showing so much as an ankle in public.

There was one thing they did well though: sadness and grief. The arts were often used as a way of sharing and processing difficult emotions.

Take Arthur Hughes’ Back from Sea. A child breaks down in tears over the grave of his mother who has died while he was away at sea. It is full of raw emotion, but also incredibly beautiful. Every detail is perfectly crafted and alive with the beauty of nature. Sadness here is not something terrible that should be feared and avoided, but something natural and beautiful.

Perhaps it is because grief was a much more prominent part of everybody’s lives then.

Unlike today, most young people would have experienced more than one bereavement by the time they were a teenager, if they made it that far.

According to an 1849 medical report, one third of children in London died before they reached the age of five. John Holmes, professor of Victorian literature at Birmingham University, explains they were “much more alert to death because it was much more pervasive”.

Nobody could escape regular exposure to death and loss, but that did not make it any less painful than it is today.

Without counselling or antidepressants, Professor Holmes believes that the Victorians turned to the arts as a way to “accommodate sadness in some way, to express it and work your way through it”.

Tennyson’s 1850 poem ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ stands as the most explicit example of this. A public working through of his own grief at the sudden loss of a close friend aged 22, it was the book Queen Victoria read the most, apart from the Bible, in her 40year mourning for Prince Albert, and is the source of the now ubiquitous quote:

of sorrow – like a traumatic bereavement – can seem too much to be aired publicly, leaving those affected feeling isolated.

Counsellor Nicola Wasserman, manager for Wandsworth Bereavement Service, has noticed that many bereaved people keep their sadness private after a certain point in their grieving, as it feels “unacceptable to continue airing it”.

As the pandemic touches all areas of our lives, Wasserman reminds us that grief can be felt for things other than death. She has clients grieving the loss of a job or a change in family dynamics.

With an estimated 130,000 UK Covid deaths, can we continue to tidy death and sadness away, viewing these as faceless statistics and filling our time with the relentless goal of positivity?

We think of ourselves as a more progressive society than in the nineteenth century; modern science and psychology allows us to explain much of what was shaded or unknown one hundred years ago.

Our cultural sensibilities may have progressed – we now openly acknowledge sexuality and eroticism in a way that our Victorian counterparts could only fantasise about.

But there is much we can learn from a historical approach to sadness. We repress raw sadness in the way that Victorians repressed sexuality. It is a dirty emotion, something we do not want to allow unfettered into our public lives. If there is anything we have learnt through history, it’s that repression of natural parts of the human condition does not lead to a healthy and stable society.

Yasmin gradually became able to express her own feelings of grief. The secret of her father’s death slipped out by accident and she found that her university friends became her support system. The sadness has not disappeared, but a weight has lifted and her feelings are no longer the closely guarded secret they once were.

“we repress sadness the way Victorians repressed sexuality”

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.”

This was an age when psychology was in its infancy, largely consisting of such tried and tested methods as analysing bumps on people’s heads or labelling difficult women as hysterical before bundling them off to asylums. The arts therefore assumed the role of today’s psychology, acting as spaces through which people explored, understood and processed their emotions.

In today’s age of post-Freudian psychology and counselling, surely it should be easier for people to process sadness and grief?

Our culture often focuses on easily palatable emotions and quick gratification. A certain level of sadness feels acceptable, but only as much as a break-up or a bad day at work. More intense forms

Now more than ever we all need to rethink our fear of sadness and start appreciating its beauty.

This may be our best chance to process the collective sense of grief at all that we have suffered at the hands of this cruel pandemic. •

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Wuthering Heights: You don’t have to read Brontë to love Bush

Sophie Ward explains why Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ is the best literature-inspired song on everyone’s playlist

I

may not have read Wuthering Heights (1847)

by Emily Brontë cover to cover, but I’ve listened to Kate Bush’s homonymous single more times than I can count. In the final year of my English degree, I wrote an essay on Brontë’s novel purely because I love the song. I let SparkNotes do the rest.

Besides having time to read more books in lockdown (I’m still yet to finish Wuthering Heights), the next best thing to come out of the last year was the meteoric rise of TikTok. Catchy little morsels of songs fly around the app, often soundtracking specific dance trends. This has

“there is something inherently empowering about it”

turned rising artists like Doja Cat into worldwide superstars - and unearthed some baby boomer bangers.

To my pleasure/grief, Bush’s 1978 hit has become one of these overused TikTok songs. TikTokers tend to pose a question over the tinkling crescendo of the bridge, for example: “Who’s the biggest slag in the friendship group?” When

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the chorus slaps you in the face with “Heeeathcliff, it’s me…”, said TikToker points at themselves. Simple, yet effective.

This sound effect has been used almost 35,000 times on the app which, when compared to the near-100 million times it has been played on Spotify, reassures me that Gen-Z have not quite claimed or butchered the anthem yet. However, no matter how many times I hear Bush’s warbling, or envisage her prancing around fields in floaty red chiffon, I never tire of the song.

If I was a wedding DJ and someone put a gun to my head with the ultimatum: “Play a song that will make EVERYONE happy,” I would play ‘Wuthering Heights’. Chances are, I would not get shot. Meanwhile, if I played my second favourite literature-inspired song ‘White Rabbit’

by Jefferson Airplane, there would be blood and brains all over the cake by the time it gets weird and shouty at the end.

But what is it about Kate Bush’s pop song that makes it so palatable despite its experimental and lofty nature? Well, there is no doubt that the turbulent melody, echoing the blustery English moors, is gripping in its unpredictability. Bush’s encapsulation of the besotted, near-possessed character of Catherine Earnshaw is also completely enthralling. What I think really attracts me to the song though, is that (like the novel) there is something inherently empowering about it.

Bush and Brontë are both pioneering female creatives. Brought up the daughter of a poor clergyman in the early 19th century, Brontë would have been expected to squeeze into the role of a voiceless caregiver. Paradoxically, she produced a coarse and sexually-fuelled novel that has become one of the most distinguished books of the past two centuries.

The novel is primarily narrated by Mr. Lockwood, the male outsider, and Nelly Dean, who doesn’t like Cathy - which means her actions are often described with disdain. Bush triumphantly gives Cathy the powerful voice that she is denied in the novel and offers us the feminist take on the story. Rather than being trapped in one home or another, in Bush’s song the lovestruck protagonist is finally free on the wild moor, shrieking at the top of her lungs.

Although Bush was born in 1958 – more than 100 years after Wuthering Heights was first published – there was still a long way to go in the name of gender equality.

With her single inspired by Brontë’s work, Bush became the first female artist to achieve a UK number one with a self-written song in 1978. This is astounding considering the supposed progress of women’s rights in the twentieth century.

Nonetheless, it is the perfect homage to a book that shook the cultural landscape for women.

In a report from the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative which sought to “assess the gender of artists, songwriters, and producers across the 800 top songs from 2012-2019”, only 10 per cent of all songwriters were

women. Shockingly, only one per cent of songs had women-only writing credits.

Bush was a trailblazer and, gut-wrenchingly, remains one of the few successful female songwriters out there. She undoubtedly paved the way for the likes of Lady Gaga, Florence Welch and Adele to pour unapologetic feminine energy into their songs.

As an ex-English student and staunch feminist, I certainly intend to finish Brontë’s novel.

For now though, I am more than happy flouncing around my bedroom, paying tribute to Bush’s stoic and empowered version of Cathy. ~ Alexa, you know what to do. ◆

Illustrated by Flo Bull

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The Secret Lives of Sex Writers

Carina Murphy gets to know the authors behind the naughtiest novels and finds out whether the truth really is stranger than fiction

H

ave you ever looked at those romantic books you buy in supermarkets – you know, the ones with pictures of cowboys’ eight-packs and titles like ‘The Stallion that Rode Me’ – and stopped to wonder: who writes this stuff?

Romance outsells every genre except cookbooks. The rise of self-publishing and e-books has only made it more popular. There’s no doubt that people are reading these books. But who is writing them? And more importantly – what’s going on behind their bedroom doors?

We all know the stereotype: frustrated house-

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Illustrations by Rowan Bailey

wives living out fantasies with a box full of vibrators and an army of cats. But is writing romance a sign of sexual repression? Or is it the ultimate badge of liberation – a woman enjoying her sensuality like men have been for centuries? In the name of feminism, I was hoping for the latter.

Writer Tibby Armstrong answers Zoom with a tabby on her lap, and my stereotype bingo card goes ‘ding!’ A divorcee in her late-forties who’s been moonlighting as a romance writer since her marriage ended, Tibby lives alone in Boston and works in IT. The homosexual (or M/M in industry talk) vampire novels she writes in her spare time

must be pure fantasy. Or are they?

“I’m bisexual, and I was married to my highschool sweetheart who was trans,” she says. “I’m obviously not straight. That feeling of being on the outside really finds its way into my books.”

There may be undertones of Tibby’s personal struggles in her novels – but what about the sex? Where does the inspiration come from for all those steaming hot ménages à trois? Tib-

“I know what sells. romance is commercial” by laughs uncomfortably. She’s timid with no makeup and a bulky fleece - imagining her between the sheets feels wrong.

“It’s a separate part of my imagination. I was with one person for 30 years, and I’ve dated a couple of people since then. If I were just writing about myself it would be very boring.”

Talking to Tibby it starts to look like all that bodice-ripping and sexual fantasy is nothing more than that – a fantasy.

Maybe I would have more luck with a writer less timid about their profession. Tibby told me she had anxiety dreams about her Mum reading her novels. Lori Whitt, on other hand, says her mum is her top reader.

“All my books get posted on my personal Facebook,” she says in a brisk, business-like tone. “And my mum reads every one of them.”

Romance writing is a lucrative business that’s allowed Lori to make a good living while following her US Navy husband around the world. With her own military discipline, she’s churned out almost 200 books in the last decade, which means she’s written a staggering 2,000 sex scenes.

“I know what sells,” comes the sergeant-major bark. “Whatever’s hot at the time, whether it’s vampires or hockey players, I know I can get

something out fast. Romance is commercial – when readers want something we give it to them.”

It takes Lori a mere three weeks to write a novel, making Tibby’s six month turnaround look sluggish. But then again, it is Lori’s full-time job.

“I don’t have kids - I have a couple of cats, but I don’t have a whole lot going on. And my husband has his job. So writing is 99 per cent of what I do.”

Bored housewife? Ding! Cats? Ding! Sexually frustrated, dildos stashed in the underwear drawer…? Like Tibby, Lori’s dressed down in grey fleece and wire-rimmed specs. Her husband may be military police, but I was having a hard time picturing her in cuffs.

Lori and Tibby both specialise in M/M, a genre which is as popular among women as lesbian porn is among men. Women find these relationships freeing because they place men in vulnerable positions.

They also allow women to experience romance without confronting their own sexuality. Tibby and Lori both rely on male proof-readers to make sure their anatomy checks out when

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writing from the male-perspective. Maybe Elizabeth Jennings, who’s been writing straight romance for the last 30 years under the pseudonym ‘Lisa Marie Rice’, would be more in tune with the woman’s experience.

“It’s fun, you know,” she says in her 1950s LA drawl. “Writing love scenes that are steamy they’re fun.”

Stiff blonde blow dry, pearl earrings, red lipstick; Elizabeth is the closest I’ve come to the romance writer stereotype. A glamorous older woman with a CV like the set list for a Bond movie (Florence, Brussels, Milan), she calls from a chaise in her Italian home and regales me with stories of her time at the UN. “For 30 years I worked as a translator and an interpreter, translating peace treaties. So I understand how lawyers speak, how doctors speak, and that helps me in writing my books, which are all romantic military thrillers.”

It’s clear Elizabeth took inspiration from her work life – but what about her personal life?

Were the men she met at the UN the blueprints for her ripped male leads? “If you’ve ever seen a male interpreter you would never have asked that,” she laughs. “My guys are like warriors.

Most male translators are the sort of people who read vocabularies for fun.”

She did go so far as admitting her couples were idealised versions of herself and her husband – but that really they were idealised versions of every couple. Romance writers are in the business of wish fulfilment. It’s easy to see in the most bizarre tropes – male pregnancy, menopausal women with super-powers, the tough guy that’s only nice to her – that the romance writer’s cardinal law is a happy ending.

“Ideally, as you close the book you go ‘oh gosh I wish I could find someone like that,’” says Elizabeth, doe-eyed. “It’s a little dopamine rush.”

So maybe sex writers are more hopeless romantics than horny housewives. After all, the one thing they all have in common is being forced to add more sex scenes by publishers.

Sex sells – and I mean, it sells. Literary publishers may look down on the genre, but traditionally it’s what’s kept them afloat. The only reason,

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“if I were just writing about myself it would be very boring” they tell me, that romantic fiction isn’t widely respected is the vast majority of its writers - and readers - are women.

Romance writers battle industry misogyny on the daily. And maybe the assumption they should live up to some sex-crazed stereotype was misogynistic too. You wouldn’t expect crime writers to be murderers or horror writers to worship the devil; why should romance writers be any different? And yet, stereotypes persist.

Thankfully, they’re thriving in the face of it all.

As Elizabeth put it: “We’re laughing all the way to the bank.” ◆

The ins and outs of the history of sex Becca Challis speaks to historian Dr Kate Lister about sex robots, ‘bodice-rippers’ and Bridgerton

D

r Kate Lister is a lecturer at Leeds Trinity University and author of the book A Curious History of Sex. Her research focuses on the history of sexuality, culminating in Whores of Yore, a digital archive on the subject, which has 480k followers on Twitter.

A thought-provoking and highly amusing read, A Curious History of Sex challenges our perceptions of sex in the past, and as Kate says, “If nothing else, it’s a hefty weapon to carry around with you to clop people around the head.”

Photo: Kate Lister / Rowan Bailey

Why do people struggle with misconceptions of sex in the past?

We still just don’t believe that people in the past had sex. Which is weird, because when you actually press pause on that you realise, of course they did. We’re all the descendants of people who managed to have sex. Especially kinky sex, we don’t think about people in the past having any kind of kinky sex or enjoying sex. We tend to think about it as being quite repressive, just missionary once a week, lights off, pyjama tops on,

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that kind of thing. And that’s quite interesting, because what does that say about us, that we’re so quick to believe it?

People had kinky sex, same sex lovers, anal sex, or anything that you can think of that we’re doing today. We didn’t invent it. I think what changes is technology and accessibility to things that facilitate sex, but the actual act itself – ancient. Like sex robots are new, but the idea of shagging an inanimate object? We’ve been doing that for a really long time, I’m afraid.

Which historical sex myth bothers you most?

I suppose the one I really wanted to tackle in the book was the vibrators and the Victorians myth (that it was invented to cure hysteria) because that crops up everywhere. We don’t need to make stuff up about them. They were doing enough weird crap on their own. But then, the curse of the historian is you’re only as good as your sources. There might be a book somewhere in someone’s attic that was written in 1855 called ‘why I invented the vibrator to cure hysteria’.

Another myth is that the medieval period was all chastity belts and damsels and castles and no, not really. In fact, they were much more sexually liberated than we think. For example, there’s something in medieval studies called marginalia, which is studying what’s been drawn in the margins of illuminated manuscripts, and they’re really rude, loads of knobs, and there are monkeys shagging each other, like just obscene stuff.

Okay, but these were done by monks. They are religious texts. So, there’s a whole field of scholarship with people basically trying to work out, what was the society where those two things go together? Where it’s completely normal to draw a monkey giving another monkey a blow job in a holy book.

Bridgerton is a very sexy historical drama that’s had to make it clear that it’s not trying to be historically accurate. Do you think this is necessary?

It’s kind of weird that they’d have to defend why it isn’t historically accurate. I know a lot of histo-

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rians that get a bit like ‘fuck sake’ about this kind of stuff, because it sort of misrepresents their patch. And definitely, when I’m teaching medieval studies, a lot of students come in thinking it’s going to be like Game of Thrones. But I quite like it. I really welcome it. Anything that gets the discussion going and makes us have conversations about what is historically accurate.

One of the things I’m interested in is our need to make the past very sexy, which we do a lot. If you look at something like Game of Thrones, they’ve gotten into a lot of trouble for constantly portraying sexual violence. And it was defended by the author on the grounds that it was historically accurate, which is a weird thing to say when you’re writing a book about dragons. How do

“sex robots are

new, but the idea of shagging an inanimate object?

We’ve been doing that for a really long time” you know that’s historically accurate? Because anyone who’s studied the history of sexual assault, and there are books written about this, pretty much start by going, ‘This is really difficult to research because it’s underreported now, let alone then’, but there’s something about us that we’re so ready, and we’re so quick to go, ‘That’s just what the Middle Ages were like.’

Why do historical dramas focus on the dominating male?

The uncomfortable thing about it is that it suggests that there is something about us that wants to explore sexual violence, but we have to dress

it up in this medieval garb to make it acceptable, so we can go, ‘Yeah, but it was a long time ago, it doesn’t happen now’. There’s a whole host of them, like Outlander – that’s shagging aplenty. My mum used to call them bodice-rippers.

We do that a lot with historical dramas and I’m endlessly fascinated as to what is it about us that needs to make the past this kind of sexy time?

Why is it sexier than the modern day? I think there’s something about the dominating masculine, it’s a very strong fantasy that many women have. I know that I have that fantasy, and then I feel guilty that I’m a bad feminist. But, no actually, I’m just enjoying it. Sex is about power and play and all the rest of it. But I think that when we set things in the past, it gives us permission to play with things that just wouldn’t work today.

The most modern version of that fantasy I can think of was Fifty Shades of Grey, and that got ripped apart. For many, many different reasons.

At its centre was a very dominant, charming man. He is like the whole Mr. Darcy fantasy, but because it was in the modern period, it was scary. But, stick it 200 years ago, give him a riding crop, and suddenly everyone loves him.

Why do sex historians often strip the life out of sex in their writing?

Sex history has really only become a viable subject in the last 40 years or so and people tend to counteract the fact that they’re writing about sex by making it as serious as they possibly can.

There’s actually ongoing research that shows that people who research sex do experience discrimination in university settings because of the inherent nature of it. Even if it’s something as simple as your colleagues joking about your research, jokes are fun, but you’re not joking about anybody else’s. I totally get why people go completely the other way and I’m glad that they did, because that allowed it to become a viable subject. But that’s not what I do.

Who is your historical sex hero?

Oh, that’s tough. I’d probably say Nell Gwyn, who was the mistress of Charles II, I think I always gravitate towards her because she literally

shagged her way to the top and I just have a lot of respect for that. She was born in poverty, she was born in London, she had nothing – and she

“she literally

shagged her way to the top and I just have a lot of respect for that” used exactly what she had. And she ended up being really, really powerful, but quite benevolent with her powers. She was funny and witty and she was completely unashamed as well, with what she was doing. She was in a carriage one day and a fight broke out between the footman and a guy who had called her a whore and she got out and asked, ‘What are you fighting about?’ Then they explained and she was just like, ‘Well, I am a whore. Now, can we carry on?’

Also Lord Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, just for the sheer naughtiness and unabashed filth that he wrote about. But he was the worst of the worst fuckboys I think.

Looking forward, how is the pandemic currently affecting the history of sex?

We’ve spent a year being terrified of being around other people and it’s something that is now so ingrained in us that we’re in a state of hyper-awareness, to the point where if someone gets close to you in the supermarket, your entire body goes into literal panic. Our whole nervous system now is geared up to think: ‘Get your germs away from me.’ Is that going to affect us having sex and being around other people? I don’t know the answer to that. book(ish) pick: Revolting Prostitutes by Juno Mac and Molly Smith. They are two sex workers who’ve written about sex worker rights today – what they’ve got to say is so important. ◆

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Did Lady C

get the D?

Sorcha Mondon takes a bonkbusting deep dive into D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover

L

ady Chatterley’s Lover explores war, class, passion, impotency, and outdoor anal sex. It was so saucy that it didn’t get published uncensored in the UK until 1960. Is it as risqué as Lawrence’s contemporaries first thought, and is #coronasafe al fresco sex having a resurgence?

The plot At the ripe age of 23, protagonist Connie Reid marries aristocrat Clifford Chatterley. He goes off to war and returns paralysed from the waist down, meaning no more coitus. After embarking on an unfulfilling affair in an attempt to fill the void, Connie meets the stern, sarcastic and hella sexy gamekeeper Oliver Mellors. They end up having a lot of sex and I shan’t say anymore, because frankly, you’re not here for plot are you?

Did they hit it different in the 1920s?

This book was revolutionary. Sex just hadn’t been written about this explicitly before. Connie thinks, “What was he feeling? What was he thinking? What sort of man was he really? Did he like her?” In 100 years, have we not progressed in demystifying the cryptic behaviour of men? In terms of the sexual content, it’s hot stuff. Lawrence captures the ecstasy of good sex, whilst also giving a nod to the benign thoughts that pop into one’s head when doing the deed - a personal favourite being Connie noting the humour in a thrusting male bottom.

When Connie and Mellors come together for the first time, they forge an intimacy and obsession with one another. I can’t help but wonder if the trope depicting couples reaching climax at the same time came from this scene?

A man writing a woman I will forever be impressed by a man confident enough to write from a female sexual perspec-

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tive. Lawrence does an okay job considering the state of sexual liberation at the time. He does fall into the trap of depicting her as a passive body that has sex done to her, perhaps more like an object than a living, breathing woman. But Lawrence did portray her with a sexual appetite, which for the 1920s is pretty baller. She certainly seems to be having a great time, and from Lawrence’s writing I can quite confidently conclude that he was a freak in the sheets.

Conclusions I say this with not an ounce of snark: Lady Chatterley’s Lover shows the universality of sexual experience. It shows us that sex is a natural, wonderful thing; an expression of love that is absolutely NOT restricted to just a man and a woman in a relationship. Are the sex scenes going to give you ideas on how to spice up the bedroom (or woods, if you’re Connie and Mellors)? Probably not. Is it going to make you miss intimacy if you’re single in the pandemic? Absolutely. Either way, well worth a read.

Ratings Hotness:5/5: It is smokin’ hot and is socially acceptable to read on the tube. Extra clout points for pulling out the Penguin Classics cover.

Realism 3/5: While the plot is a little dull, the characters are fully fleshed out, complex beings that you learn to love. Note: to recreate at home you will need to have access to a country estate with space for game shooting.

Euphemism use 5/5: Big, BIG fan of the use of “turgidity of his desire” being used to describe what I would call a raging stiffy. ◆

Anthony McGowan (author) Sarah Lonsdale (author) “I always have a volume of poetry in the “I keep several volumes of maps lavatory. I met Simon Armitage at a literary and atlases in my loo. I love to festival and I said to him, ‘Armitage, you find out where places write piss poems and shit poems. The little like Ultima Thule short ones you read while and Svalbard are. you’re having a piss. And They have been the big, long ones you particularly absorbing read while you’re having this year as my world Terri White a shit.’ And he took it quite has shrunk.” (editor of Empire well actually.”

Magazine) Paterson Joseph (theatre and TV “Ted Hughes’ actor, known for Peep Show) poem ‘The Ali Plumb (BBC “Samuel Johnson’s Crow’” Radio 1 film critic) Dictionary” “I tend to read Tess Little things like Empire (author) magazine or The “My top New Yorker when picks would I’m trying to be be Junji Ito’s highbrow.”

Shiver (a collection of surreal and horrifying manga short stories), or Sophie Calle’s The Address Book (detailing Calle’s meetings with strangers). Both are fascinating—and, crucially, contain tales which can be easily digested in one sitting…” ◆ Annie Lord (Vogue columnist) It’s a well known fact “I like looking at that a good book ‘Literary Bots’ on helps your bowels Twitter. There’s an to move - in Japan Anne Carson Bot they even have a which is funny.”

name for it, the Mariko Aoki phenomenon. book(ish) asked authors, actors, critics and columnists what they read on the throne.

Loo Reads

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Writing your way to happiness Narzra Ahmed speaks to Ella Dove, author of Five Steps To Happy, about fictionalising her experiences

I

n Ella Dove’s debut novel, Five Steps To Happy, the main character has an accident which leads to her becoming an amputee. Elements of the novel were inspired by events in Dove’s own life.

“In 2015, I had an accident where I was out running with my sister in East London, and I was on the way home - I was five minutes away from home when I tripped over and fell. At the time, I thought I had just broken my leg. I didn’t know that it would be anything more serious than that.

“We had to wait for somebody to come along to call an ambulance. The first guy that came

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Photo: Nicky Johnston

along said to us, ‘I’m really sorry, I’ve got a train to catch’ and he hung up his phone and then he left us there. Then we had to wait for somebody else. I don’t know how much longer I was lying there until somebody else came, but finally a girl came who stayed with us until an ambulance could take us to hospital.”

Dove’s accident was much more serious than she had first thought, and was the inspiration behind her novel, Five Steps to Happy. “I had dislocated my knee, but also I’d had a fracture, so the blood had been cut off to my foot. It’s a condition called compartment syndrome, where

the blood kind of collects in a certain part of the body. It meant that the blood couldn’t get to my foot. After three operations to try and restart the flow of blood over the next few days, I was in intensive care and they said: ‘Really sorry, there’s nothing else we can do, you’re going to have to have an amputation.’ I was 25 then and I had lost my right leg below the knee. I had had an amputation.

“In Five Steps To Happy, the main character, Heidi, has the same accident that I did. The opening scene is her jogging along the canal path in East London. She’s not with her sister.

She’s not with anyone. She’s on her own. But she has the same experience of a man calling an ambulance and then leaving her there. That’s the jumping off point for the book - after that it is completely fictional. It’s about her recovery journey.” Dove used her experience as inspiration for her book, but it is not autobiographical.

“It was fictionalising my journey and using it in that way to sort of spark creativity.

“The book is all about hope and courage and triumph over adversity. I really haven’t read many, or really any fiction books with the main character as an amputee like that - no mainstream fiction books, no novels. For that reason, I wanted to bring amputation into the mainstream. I’m a trustee for the Limbless Association, who are a national charity supporting lives beyond limb loss.”

There were times when writing the novel was an emotionally challenging process. “Obviously, even though it’s fiction, when you’re writing about emotions that have happened to you then I think sometimes you open boxes that you don’t necessarily want to open,” Dove says. “They say about PTSD that one of the main things that you can have is flashbacks of the traumatic incident.

I definitely, at the beginning after my accident, had a lot of that, where I would be laying in bed and it felt like I was watching a film of the accident. It felt like I was watching myself fall over again and again and I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t stop watching even though I really wanted to turn the film off.”

But the writing process had positive aspects

too. Writing her debut novel helped Dove to move forward after the accident. “It is also very cathartic, as well, to explore the emotions - it’s like a form of therapy, in a way. You’re going back over it and realising that nothing would have changed and you couldn’t have done anything differently, making peace with it, and reaching a point of acceptance.”

Readers have related to the character of Hei-

“I really haven’t

read many, or really any fiction books with the main character as an amputee...

I wanted to bring amputation into the mainstream” di and have been in touch with Dove to express their thoughts.

She says the response to Five Steps to Happy has been overwhelmingly positive. “I’ve had loads of messages on Instagram and on Facebook. I was like, ‘whoa’. There are loads of nice messages on there. There seems to have been a sort of resurgence over summer. I think obviously over the lockdown people have been reading more, and it’s the sort of book that is really nice for people to read when it’s a difficult and uncertain time, because it’s kind of a friend, like a hand to hold.

It shows you that you can get through this. I’ve had lots of lovely messages and I’m really really grateful that it’s actually done what it was supposed to do which is, obviously, to help people.” ◆

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Be

dti m

e Stor

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Illustration by Paola Ascanio

Illustration by Phoebe Eaves

Ella Doyle sits down and chats with Drew Ackerman, creator and host of the Sleep With Me podcast, about storytelling, anxiousness and superheroes.

I

f you’ve ever had trouble sleeping, you’ll know the agony. You’ve doused your pillows in essential oils and woken up smelling like air freshener. You’ve quadrupled the recommended dose of CBD oil, dimly concerned you’ll actually get stoned. You’ve tried feet out and window open, and feet in and window closed. But nothing works.

Since the pandemic hit, over a third of us have been suffering with sleep problems. And for Drew Ackerman, this is a familiar battle. “I had a lot of trouble in school,” he says. “I’d stay up all night worrying. That’s when I started to listen to the radio. I listened to comedy radio a lot in bed, and it kept me company, and kept me distracted.”

It wasn’t until 2013 that he began to craft this idea into a podcast. Now, the Sleep With Me podcast has 250,000 nightly listeners, and has been featured in GQ, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. Ackerman is the voice of ‘Dearest Scooter’, the podcast’s host.

I ask him to sum up the podcast in a few words.

He laughs, scratching his head. “These are hard questions!”

Sleep With Me is a bedtime story podcast for grownups. A friendly voice tells you a story so strange, so dull, so monotonal that it will lull you to sleep. Specifically, it tells you a story you can barely listen to.

Ackerman writes the podcast as well as narrating it. But the Sleep With Me bedtime stories are no ordinary fairy tale - these stories have infinite possibilities. Instead of a princess marrying a prince, Scooter might describe a walk in the park, and ramble about a single leaf for ten minutes. Eventually, the story goes totally “off the rails”.

“As the stories get closer to the end, they get harder and harder to follow,” he says, “so that people are like, oh, whatever, I’ll just listen to his voice now.

“There’s no pressure on you as the listener to really pay attention, so that you can fall asleep whenever you want. It fills the role of a late night

phone call with a partner, or a conversation with friends or a roommate.”

The hope is, obviously, that listeners won’t get to the end of the podcast. But though he plays around with the conventions of storytelling (in his words, his characters can go “on and on and on and on”), he explains the importance of always maintaining a beginning, middle and an end.

“I think people are, on some level, adapted for narrative structure,” he says. “Even if they’re asleep, if I wasn’t making something structured, their brain would be like, ‘hold on, this is just reading off a list!’

“I think a lot of people that are having trouble sleeping, whatever the cause is, they’re already telling themselves a story. And they’re the main character.”

He is referring to what we all do at night –

“I listened to

the radio a lot and it kept me company” worry about what we have to do the next day, recall our most embarrassing memories, count how many hours of sleep we’re about to (not) get. “Having a story where there’s no stakes for them, and they’re not a character, it kind of takes them out of the story.”

Sleep with Me makes use of the surreal, something that’s supposed to distract you from the real world. Episodes can be based in science-fiction, fantasy, personal essays, ‘nostalgia trips’ and TV recaps – there’s even a spin off season called, aptly, ‘Game of Drones’.

Recurring characters include Superdull the superhero, Bernie the Butterfly, and the “sweet upbeat old man” Ray Perkins, all voiced by Ackerman.

Switching the stories up is necessary, he says, to stop listeners’ brains ‘adjusting’ to a certain kind of narrative.

“For adults, everything around sleep is so serious and structured. And that’s silly.” He smiles.

“I just think that some people enjoy a bedtime story, like a child would.” ◆

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COMING OF AGE IN ATHENS

KOSTYA TSOLAKIS Photo: Matthew Butts

Bea Tridimas talks time, memory and coming out with Greek poet and editor of Ambit Magazine, Kostya Tsolakis 70

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efore I could even put my sexuality into words, I saw it on the page for the first time,” says poet Kostya Tsolakis. He was sitting in the end-of-summer light in his school classroom studying the poem ‘Kaisarion’ by the early twentieth century Greek poet CP Cavafy.

He still has the date, 24 September 1997, noted on the corner of the page.

“My art gives your face a dreamy, an appealing beauty.

And so completely did I imagine you that late last night, as my lamp went out—I let it go out on purpose— it seemed you came into my room, it seemed you stood there in front of me, looking just as you would have in conquered Alexandria, pale and weary, ideal in your grief” -CP Cavafy It was a pivotal moment for the young Tsolakis, who found no one he identified with on the TV or in the magazines of 1990s Athens. “I think that was the very first time I read a poem by a queer poet. I don’t think I realised at the time how big an impact it had on me.”

There are moments such as these from Tsolakis’ past which only seem to make sense to him now.

They are moments on which he ruminates in his debut poetry pamphlet Ephebos. Some of the poems were written only last year, despite the collection being centred on his coming of age amid the smell of eucalyptus and pine trees in 1990s Athens.

“Other poems, maybe they were an idea I had even before I started writing poetry,” the 39-year-old says. Tsolakis only started writing poetry seriously in the past five years, and it’s

since then that he’s found the words to write Ephebos. Ephebos, meaning ‘adolescent boy’ in ancient Greek, was published in November 2020 and centres on Tsolakis’ youth, sexuality and his relationship with his parents.

By day, Tsolakis edits an energy industry publication in London where he now lives, after leaving Athens in 1999 to study. “Because I’m a journalist, I can’t really veer away from wanting to be as close to the truth or as close to how my memory remembers it.” Time is complex. It has both brought him understanding and tarnished the exactness of his past.

“The thing is with memory is that sometimes it makes the details a bit fuzzy so of course you can’t always write it precisely as it is.” Although during the writing process, the pieces of his life seemed to neatly string together like an “invisible thread that leads from one poem to another”.

Despite neatly interweaving his past and present understanding of self in his poetry, one thing that Tsolakis is adamant about is that literature and poetry was not a part of his past. He only took an interest in literature when studying history at the University of Warwick where he later went on to take an MA in creative writing.

“The majority of the poetry I read is in English, but somehow the ones I always return to are some of the Greek poets I love.”

He mentions discovering Andreas Angelakis, a Greek gay poet who died in the early nineties from AIDS-related complications.

“It was the first time I read someone in Greek who had this very modern, unfiltered way of writing about being gay in the twentieth century.” Cavafy, Greece’s most distinguished poet, on the other hand, wrote about a Greece of the past. “In Angelakis I recognised the language. I could relate to it directly because it is the language I have used as a gay man.”

But despite his love for its poetry, Tsolakis has sought to put a distance between himself and the country he was born in. Growing up, he could not imagine his future in Greece: there were no openly gay role models whom he could look up to and he remembers the Greek Orthodox Church being outwardly homophobic. But England

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“would be the place where I could breathe, where I could be myself”. He left Greece after finishing school, and has been in England ever since.

The physical distance between Tsolakis and his past is widened by the fact that he chooses to write in English. It has been his main language for 22 years; his friends and partner all speak English, you could not tell he ever spoke a different language unless you know to look out for the very slight lilt on some words. But more than that, English is the language he used when he was coming out.

“I don’t think I’ve really escaped this sense of Greek and Greece being the closet,” he says.

His detachment from the language reflects much of his alienation from Greece.

“I really don’t know what I would be writing about, how I would be writing if I was still in Greece, writing in Greek. I don’t even know if I would be a poet.”

Tsolakis first started realising he was gay when he was about 12. He was not troubled by his gayness, but only by how it fit into his external surroundings. “Growing up, I knew that what I was expected to do was have a family, get married.” He writes in the poem ‘Fragments of Emails from My Mother in 2011’:

me angry, more than anything.”

He talks often about feeling anger, although his voice is soft and his manner oozes serenity.

It was this anger that finally led him to come out to his parents over the phone, aged 29. “I can pinpoint the moment when I was less angry to that moment, and it was liberating. I just felt ‘why should I keep up the pretence to make them happy when I’m not happy?’”

Over the years, Tsolakis has been reconciling himself with Greece. Although, it has not always been easy. In Ephebos he writes about the death of Vangelis Yakoumakis, a 20-year-old whose bullies drove him to suicide in 2015. He also mentions the lynching of Zak Kostopoulos, a queer activist who was beaten to death in broad daylight in the streets of Athens in 2018. It was important for him to document these reactions against those who are considered different.

In England, Tsolakis felt accepted, although there was one area in which he still felt different. When he started submitting poetry to magazines he realised “there was not really a place for poets like me; no place where the focus was on poets writing things in a second language”. This led him to found Harana Poetry, an online platform dedicated to poets who write in a second language.

It was through editing Harana that he and his co-founder, Romalyn Ante, were invited to guest edit Ambit Magazine, the quarterly literary publication which he now edits on a permanent basis.

Tsolakis is currently developing Ephebos into a full collection, and later hopes to write a second collection exploring his relationship with his father.

As for Greece, he has started visiting more regularly with his partner.

“It’s a much more easy, comfortable relationship between me and Greece now,” he says.

“I’ve started to really like Athens again.” ◆

“I don’t think I’ve really escaped this sense of Greek and Greece being the closet”

“Kostiko only when you have a family and child will you understand how much we miss you” Much of Ephebos is about mothers – the motherland, the mother tongue, his own mother. She was a stewardess for Olympic Airways in Greece and would sometimes talk with pity about members of the cabin crew whom she suspected were gay. “I didn’t really feel I ought to be pitied. I didn’t really feel that I ought to be somebody you disdain. I think that’s what made

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Alim Kheraj’s Queer London

Narzra Ahmed speaks to Alim Kheraj, the author of Queer London, about the city’s changing landscape

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Photo: Alim Kheraj

ueer London isn’t your traditonal Lonely Planet style guidebook. It contains queer history and profiles of LGBTQI+ Londoners. “Like a big A to Z, but with more information,” author Alim Kheraj says. It’s a new volume in ACC Art Books’ London series.

Over the years, the LGBTQI+ scene in the capital has changed drastically. There have been significant closures of iconic venues since 2006 and almost 60 per cent of all venues have closed.

“Even just in the last 10 years, there’s been a big change in that regard: a lot less emphasis on specific venues, and more emphasis on nights that might happen in non-queer spaces, like a strip club or an abandoned building, or a warehouse, or the upstairs of a pub or the bar of a theatre,” Kheraj says. “Obviously, it’s come from something that’s sad, but it also allows for people to get creative and

have fun and explore different avenues for things. And, I think you find, that was kind of a cyclical thing. Places come up and then they disappear. And then they come back again.”

Kheraj tells me that researching the book was daunting yet memorable, due to the vast amount of information available. Kheraj enjoyed exploring the history and speak to people of all ages and backgrounds. “Talking to people about what queer London was like in a period of time and what what they could remember about certain venues or what people could tell me about different scenes,” he says.

Kheraj did a lot of his research at the Bishopsgate Institute, where he looked at their LGBTQI+ archives. “Looking at old newspapers and old guidebooks, and bits of flyers from community groups and club nights was really interesting,” he says. “It’s a bit like time travelling, but you’re in an archive. That was really fun.”

Kheraj felt it important to write about London’s history. “Queer London is more than just the places that are in it, more than the physical spaces. I think you can learn a lot about queer London by looking at its history,” he says.

Kheraj hopes readers see that the current landscape of London, especially from an LGBTQI+ perspective, is not so different than it was 30 or 40 years ago. “I hope that readers will take away a sort of sense of inherited resilience and continue that resilience in the face of things that are going on right now - whether that be a rise in hate crime or property development crushing LGBTQI+ spaces, or gentrification or anti-trans narratives.” ◆

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Fran Lebowitz: a tonic for this time

Elizabeth Gregory explains why Fran Lebowitz and her series Pretend It’s A City are the perfect antidote to the pandemic

Illustrated by Betty Kim

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o two grumps equal a laugh? Is this why Fran Lebowitz, writer, humourist and grouchy New York City icon, has gained muse status as we enter our second pandemic year?

In January 2021, Pretend It’s a City - a seven part documentary series made up of interviews and conversations with Lebowitz (read: three and a half hours of Lebowitz complaining) in a pre-pandemic New York - was released on Netflix. It was the second project about Lebowitz to be directed by her friend and fellow New Yorker Martin Scorsese. The first, Public Speaking, was released in 2010 on HBO. In literary circles Lebowitz had been a heroine for a long time. After moving to New York from New Jersey around 1970, and after working as a

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cab driver and a cleaner, Lebowitz began writing - first student essays, then pornography, then magazines - for the radical-chic political magazine Changes, and for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine. When she published Metropolitan Life, a collection of comedic essays in 1978, Lebowitz was catapulted to fame. She became a central figure in the New York art scene, living a remarkable life of dinners and parties with some of the twentieth century’s most influential artists and thinkers.

But in 2021, a time when fame-soaked anecdotes, or a 70-year-old celebrity complaining about their financial worries, ought to be less palatable - and even to some, unforgivable Pretend It’s a City was a hit, and it brought Lebowitz to the attention of a much wider audience.

NME called the series “life-affirming” and Hadley Freeman in The Guardian said that Lebowitz’s wit is “every writer’s fantasy”.

Pretend It’s a City worked because humans love to complain, and have missed being able to complain together during this plague year. But it also worked because there is something about Lebowitz’s humour which resonates with our present dispositions. Her new collection of essays, which will be published by Virago later this year, is testament to this.

Is Lebowitz a balm because we too have developed cantankerous opinions, spending our days at home, often alone? Is it because her slightly pathetic habits echo our own (she now often eats cereal for dinner because she hates cooking and restaurants are closed)? Or is it simply because she feels like a friend when we’re so starved of contact? Here are my reasons why Fran Lebowitz is a tonic for this time.

Lebowitz knows how to live Pre-pandemic, Fran Lebowitz had been busy living. So busy in fact, that she had not been writing. She has partied with everyone from Bowie to Jagger: Lebowitz’s stories include being at dinner with jazz legends Charles Mingus and Duke Ellington, and attending the ‘Fight of The Century’ in 1971 when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier faced off in Madison Square Garden.

“It was a very wonderful fashion and cultural event,” says Lebowitz of that night in Pretend It’s a City. “Unfortunately, there was a fight in the middle of it.”

A close friend of Toni Morrison, in The New York Times Lebowitz tells the story of spending time at the publisher Random House, where Morrison worked at the time: “My editor called me once and said: ‘You have to stop hanging around Toni Morrison’s office. The two of you are in there all the time with the door closed, laughing’ — laughing, I think this is what was upsetting to people — ‘and smoking cigarettes.’”

While we’ve been stuck at home, forbidden to physically meet friends and deprived of old school fun, there have been few better

people to live life vicariously through than Fran Lebowitz. Her anecdotes, wrapped in a blanket of sarcasm, though with an overwhelming sense of appreciation of her friends, are transportive almost magical.

Lebowitz knows who she is Though some have seen the last year as an opportunity to become reacquainted with themselves, others have been left feeling rather unanchored. With no social events to structure the week, no physical contact as an impetus to get properly dressed, and with very few distractions from stormy political events, some have been left feeling out of control, and not quite sure who they are anymore.

Then there is Lebowitz: steadfastly, uncompromisingly herself, even in a pandemic. Some of her opinions are unpopular, some antiquated: her joke about how men and women sound different on the phone doesn’t land well with those campaigning for a more gender fluid society, and in Pretend It’s a City Lebowitz says that sports are a big thing because men rule the world. “If women were in charge of the world do you think there’d be professional hopscotch?” she says.

Has anyone played hopscotch since 1960? And don’t women also appreciate sports?

Lebowitz is not perfect, but is not trying to be. She laughs at her own jokes, corners of her mouth twitching, eyes shining with amusement as she speaks. She is as critical of herself as she is of anyone else. There is something admirable about someone who has ruminated on every opinion they hold. And this confidence is inspirational for a generation wilting at home.

Lebowitz does sweat the small stuff Mundane events make a life. Boring, silly, everyday things. It’s the gentle acceptance of this that is the foundation of humour, but also of a happier life. Although Lebowitz hates the banal, a lot of her opinions are about the minutiae of life. She hates money - ok that’s a big one - but she also hates hot weather, sport, men in shorts, tourists, slow walkers on the pavement, people who talk

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Photo: Netflix

during film-screenings, calculators and news. In fact, it would be easier to name the things Lebowitz loves: namely, smoking, and lying on the sofa to read.

Since March last year, the idea of appreciating the mundane has rather been shoved down our throats. But one of Lebowitz’s talents is raising the quotidian to the sublime, such as writing in Metropolitan Life about her daily schedule: “5:10pm, I return to my apartment laden with magazines and spend the remainder of the afternoon reading articles by writers who, regrettably, met their deadlines.” In Pretend It’s a City Lebowitz jokes about the subway: “No one in the subway system has any spirit left. They’ve beaten it out of us. It would take one subway ride for the Dalai Lama to turn into a lunatic.”

Lebowitz is a reminder that you don’t need to be at Studio 54 every night to have a good story to tell, that in walking from your desk to your kitchen, there may be a cheerful anecdote to be found.

Lebowitz reminds us that humour is a tool Lebowitz’s opinions can seem flippant, particularly in the context of the last year. But that is a misreading, as if laughter supplants tragedy rather than accompanies it. It’s forgetting too that Lebowitz herself has suffered great loss -

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many of her close friends died during the AIDS/ HIV crisis. In 1987 she wrote a devastating article about the impact of AIDS on the artistic community for The New York Times: “The Impact of AIDS on the Artistic Community is that on New Year’s Eve Day a 36-yearold writer takes a 31-year-old photographer to get a chest X-ray and listens to him say with what can only be described as a certain guarded hope, ‘Maybe I just have lung cancer.’”

“humour can also be used as a tool for repair”

Lebowitz chooses humour as the clearest, and often the most effective, mode of communication: a tool for commentary, not avoidance.

Humour can also be used as a tool for repair - which explains why cackling away at Lebowitz, just as Martin Scorsese does throughout Pretend It’s a City, is an excellent corrective to another anxiety-fuelled pandemic day. A self proclaimed “expert on fun”, I defy you to find a more perfect tonic for this time than Fran Lebowitz - acerbic, erudite and full of joy and loathing in equal measure. ◆

LGBTQI+ fiction

Illustrated by Georgia Hainesio

Get lost in LGBTQI+ fiction this summer with Simone Fraser No matter how open-minded and accepting you are, realising that you’re ‘different’ in a sea of heterosexual culture can be a difficult and lonely experience. The last fifteen years have seen a boom in LGBTQI+ books, so we’ve gathered some stand-out picks to explore.

John Green and David Levithan’s Will Grayson, Will Grayson presents the usual cliché teen love story, with an enjoyable tweak of two male characters falling in love.

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The trope of ‘two LGBTQI+ people fall in love and then one dies’, is irritatingly common and somewhat Simone her standproblematic, Fraser but in this compiles case it can be forgiven.

The Song ofLGBTQI+ Achilles, by Madeline Miller, a retelling of the out fiction tois devour this legend of the Trojan war through the eyes of Patroclus, Achilles’s friend and, ultimately, lover.

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By Your Name by Andre Aciman, has faced criticism for the explicit sex scenes and age gap between the protagonist and his lover, it deserves a place on the list for the impact the series has had on popular culture. ks

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Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters, is currently taking the world by storm. Exploring the realities of transgender life and the desire for children, and written by an openly trans woman, this pioneering debut novel looks set for awards success.

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You may be more familiar with this book’s movie adaptation, Love Simon (2018), but the novel by Becky Albertalli came first. Bringing gay love to the mainstream through a romcom lens gives the protagonist a happy ending, reinforcing that you can be LGBTQI+ and still be fulfilled, loved, and carefree. ◆ oo

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Maurice: a queer icon

Simone Fraser explores why EM Forster’s Maurice still has such

an important role in queer culture, half a century after publication

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ueer films and books like Maurice “made me feel okay with myself. They make me feel normal and realise these things exist and aren’t some anomaly. They can be viewed in private and help you come to terms with yourself alone and in a personal way that is difficult. You can confide in films and books whenever you need.”

These words, spoken by Mantas Iliuskaitis, 21, who identifies as gay, show how crucial representation is to those coming to terms with their sexuality. Although there’s still not enough representation of the LGBTQI+ community in

Illustrated by Paola Ascanio

books, film, and TV it’s a million times better than it was half a century ago. Gay and bisexual men are found across some of the most popular works of fiction in the modern day - Bridgerton, It’s a Sin, Pride. But in 1971, when Maurice was released, this was not the case.

Maurice tells the story of an upper-class gay man living in the early 20th century. Set at Cambridge University, and later in rolling English country estates, it shows that LGBTQI+ individuals can be the epitome of respectability and patriotism - rather than the dangerous, subversive individuals that many people at the

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time the novel was written, in 1913, believed.

However, when Maurice was written and indeed up until 1967, gay sex was illegal and punishable by imprisonment, something gay men were vehemently against. Indeed, the fact that a century ago you could be imprisoned for loving someone of the same gender continues to horrify the LGBTQI+ community in the modern day. Forster, who himself had a secret male partner, only felt safe having the novel published after his death.

Forster did not shy away from expressing the pain and difficulties a gay man in the early 20th century felt, be that personal shame or the constant fear of discovery and disgrace. But why does Maurice remain such an iconic representation of queer love and culture even today?

Edwin*, 22, identifies as part of the LGBTQI+ community but has not come out. He finds Maurice comforting as it exposes the contradictory emotions and struggles that many LGBTQI+ people continue to face: “The prejudice and sometimes the same kind of shame and social consequences feared by the film’s protagonists are still being felt by the community up to this day.”

Even when the film was released in 1978 it caused controversy by showing two LGBTQI+ characters having a happy ending: although Maurice’s first gay relationship ends due to fear of discovery, he later embarks on a passionate romance with Alec, an under-groundskeeper, and remains with him at the end of the film.

Edwin finds this uplifting as he comes to terms with his own sexuality: “There are so many things to take away from this wonderful film, but the most important to me personally is the role of Maurice. For me the character, based on Forster’s friend Edward Carpenter, represented a brave and unyielding ray of humanity. Although Durham was the first to open up about his feelings, Maurice was the one who chose to stay true to his emotions and, in the end, broke the unimaginably stern boundary of class with Alec.”

Maurice remains important to gay men largely because of Forster’s own sexuality. Forster had several male lovers during his lifetime, although

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they had to be covert due to homophobic laws in the UK. To many gay men, Forster’s candid novel speaks to an experience shared by many across generations.

This experience was also a large part of the film’s creation. Ismail Merchant and James Ivory - who ran the popular heritage film company Merchant Ivory Productions which adapted Maurice and other Forster novels like A Room with a View - were in a covert gay relationship from the early 1960s until Merchant’s death in 2005. It is bittersweet that Ivory, finally able to publicly acknowledge their relationship, won an Oscar at the age of 89 as the screenwriter of Call Me By Your Name, one of the most popular LGBTQI+ films in recent history.

“Forster did

not shy away from expressing the pain and difficulties a gay man in the early 20th century felt” Ultimately, Maurice remains such a queer icon over 100 years after it was written because it accurately portrays the intricacies of growing up ‘different’ in a heteronormative world. Even though LGBTQI+ love is now legal, the fear, shame and confusion of discovering love for someone of the opposite sex still remain an important part of many people’s experiences.

At the heart of Maurice’s experience is not fear or rejection, but love, and this is where its power lies today. Whilst honest about the difficulties, Forster’s novel leaves Maurice, and us, with proof that no matter what your sexuality is, it is always possible to have a happy ending. ◆ *Name changed for anonymity.

Bridget Jones’

Diary 25 years on Catherine Entwistle dissects why the cigarette-smoking, Chardonnay-loving 30-something-year-old still speaks to women today

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t has been 25 years since Helen Fielding gifted the 1990s female zeitgeist with her utterly fantastic Bridget Jones’ Diary. Since the book’s first publication in 1996, this neurotic heroine has won the hearts of women everywhere. Millions of copies are sold worldwide.

Earlier this year the 25th anniversary edition of the book was published with great success, so it would seem we still have a soft spot for big-knicker-wearing Bridget.

“the depiction of

single women in literature and film did not match up with the reality” Spanning a year of Bridget’s life, the novel chronicles the ups and downs of her career, self-image, friendships and romantic relationships. In the same way that Dolly Alderton captured the experience of many young women of today with her honest and relatable Illustrated by Flo Bull

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Everything I Know About Love, Helen Fielding recognised that the depiction of single women in literature and film towards the end of the twentieth century did not match up with the reality. Despite it being fictional, perhaps the reason why Fielding’s writing speaks to so many women is that it was close to her own experience living and working in London in her thirties.

The pressure to slim yourself to oblivion, climb the career ladder with gusto, marry Mr Perfect and have a beautiful brood of high-achieving children all at the same time without dropping any of the balls was ubiquitous back then. The sad truth is that these high expectations are still set for women today (although slowly improving) and insidious reminders of that ticking biological clock are still very much present.

A quarter of a century on, women relate to

“a quarter of a

century on, women relate to Bridget all the same” Bridget all the same because the world is still primarily designed for men. So, what would Bridget make of dating apps? Not much has evolved since 1996 – apart from technology. One of her diary entries today might read something like: “Must stop going on Tinder dates with fuckwit men.”

One aspect of the book does, however, feel dated. A modern-day Bridget certainly wouldn’t tolerate the blatant sexual harassment she receives from Mr “Titzpervert” Fitzherbert and Richard Finch, her TV producer boss who reminds her that “at Sit Up, Britain, no one ever gets sacked for shagging the boss”.

That’s not to say this type of behaviour

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doesn’t exist today. The #MeToo movement has shown that it remains rife in industries we view as glamorous and aspirational. The difference is that today, men are increasingly held accountable for their treatment of women. Sexism and sexual harassment are no longer tolerated in the same way that Bridget endures the inexcusable behaviour of her male work colleagues.

In an interview on BBC’s Desert Island Discs in 2020, Fielding said: “You couldn’t write that now […] it was quite shocking for me to see how things have changed.” There is nothing in the book, however, that isn’t still relevant today. Feelings of loneliness (cue Jamie O’Neal’s rendition of ‘All by Myself’), body image issues, relationship struggles and a desire to better oneself all prevail, making Bridget a relatable character for women 25 years on.

No one can deny Bridget’s enviable situation at times (being whisked off to a weekend spa break is something I doubt many of us would say no to). But despite much of her time being spent searching for Mr Right, Fielding beautifully captures the importance of great friendships, in the form of Bridget’s best pals, Jude, Shazzer and Tom, who are on hand with a bottle of wine or a questionable amount of expletives to make you feel better about yourself. Who cares if she manages to turn homemade soup the most revolting shade of blue? They still toast her culinary failures with: “To Bridget, who cannot cook, but who we love.”

Photo: Universal City Studios LLC

How well do you kn ow Bridget?

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In the words of Mark Darcy, Bridget “drinks like a fish, smokes like a chimney and dresses like her mother”, but these foibles make her human, charming, and loveable. Now more than ever, the fabulously flawed Bridget is a tonic to the increasingly intolerable faultlessness and excess that infiltrates every aspect of modern life.

Whether it’s a makeup blunder in the back of a taxi, falling for the wrong guy one too many times (we all know a Daniel Cleaver), or just putting your foot in it at the most inappropriate moment, we’ve all been there. Reading about Bridget bumbling through life and trying to deal with her mistakes allows us to laugh at our own pitfalls and reminds us that perfection is overrated. Bridget Jones’ Diary is a timeless classic; one that will resonate with women for many more years to come. ◆

Photo: Universal City Studios LLC

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Ali’s podcast picks

Narzra Ahmed gets podcast tips from Ali Plumb, BBC Radio 1 film critic and host of Radio 1’s Screen Time podcast “There are classic British ones like The Adam Buxton Podcast, which are always worth listening to.”

“I’d also recommend 90 Minutes or Less Film Fest, which I’ve actually been lucky enough to appear on to talk about The Naked Gun.”

“The Empire Film Podcast is obviously a great podcast.”

“How Did This Get Made?, which is a funny, American, comedy film podcast where they discuss movies that really are very questionable and you think ‘How on Earth did they get made?’”

“Other ones I really enjoy are classics like No Such Thing As A Fish.”

“There’s the Ghibliotheque, if you like Studio Ghibli. That’s another good podcast.”

“Script Apart is a podcast about the first draft secrets of movies that have gone on to be brilliant. They’ve recently had Aaron Sorkin on. It’s such a simple idea, so well executed and it’s done for charity.”

“Films to be Buried With with Brett Goldstein, which is really, really good. It is about both death and movies. ‘We are born. We die. In between, we watch a lot of films.”

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“The Director’s Cut, A DGA Podcast is a great one.

It’s directors interviewing each other and that often gives me a level of insight that I would never normally have.”

Cruella: blank

slate or devil woman?

Becca Challis examines the glamorous villain, Cruella de Vil, ahead of Disney’s release of Cruella

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isney’s new release, Cruella, is the latest in a long line of live action remakes of animated classics. But unlike its siblings, 101 Dalmatians has been given the dirty martini with a twist treatment.

This new spin was originally thought up by Aline Brosh McKenna, the writer of beloved fashion classic The Devil Wears Prada, and is produced by Glenn Close, the original 1996 live-action Cruella. The result? A glamorous, fashion-filled feature, focusing not on the trials and tribulations of the dalmatian pups but on the story behind the villain herself.

Illustrated by Daisy Ferreira

Cruella de Vil is best known for her ‘evil woman’ aesthetic. With half white, half black hair, a long cigarette holder and famous fur coat, she oozes glamour and marble-like coldness. But while the name “Cruella” evokes a clear vision, who is the woman behind the costume?

First conceived in Dodie Smith’s 1956 novel 101 Dalmatians, Cruella de Vil is a villain extraordinaire. The owner of nine dalmations, Smith was horrified when a friend mentioned, in passing, that her pets would make a lovely coat - but, the seed was sown. Cruella de Vil was born.

Prioritising fashion over feeling and business

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over bonhomie, Cruella certainly displays a killer instinct. Yet, you can’t help but wonder if it was easy pickings making a villain out of this 1950s modern woman. Cruella has no children. She prioritises her career in fashion. Perhaps most terrifying, she remains indifferent to canine companions - Man’s ‘best friend’. Scary stuff.

Smith goes to some length to demonstrate her poor performance as a housewife. Describing Cruella’s cooking, she writes: “The soup was dark purple. The fish was bright green. The meat was pale blue. Everything tasted of pepper, even the ice-cream - which was black.”

Compared to serial murderers like Hannibal Lecter, is this fashion fiend really worthy of Bill Lee’s accompanying soundtrack “Cruella de Vil, Cruella de Vil, If she doesn’t scare you, No evil thing will”?

Smith works hard to make us think so. She refers to de Vil as “not an ordinary human”. Mr Dearly points out the relevancy of her name: “What a strange name de Vil is. If you put the two words together, they make ‘devil’. Perhaps Cruella’s a lady-devil!”

Cruella even demonstrates her nonchalant attitude towards death when she orders the Badun brothers to kill the dalmatians. She says: “I don’t care how you kill the little beasts. Hang them, suffocate them, drop them off the roof - good gracious there are dozens of lovely ways. I only wish I’d time to do the job myself.” Pretty dark for a children’s book. Even darker when followed by: “Here’s an idea for you. Shut them up without food

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and then they’ll kill each other.”

It’s this dark streak that Disney are exploring in the upcoming Cruella, due for release on 28 May 2021. Starring Emma Stone as Estella (the young Cruella), I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie is the perfect choice for Disney’s first real crack at the origin story genre.

Unsurprisingly, the film is rated PG-13, “for some violence and thematic elements”. The trailer alone shows a real departure for Disney.

It looks gritty, original and stylish. But what’s the motive here?

It’s no new invention to look behind the psyche of our villains to explain how they became their evil selves. Movies like The Godfather: Part II, Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, and even the much-loved Shrek, look into the events that pushed their protagonists to the edge. Perhaps the most successful example is Todd Phillips’ The Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix, which lent a new, raw darkness to the genre in what can only be described as a thought-provoking and highly disturbing piece of cinema. The Joker’s influence is clear in Cruella’s trailer, with deranged laughter, plenty of fire and a clear revenge plot which I’m sure will endear the villain to the audience.

But, once again, this is not new stuff. John Milton’s poetic epic Paradise Lost is one of the first examples of an origin story. Written in 1667 and told from Satan’s point of view it follows his fall from glory, including the temptation of Eve. It gives vital context, allowing us to understand his motives. It gives the devil a voice.

Another defining work is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, far ahead of its time in the ripe year of 1818. Similarly, the creature is seen as

the work of the devil, yet he demonstrates that he is anything but. Rather, Frankenstein is a product of his context.

As humans, we have long been fascinated with understanding the powers

at play behind ‘evil’, and Cruella demonstrates that this appetite continues. Stemming from an Ancient Greek concept, ‘nature vs nurture’ has fascinated us for thousands of years. But, the idea of nurture having a real impact on character, rather than the Christian ideals of straightup ‘good’ and ‘evil’, came from philosopher John Locke in 1690 with his work on the tabula rasa.

This idea, that humans are born as blank slates which are filled in by ‘nurture’ or life experiences, is certainly true of Frankenstein and The Joker.

But does this fit Smith’s Cruella?

The hints of an origin story come from Mrs Dearly. An old school friend of Cruella’s, she

“she oozes glamour and marble-like coldness”

tells her husband that the villain was expelled for drinking a whole bottle of ink. Not the behaviour of a well-functioning child, I think we can agree.

Yet, in Smith’s novel we are given something else - a family history. A sheepdog gives us the backstory of how Cruella’s home, Hell Hall, got its name. De Vil’s ancestor bought the place for the “lonely location on the heath” and: “Once the wall, with its heavy iron gates, was finished,

strange rumours began to spread. Villagers crossing the heath at night heard screams and wild laughter. Were there prisoners behind the prison-like wall? People began to count their children carefully.”

Rumours. The way it always seems to start. “It was said that this de Vil fellow had a long tail.”

Then: “People were calling the place Hell Hall, and the de Vil chap plain devil.” In a scene reminiscent of Beauty and the Beast, Cruella’s natural ‘evil’-ness is decided: “The end came when the men from several villages arrived one night with lighted torches, prepared to break open the gates and burn the farmhouse down. But, as they approached the gates, a terrific thunderstorm began and put the torches out. Then, the gates burst open seemingly of their own accord - and out came de Vil, driving a coach and four. And the story is that lightning was coming not from the skies but from de Vil - blue forked-lightning. All the men ran away screaming, and never came back. And neither did de Vil.” Super appropriate for kids, right? But perhaps Smith reconsidered her ‘nature’ verdict for Cruella. Starlight Barking is the little known sequel to 101 Dalmatians. The dogs decide to once and for all kill Cruella de Vil, assuming her to be the villain behind a worldwide slumber, Sleeping Beauty-style. But, when the dogs find her, she too is asleep. Smith instead notes that she is the only sleeper who does not look peaceful, and is instead grim and unhappy. Her house has been remodeled and the walls resemble angular psychedelic paintings, many of them anguishedportraits of herself.

Cruella de Vil is a woman in despair. She is The Joker in female form, tortured by both her past, present and future.

Finally, Cruella will tell her story. ◆

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As cinema teeters on the brink, Jake Helm investigates what caused its downfall and whether it can be revived

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t’s easy to forget, with our pandemic-tinted glasses, that at the start of 2020 cinema was booming. Nine of the top-grossing films of all time were released in 2019, one of them the second highest-grossing film ever: Avengers Endgame – you know the one with a trillion superheroes.

And box offices were ballooning worldwide. In February 2019, Chinese audiences spent $1.63 billion on tickets, a record for a single month anywhere in the world, and the British box office fared pretty well too with its highest ever takings, aided by a psychotic clown (Joker), an ice queen (Frozen II) and a computer-generated warthog and meerkat warbling ‘Hakuna Matata’ (Lion King).

With blockbusters such as No Time to Die, Black Widow, Fast & Furious 9 and West Side Story on its agenda, 2020 promised to outshine its ancestor.

Unless I missed them in the coronavirus chaos or, more likely, the rush to get a table at a beer garden, as of this writing, none have hit the silver screen.

In the last year, our large screens have taken a beating. Roll the credits, read the last rites, cinema is on its knees. In April, the world’s secondlargest cinema chain, Cineworld, announced the company made a record $3 billion (£2.2 billion) loss for last year. The chain, whose screens had mostly

remained closed since the start of the pandemic, reported that admissions had decreased by 80 per cent last year to just 54 million, down from 275 million in 2019. As cinemas begin to open their doors, it’s time to point fingers. Who killed cinema? Is it too late? Or can a quick mouth-tomouth revive this dying medium – think Dr Alan Grant (Sam Neill) resuscitating an electrocuted Timmy in Jurassic Park.

The obvious culprit? The pandemic. This beast came out of nowhere, pulled away the shower curtain and kept stabbing Norman Bates-style at the innocence of the film industry. With Boris Johnson’s “Stay at home” message ringing in their ears, studios postponed their blockbusters because cinemas were shut; but then when cinemas attempted to safely reopen, there were no movies to put on. The film industry reached a stalemate.

The question was: who would bite the bullet first?

The answer came in the form of an inverted bullet, otherwise known as Christopher Nolan’s Tenet – a film in which objects move backwards through time. Starring Robert Pattinson and John David Washington, the film features a Boeing 747 that crashes into a warehouse and then un-crashes back out of it.

But the only

Illustrated by Rowan Bailey

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thing truly crashing about Tenet was its box office takings.

While Team 007 were unwilling to unleash Daniel Craig’s fifth and final outing as James Bond, moving the picture from April to November 2020 then postponing it entirely until September 2021, Nolan stood firm. Tenet clung to its July release for as long as possible, was cautiously postponed several times and then launched on 26 August in 70 countries, including the UK. The stakes were high and Nolan was all-in.

But with many cinemas closed and those that are open left struggling to get actual bums back on actual seats, Tenet took a substantial hit, grossing £270 million worldwide, far short of the £405 million grossed by Nolan’s last film, Dunkirk, which itself was a modest performer compared to the £830 million racked up

by The Dark Knight Rises.

Smugly sipping a dry martini, Bond was right. The pandemic has shaken (not stirred) the industry to its core.

While the pandemic is certainly a monster in more ways than one, let’s not forget the silent killer, the seemingly innocent one that’s lurking in the background, quietly plotting and preparing for the ultimate stab in the back. I am, of course, referring to streaming platforms, and boy did they stab.

It was inevitable, wasn’t it? The juggernauts of digital streaming have always been nipping at the heels of cinema, but I’m not sure even they expected it to be so easy. The pandemic handed it to them on a plate. Everyone stuck at home with nothing better to do than stream endlessly. “Lockdown for one,” screams Netflix, which surpassed 200 million subscribers last year as record numbers signed up to beat the lockdown boredom. Disney+, which demonstrated perfect timing by launching in the UK on the first day of the spring lockdown, originally hoped for 50 million subscribers by 2022. Instead, it gained 73 million in nine months.

In the dog-eat-dog world of streaming servic-

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es, content is king and major players, ready with a catalogue of movies they were unable to show at the pictures, shifted their chips from cinema into streaming: Universal’s Peacock, Paramount+ and deadliest of all Warner Bros’ HBO Max. In December, Warner Bros released Wonder Woman 1984 simultaneously on HBO Max and in cinemas in the US. It will do the same for all 17 of its planned 2021 releases, including The Suicide Squad, The Matrix 4 and Dune. This is a brutal blow for cinemas, which rely on exclusive, advance access to blockbusters.

In a plot twist, Warner Bros announced in March that it had struck a deal with Cineworld, which will allow the chain to show its films for 31 days before they go on streaming platforms. Shall we rejoice? Not at all – this might be a gently placed final nail in the coffin for cinema. The move may have hastened the permanent narrowing of the theatrical window – the time between cinema and streaming releases – previously three months.

This is more than just a compromise, it’s a full-blown statement that simultaneous streaming, albeit 31 days apart, is a permeant fixture in a post-pandemic world. Disney made that even clearer by announcing on the same day, they will shove its hotly anticipated summer films Cruella and Black Widow onto its streaming service at the same time as theatres.

“But they’re just doing good business during a difficult time,” I hear you cry.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new. These platforms were dismembering cinema pre-Covid.

Their gargantuan budgets have lured some of the finest directors away from the silver screen. Martin Scorsese, a doggedly old-school auteur, claims he’s not a fan of viewing a film anywhere but cinema. Yet, even he jumped on the Netflix train with his gangster flick The Irishman. With the promise of a $150 million budget, who can blame him? That’s an offer you can’t refuse.

This is not to say that streaming sites don’t produce good movies. They do. Roma, The Irishman, The Trial of the Chicago 7, Marriage Story, to name

a few, are all compelling films. If anything, it’s the opposite – they’re too good, and they’re pulling the theatrical experience to pieces. With the introduction of simultaneous streaming of blockbusters, the mutilation is almost complete.

Nolan was quick to offer his view on simultaneous streaming. Criticising Warner Bro’s decision to send 17 films directly to HBO Max, the director said: “The decision makes no economic sense, and even the most casual Wall Street investor can see the difference between disruption and dysfunction.” Ironically, it was his blockbuster’s poor showing that is thought to have partly formed Warner Bros’ decision.

And there’s the rub. Cinema’s wounds are very often self-inflicted. Take the Academy Awards, for example, the most prestigious ceremony in Hollywood. This year’s ceremony, which saw onthe-road drama Nomadland triumph with a win for best picture, was watched by 9.85 million Americans, down from 23.6 million in 2020.

Why? There are a number of reasons, the obvious one being the pandemic, and another must be the lack of nominations for blockbusters in recent years. None of the top 10 grossing films has won best picture in the last decade; in comparison half of the best pictures in the 1990s were a top 10 grosser. Audiences are associating the Oscars, Hollywood and thereby cinema as either ultra-woke or arty-farty.

Let’s be clear, the best picture could be the ‘best’ and only be viewed by one person and this certainly isn’t a plea to change the landscape of film award ceremonies (who would want to change a twerking Glenn Close?), it’s merely to point out how the industry doesn’t make cinema’s life easier.

That’s because it doesn’t need to. Cinema is a fighter. Put it in a ring and it will survive knockdown after knockdown. A century ago, cinema’s competitor came in the form of the so-called ‘Spanish Flu’ which from 1918 to 1920 took the lives of 50 million people worldwide, coming right at the end of World War One, where 40 million died. When the flu hit, cinemas closed around the globe, al-

though not quite in the same blanket way that they have today. But cinema didn’t die. It came back thriving. After the Great Depression of 1929, attendances at cinemas in the 1930s were higher than in any decade before or since. By numbers of attendees, 1939’s Gone with the Wind remains the most successful cinema release of all time. Cinema gave the pandemic the middle finger, who’s saying it won’t do it again?

But they didn’t have Netflix then? Let’s fast forward to the 1950s when everyone was rockin’ and rollin’ and television was the new kid on the block.

Its arrival sent shockwaves through the box office, and caused weekly attendance at American cinemas to fall from 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960. But cinema was far from down and out. It one-upped television with the arrival of the summer blockbuster in the 1970s.

And in 1975, Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws sunk its teeth into television’s hope of a coup, with roughly 250 million tickets sold. Since then cinema has been lying low, waiting for its next foe. Watch out Netflix, cinema is preparing to rip you to pieces.

There is still one image of a cinema that haunts me.

Posted last March by the director Edgar Wright, the picture is of an abandoned Odeon, closed due to coronavirus, with a poster for A Quiet Place II, a film which had its premiere in March 2020 but is set to be released over a year later in May 2021.

Cinemas are not meant to be quiet places. As Nomadland’s Frances McDormand pleaded at the 2021 Oscars, we all wish to be “shoulder to shoulder in that dark space”. Big screens, booming speakers and the validating laughter and cries of fellow viewers all lie at the heart of our culture.

Coronavirus and streaming platforms may have sent death threats but they are just the newest enemies in a long list.

Cinema has survived two world wars, the advent of television, laser disc, DVDs, Blu-rays, terrorism and mass shootings. Cinema is a beast with nine lives and while it may be under threat, I’m not convinced it has lost one. ◆

“audiences are associating the Oscars, Hollywood and thereby the cinema as either ultra-woke or arty farty”

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Shall I compare thee Carina Murphy uncovers the silver screen classics inspired by the man himself

Since the dawn of cinema there have been some amazing adaptations of the Bard (Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet, anyone?) While there’s nothing wrong with taking a bit of creative licence, some adaptations are practically unrecognisable…

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Characters in Shakespearean comedies have a few dominant concerns – love, lust, and reputation – which also happen to be top of the list for modern teenagers. The result? Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming of the Shrew translates perfectly to a 90s high school. ‘Shrewish’ and unweddable Katherina becomes Julia Stiles’ spiky feminist Kat, who must be tamed by the roguish Heath Ledger to win a bet. Problematic? Maybe in the play. But the film is 90s gold.

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Proving that Shakespeare was basically the teen romcom writer of the sixteenth century is this noughties update of Twelfth Night. The play leans heavily on cross-dressing, as shipwrecked Viola poses as her twin brother to win the favour of powerful Duke Orsino. A natural fit for a high school flick where football-playing Amanda Bynes takes her brother’s place at an elite boarding school so she can play for their team. Captain ‘Duke’ Orsino (a young Channing Tatum) makes it very worth the watch.

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This one is a bit more obvious, and a lot more loyal than other maverick adaptations. Musical theatre titans Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim transplant Romeo and Juliet into the Upper West Side of New York City. It’s the mid 50s, and racial tensions are mounting. Tony, a former member of the white blue-collar Jets gang, taunts the Puerto Rican Sharks – that is, until he falls in love with the daughter of their leader. The result? A lot of singing and dancing.

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to a Shakespeare play?

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The Lion King

After twenty-five years, two sequels, a smash-hit Broadway show and a less than memorable CGI revival, nothing captures the grief and growing pains of Hamlet quite like Disney’s 1994 animation. Recasting Shakespeare’s broody Prince as an adolescent lion was nothing less than inspired; turning Polonius into a bird voiced by Rowan Atkinson, pure genius. And that’s before we’ve even gotten to the music. If (like me) you already know The Lion King off by heart, try dipping your toe into its Romeo and Juliet inspired sequel, or better yet, the third film in the franchise which follows Timon and Pumba in a fourth-wall-breaking ode to Tom Stoppard’s Hamlet rewrite Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

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Another Romeo and Juliet remake. If you thought 50s New York was radical, then you’d probably be best to steer clear of this one, in which Romeo is a zombie called ‘R’ (Nicholas Hoult) who falls in love with human Julie. As if the gap between these two lovebirds wasn’t insurmountable enough, she also happens to be the daughter of John Malkovich’s zombie-hating leader of the human survivors. It may be kooky, but this is actually quite a sweet adaptation.

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One of the loosest adaptations out there, Kurt Sutter’s motorcycle gang epic is often referred to as “Hamlet on Harleys”. When the founding father of the Sons of Anarchy Motorcycle Club is killed by his biker brother, who then usurps his throne and marries his wife, it’s left to crownprince ‘Jax’ (Charlie Hunnam) to avenge the deed. Even though the episodes use Hamlet quotes as titles, purists would probably dispute whether this seven-season biker flick had anything to do with the Bard. To which I would say: the lady doth protest too much. ◆

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Heartburn: Cooking with Nora Ephron On what would have been her 80th birthday, Eloise Feilden cooked a feast from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn

Illustrations by Vicky Hughes

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here is no denying the impact Nora Ephron has had as a writer. Her household name status as a screenwriter has stood the test of time, and almost a decade past her death and more than 30 years past its first release, When Harry Met Sally’s diner scene is as iconic as it ever was. Give me Meg Ryan howling in pseudo pleasure and pounding the table in passion any day.

But sadly, while Billy Crystal’s lighthearted

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rendition of ‘Surrey with the Fringe on Top’ and Meg’s slightly garish high-waisted 1980s trousers may live on forever in perfect nostalgia, the same cannot be said for all elements of Ephron’s work.

Published in 1983, Ephron’s first and only novel Heartburn details the disastrous breakdown of her second marriage to Carl Bernstein under - as she puts it - the “thinly veiled” guise of fiction. And boy does that woman have a sense

of humour. Finding out your husband is cheating on you and leaving you when you’re seven months pregnant with a two-year-old on your arm doesn’t scream comedy, but somehow that is where it ends up, with warmth and playfulness and a whole lot of wit.

Despite the brilliant quips of Ephron’s fictional counterpart Rachel Samstatt, taking jibe after jibe at her husband’s obscenely tall mistress, one element of the novel has sadly failed to outlast the early 1980s: its food.

Rachel Samstatt works as a TV chef and her recipes, scattered among the prose, could not be more dated if they tried. From lima beans and pears to sorrel soup, the chosen cuisine ages her fiction far more than any reference to Reagan or Carter.

Ephron is a master of fiction, whose cultural significance has lived on for decades. So could she also be a master of cooking? Could vinaigrette and key lime pie really make a comeback?

If Ephron says it’s good, who am I to judge?

After a quick google, I discovered that, were she still alive, 19 May would be her 80th birthday. A banquet in her honour sounded like an appropriate celebration. And so began my quest back in time, to find out whether “I’ll have what she’s having” could apply to her own prose.

Starter The first attempt at one of Nora’s recipes was an easy one; a “four minute egg”. Quick and light, it would make the ideal starter to my three course cooking experiment. And is a hard one to get wrong.

Cooking the egg went smoothly, and I have no qualms about the gooey golden yolk and just firm enough white so as not to be snotty, which went perfectly with my avocado toast. No qualms, that is, except that it should really be called a six-and-a-half-minute egg, but who’s counting?

Ephron can be forgiven for her embellishment; after all, what is fiction if not an reimagining of the truth? And besides, “four minute egg” sounds a whole lot more catchy.

Main Course The main event of the evening came in the form of the most curious dish in the book: lima beans and pears. I say curious, but really I mean insane.

It supposedly takes 12 hours at 200 degrees to cook. I’m done with this before I’ve even started.

One of its limited upsides was the short ingredient list: lima beans (Wikipedia informed me these are butter beans), pears, chicken stock, onion and molasses. If you have never tasted raw molasses before, let me tell you it does not

“could vinaigrette and key lime pie make a comeback?

If Nora Ephron says it’s good, who am I to judge?” taste good. I was imagining a rich treacle used to sweeten pies like something out of a Maya Angelou novel. Instead, it tasted like sickly, burnt liquorice with a lingering bitter aftertaste.

Bundled into the oven in the early morning ready for its day-long roasting, it looked and smelled like it could not get any worse from here.

Two hours in, the house smelled deliciously savoury, with the scent of chicken stock watfing up the stairs. By hour three, however, the molasses had taken over, and its sickly sweet pungency was less than pleasant. The aroma lingered for the rest of the cooking time, until the dish was checked after seven hours, at which time I declared it prematurely done. The contents of my poor Le Creuset pot were drier than the Sahara and looked a shade of brown that no food should ever reach.

Maybe the heat was too high, or maybe it just was not meant to be, but the lima beans and pears were sadly inedible. They said hello to my little friend the bin soon after.

Dessert Following on from this disaster, it was on to the grand finale: dessert. One of the more appealing sounding dishes, bread pudding is a familiar classic and seemingly safe bet. Ephron’s recipe calls for sugar, butter, milk, evaporated milk, a whole loaf of white bread, vanilla, nutmeg, oh

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and some raisins. Basically a heart attack in a casserole dish.

The further I got through the recipe the more my arteries clogged in anticipation; the two sticks of butter that the recipe calls for translates to a whole 250g slab in Brit-speak, making my mouth water and my stomach churn all at the same time.

After creaming the butter and sugar together, I was instructed to casually toss in all other

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in horror at what I had created: a cholesterol iceberg” ingredients. Unfortunately, my assumption that they would seamlessly mix together and form some kind of batter did not turn out as planned.

Instead I stared down in horror at what I had created: a cholesterol iceberg half-floating in the surrounding liquid.

Two hours, one slightly battered blender and a kitchen that resembled a crime scene later, and my burnt masterpiece emerged from the oven.

Did it taste good, made almost entirely of fat and sugar? Yes. Was it worth the permanent damage to my kitchen? No. All in all I would recommend any other bread and butter pudding recipe besides this one, if only to avoid the grotesque glob of floating fat: an image that will revisit me in my nightmares.

Oh Nora, how I wish I could say that you were right all along, that the next food fad had to be a trip down memory lane back to the era of the

prawn cocktail and the quiche. But no.

I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt and say, what with the divorce and looming single motherhood, this must have been a dark time for both Nora and her kitchen. After all, she did end up writing the screenplay for the 2009 classic Julie and Julia - a witty and brilliant depiction of Julia Child’s journey into cooking so it can’t be all bad. At least Nora didn’t write the recipes herself in that one.

Ultimately, I have no one to blame but myself for this culinary disaster. In the foreword written

by Ephron herself, she states that she is not, nor has she ever been, a food writer. This should really have been taken as a warning.

There is a phrase within the foreword that has since become something of legend, which stuck with me through my experiment: “everything is copy”. My kitchen may be short of a blender, and the whole house may stink of rancid molasses, but at least I picked up the pen and wrote it down. I hope she would be proud of me for that. ◆

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Pho

How Jay Rayner survived lockdown

Nicola Blackburn speaks to Jay Rayner about spag bol, jazz quartets and the next Roaring Twenties

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ay Rayner has been robbed of his livelihood his wife and two sons. A Mark Rothko print for the third lockdown in a row. A working looms on the wall to his left, overseeing a row week once brimming with long lunches, of awards gleaming atop a marble mantelpiece, stand-up shows and immaculate suits, seasoned which he shows me with boyish enthusiasm. with weekly performances by the Jay Rayner Judging by his Instagram feed, the Rayner (jazz) Quartet, is no longer. It is nearing 5pm on household deserves a Michelin star. Images of a Friday and the UK’s suavest restaurant critic smoked haddock rarebit, kebab skewers and is slouched in his office chair, wearing a shab- Basque cheesecake dribbled with lavender honby grey cardigan and glasses. Over FaceTime, I ey, prepared à la Jay, make you at once envious can see his usual sleek curtain of brown hair has of his family and concerned for their health. expanded like bread left to rise, voluAll this fine dining at home isn’t for minous and puffy. fun. With restaurants closed Rayner, 54, is petulant as he for the foreseeable, Rayner considers a future of less eating is serving up reviews of his out. “This idea that people will most beloved cookbooks for go, ‘D’you know, I’ve rather enThe Observer, cooking three joyed these lockdowns, recipes and discussing each I’ll stay at home and author’s influence on the do that same f***ing culinary world. “So there’s spag bol recipe I’ve no way that I can be in resbeen doing for six taurants,” he says. “But I months’ - no!” For can allude to them and I The Observer’s rescan talk about them.” taurant critic, the host The first review celeof BBC4’s radio show brated Michelin star chef Kitchen Cabinet and host of Gary Rhodes’ New British the Out to Lunch podcast, the Classics. Rayner’s copy is prospect is understandably his sauce-stained and worn. worst nightmare. “It’s not going “Rhodes died suddenly in to happen!” he insists. “I want to 2019,” Rayner wrote for live my life and go out to restauThe Observer, “but here he rants!” is still holding my clumsy Though he reminds me of a hand.” teenager aching for independFor Rayner, the comforts of ence, Rayner insists he’s in a home cooking won’t beat eatlucky position. His podcast and ing out because there’s an elradio show can be recorded from ement of performance about his desk. He’s locking down at his the latter that he loves. Out to large house in south London with Lunch, which sees Rayner dine Photo: Levon Bliss

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out with impressive guests (recently singer Paloma Faith and actress Nina Sosanya), is more about his fellow diners than the chapchae noodles and the Taiwanese braised pork they feast upon.

In a recent review of a central London restaurant for The Observer, Rayner spends three paragraphs describing the mise-en-scène of the dining area before finally buttering his sourdough. “I’m not a food critic,” he corrects me.

“I’m a restaurant critic. I’m telling you how much pleasure your money can buy, what happens when you walk through the door.”

My Last Supper, Rayner’s recently-published memoir, celebrates the performativity of dining that he loves. In the final chapter, Rayner stages his death row meal for 40 friends. He originally hoped to get Netflix on board and, with the streaming giant’s help, tempt some dream invitees to attend.

He seriously considered inviting the Obamas (the more I thought about it, the lousier an idea it seemed, he writes. I’d be desperately worried that Barack and Michelle weren’t having a good time). French snails get their own course at the dinner. Oysters too.

But not all the food was chosen for its wow-factor. It is the memories that food conjures, as well as its taste, that earns it a place on Rayner’s holy table. Bread and butter, salad and even sparkling water get their own chapter in My Last Supper for this reason.

However, chocolate and cheese don’t make the cut. Zero emotional resonance there. “In everything I do about food, food is merely a vehicle for emotion,” Rayner explains to me.

“Obviously chocolate is a huge indulgence. But I didn’t have enough of an emotional connection, I didn’t have enough of a memory, enough stuff to build around it.” He shrugs. “So it went.”

If our attachment to food is an emotional one, Rayner thinks the same can be said for restaurants. “We like the smell of the herd,”

he explains. “We want to be in a crowded bar.”

He recalls a gastropub operator telling him it was the “atmosphere” he sold, not “steaks and

“I’m not a food critic, I’m a restaurant critic. I’m telling you how much pleasure your money can buy” chips and bottles of wine”.

Rayner is confident that months in lockdown won’t turn us into homebodies, even after the novelty of freedom has worn off. “If our behaviour did change, the pandemic of 1919 to 1920 would also have destroyed behaviour, and it didn’t. It led to the Roaring Twenties,” he grins.

My delectable 25 minutes with Rayner is almost up. I suspend reality with a final question: where will his first post-lockdown meal be?

Rayner’s answer is ready.

“I want to be at Brasserie Zédel, which is where my jazz quartet plays,” he says. “And I want to have one of those nights where I have a quick dinner in the Brasserie, play a cracking gig at the Crazy Coqs [the live music venue attached]. And then kill the last hour drinking too much wine, congratulating myself on being brilliant.” ◆

Photo: Levon Bliss

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Food for thought Becca Challis speaks to food historian Dr Annie Gray about which food history myths are ‘absolute bollocks’

Photo: Kristy Noble Photography/Catherine Entwistle

D

r Annie Gray is a food historian, historical consultant, and gourmand. Working alongside Jay Rayner for BBC Radio 4’s Kitchen Cabinet and Lucy Worsley for A Merry Tudor Christmas, Gray advises on all manner of food-themed projects. She is also the author of popular non-fiction titles Victory in the Kitchen, a biography of Churchill’s cook, The Greedy Queen, an analysis of Queen Victoria’s eating habits, From the Alps to the Dales, a history of Yorkshire institution Bettys and the Downton Abbey Cookbook.

How have you been keeping things interesting in lockdown?

My brother has been setting us Saturday night dinner party challenges because I keep losing my mojo with cooking, I’m so bored with my own

food. He gives us the theme two weeks in advance, so we’ve got two weeks to plan it. We’ve done French bistro, French high-end restaurant - that was challenging, three days of prep for that one. We’ve also done Israeli, Vietnamese, Peruvian and next week is school dinners.

So we’re doing turkey twizzlers, potato smileys, carrots and peas, followed by sponge and pink custard.

The weirdest thing you’ve ever eaten?

I’ve had testicles, they were quite nice. They’re like meatballs. I’ve done hearts on sticks, feet sticking out of pies. Often things that we think of as weird and in the past are still completely normal in other cultures, so deep fried chicken feet, which I had in Hong Kong airport of all places - amazing. Snouts and heads and all kinds

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of things. It’s all just how you cook them and I wouldn’t regard any of them as weird. But, I did find vegan mozzarella offensively weird.

What are the food history inaccuracies that annoy you most?

First, that nobody drank the water in the past.

Absolute bollocks, of course they drank the water - it’s free and most of the time it was pure.

Just do one. Second, meat was always spiced to disguise the fact that it was rotten. If you eat rotten meat you get the shits and risk dying, so no one’s going to eat rotten meat - okay bog off.

Plus spices were really expensive, so you’re not going to waste that on crap meat. Number three, everybody was short in the past. Also bullshit.

Go and have a look at some skeletal analysis.

Poor people were shorter than rich people in the past, but it’s also true today. So malnutrition plays a huge role and it’s a very complicated topic. Fourth, afternoon tea was invented by the Duchess of Bedford in 1842. No it wasn’t, go away. Oh, and all food in the past was really stodgy and fattening and disgusting. Yeah, well try vegan sausage and tell me that’s not stodgy and disgusting. They just fall down as soon as you apply logic, yet they’re repeated again and again and again.

Are there any food-focused film or TV shows that completely get historical food wrong?

The vast majority of food scenes in any film are going to be inaccurate because nobody could afford to put the money into making them 100 per cent bang on. It’s usually not the point.

If you’re making a film about food, then it’s a problem. So I think it’s important to be able to forgive things and not be a pedant about it.

Sometimes there are scenes where it is glaringly wrong, but it’s perfect. For example, in The Favourite, which I adored as a film, there’s a bit where Queen Anne is stuffing herself with blue cake icing. There wasn’t a stable blue food coloring until the 1930s. But it’s perfect in the context of the film, essentially an Edwardian cake with an icing that wouldn’t have existed till 1952, because the whole film is focused on

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this concept of heightened reality. If you want a film which gets it all right, apart from the gender of the cook, watch Babette’s Feast. She’d have been a man, but apart from that fundamental problem which the author acknowledged, it’s a brilliant food film - proper gastronomic porn.

Which of your historical discoveries are you most proud of?

I think just the life of Georgina Landemare (Victory in the Kitchen), full stop. I’m putting Churchill’s cook back into the rightful place in his life. The story of a woman who was totally ordinary, everybody’s Grandma basically, giving a voice to somebody who represents all of our ancestors.

It helps to free us of this ‘great man scenario’, especially where Churchill is concerned. There’s obviously a lot of revisionism around him and his actions right now. At the end of the day, he’s human. Everyone is just a person. But even his wife tends to get neglected. There are still only three biographies on Clemmie and she was absolutely pivotal, compared to thousands on him.

It’s a lot easier to be great if someone’s doing your bloody laundry.

How do you avoid clichés when you are writing about food?

In the book I’m writing currently, I’m deliberately using clichés, because it’s a very quirky tonguein-cheek-style book. At some point, I’ll probably go on a massive rant about ‘moist’ and whether or not moist is a useful word to use, precisely because it’s been used a lot. But I think every piece of writing is different and sometimes a cliché is an overused set of words because they’re a good set of words. Querying what you’re putting down, thinking, ‘Is this genuinely useful? Or am I just putting in filler?’, that’s the key to it really.

When I was at uni, I couldn’t really write. I struggled with getting my words down. So it’s a constant surprise to me that I’m making my living from writing now. I thoroughly enjoy the process of putting words together, of wordsmithing. ◆

10 books to help you break into the Asian kitchen Samyama Kolhapuri recommends the best recipe books to kickstart your Asian cooking adventure

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Illustrated by @l.ttle.joys

remember sitting under a jambu (java apple) tree when I was four, my parents spread out over a thin blanket with the radio singing to us from inside the house. Slow days filled with contentment were accompanied by plates filled with fresh aloo parathas (potato-filled flatbread) with dollops of butter and a pot of salt to smear onto our freshly plucked jambus.

As an Indian growing up in Indonesia, my meals were always an amalgamation of Indian dishes and Indonesian treats, and I found myself embracing being Indonesian through food.

The comforting ‘tempeh goreng’ (fried fermented soy cakes) from a smiling street shop owner near my school; the smell of teh manis (sweet black tea) in the mornings; a large pot of sayur asem (sour vegetable soup) passed around a chattering dinner table; laughter over an oddly burst Klepon (rice cake filled with liquid palm sugar) that spilt everywhere.

Exploring Indonesian food and later Asian cuisine has become one of my greatest passions. Here are the best books to get you started on your exploration.

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JAPAN

CHINA

Atsuko’s Japanese Kitchen: Home-Cooked Comfort Food Made Simple by Atsuko Ikeda

Land of Fish and Rice: Recipes From The Culinary Heart of China by Fuchsia Dunlop

THAILAND

CAMBODIA

Bangkok Local: Cult Recipes From The Streets That Make The City by Sarin Rojanametin and Jean Thamthanakorn

Cambodian Cooking: A Humanitarian Project in Collaboration with Act for Cambodia by Joannes Riviere and Dominique De Bourgknecht

There are 8 regions in Japan, and Atsuko, a Japanese cookery teacher for over a decade, is excited to teach you what’s unique about each.

From meal planning to chopstick mannerisms, her approachability stands out.

Sarin and Jean moved to Melbourne to study photography and economics respectively, but life steered them towards cooking. In 2014, they opened up an experimental kitchen, NORA. After two years of stirring dishes, they decided to close, move back to Bangkok and explore their roots.

A cookbook with the flair of a travel memoir, Fuchsia documents her culinary journey through Jiangnan, south of the Yangtze River.

She imparts intimate knowledge of the region’s delicate and balanced cuisine from the locals, pulling us into their history.

Joannes came to Cambodia as a volunteer cooking teacher but he stayed and opened Cuisine Wat Damnak. The restaurant celebrates the deep connection the locals still have with their land by foraging . This book opens up a world of rustic harmonious flavours.

INDONESIA Coconut & Sambal: Recipes from My Indonesian Kitchen by Lara Lee

Passed down from Lara’s popo (grandmother), from a kitchen painted all shades of blue in the town of Kupang on the island of Timor.

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PHILIPPINES I Am a Filipino: And This Is How We Cook by Nicole Ponseca

Growing up in the US, Filipinos were the ‘invisible minority’. Ruled by the Spanish for over 300 years, Filipino people remain stuck between the AsianAmerican and the Latino-American community. Nicola wrote this book as a way to take a stand and display pride in her heritage. She has been hailed as a pioneer since.

VIETNAM

SOUTH KOREA

Vietnamese Home Cooking by Charles Phan and Jessica Battilana

Cook Korean! A Comic Book with Recipes

by Robin Ha

After the fall of Saigon, the Phan family escaped in a cargo ship eventually arriving in San Francisco. Charles dreamt of opening a small crepe shop inspired by one back home but instead, opened ‘The Slanted Door’. In his first book, find heartfelt memories and striking visuals.

Robin, a professional cartoonist, compiled and crafted her weekly Tumblr project called Banchan in 2 Pages, which illustrated instructions for various Korean dishes into a recipe book filled with charm and knowledge.

MYANMAR

MALAYSIA

Burma: Food, Family & Conflict by Stephen Anderson and Bridget Anderson

Amazing Malaysian: Recipes for Vibrant Malaysian Home-Cooking by Norman Musa

Bridget, a professor of Migration and Citizenship, and her brother, Stephen, a chef, crafted and self-published this book to create an independent account of their family history and to preserve distinctive regional recipes. The book was based on extensive interviews with Grandy (their grandmother) before her passing.

Norman is a restauranteur, a cooking show guest, a teacher, a chef for the Formula One Lotus team and more. His success stems from helping his hard-working parents run a food business in Penang. This book recognises his passions while speaking about the unique union of three ethnicities — Malay, Chinese and Indian. ◆

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Cosmo through the looking glass Becca Challis meets Cosmo Sheldrake, the man who makes music from mushrooms

C

osmo Sheldrake appears at first glance to be an eccentric indie artist, with a kooky style and niche audience. But, as Franz Kafka said, first impressions are often unreliable.

The 31-year-old musician’s song ‘Birthday Suit’ has been used in an impressive 1.7 million videos on TikTok. He has one million monthly Spotify listeners and his single ‘Come Along’ has 11 million views on YouTube. Entirely recorded in his bedroom, this one-man-band is making his niche oh-so-popular.

Intrigued to discover the inspiration behind his unique sound, I arranged a Zoom call. At 3.20pm, a stubbled chin appeared on my screen – iPhone

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Photo: Peter Flude

camera providing a perfect worm’s-eye view.

“Helloooooo?” erupted from the speakers and a grin split Cosmo’s face in half, a boyish mop of muddy curls falling over his eyes. “Wait I’ve just got to turn everything off. I’m running out of power.”

He scrambles under the desk, pointing his video at a small digital meter. “There’s more going out than coming in. I could be in trouble,” he laughs.

This small shed, on his girlfriend’s mum’s property in Devon, has served as Cosmo’s lockdown hideout. Strolling through the soggy green garden to a hunched-over cottage, he explains that the site is entirely off-grid, powered by a diesel gen-

erator. A failing immersion heater means the water is sporadic and the oven stopped working months ago. Incongruously cheerful about it, Cosmo is like an unapologetically content character in The Good Life.

His quest outdoors was prompted by my question on mushrooms.

Cosmo’s brother Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist, published the book Entangled Life on the subject in May 2020. To accompany the release, the musician produced an identically titled song for his sibling, composed from the ‘voices’ of mushrooms.

“This machine can turn electrical activity in plants and fungi into sound,” he explains, with a close-up of a neon-green box, teeming with dials and crocodile clips. His eyes widen: “Actually I’ll show you, I’ve got some growing right here.” In the corner of the jumble-sale eclectic-ness of the cottage’s farmhouse kitchen is a sack of wood chips, a large oyster mushroom sprouting from its side. With the clips attached, the fungus let out a series of wails, reminiscent of Disney robot WALL-E. This ‘plant chant’ machine was invented by Tony Bassett, a good friend of Cosmo’s father (scientist Rupert Sheldrake, best known for his controversial theory on morphic resonance, bridging hard science with the psychic). Often cropping up in conversation, Rupert encouraged the young Cosmo to birdwatch and is the scientific inspiration behind the brothers’ fermentation experiments (they’re starting their own hot sauce company). But his biggest influence seems to be on the musician’s natural science philosophies. He says: “Personally I don’t think music or language is a human phenomenon.”

Growing up on the edge of Hampstead Heath, Cosmo has always kept one foot in the wild. He detests manicured gardens and finds New York’s Central Park a frustrating spectacle: “A beautiful place, but there are so many things you can’t do. I can’t really abide by that.”

This rule-avoiding mentality is rooted in his childhood. His mother, Jill Purce, is a voice teacher, specialising in Mongolian overtone chanting. Both sons learned piano by ear: “I still can’t read or write music. I grew up with lots of music in and around the house and I think I was just connected with it.”

Cosmo believes this had a “huge impact” on his ability to express himself, because he “felt free to

do that in an environment where it was encouraged in me from a young age”.

Cosmo’s unique musical style stems from his EP The Moss (2014), and blossoms in his first album The Much Much How How and I (2018). He records and releases on his own label, Tardigrade,

“hearing the

shattering of the silence with its pure piercing kind of rhythmic singing is such an enchanting feeling ” named after the fascinating micro-animal (which is otherwise known as a water bear or moss piglet). “It’s about keeping complete control and freedom of choice and allowing myself to be a bit spontaneous and follow my nose.”

Often surrealist in feel, his songs layer textures and experiment with unusual timbres, which are then paired with playful lyrics. The silliness of nonsense poetry draws him: “I think, in general, I react against taking things too seriously. There are so many serious songs and subject matters.”

Instead, he is inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. Wild and whimsical lyrics such as ‘Come along catch a Heffalump / Sit with me on a muddy clump / We’ll sing a song of days gone by’ are the norm. “There’s an amazingly profound philosophical edge to nonsense literature – it’s not just silliness for silliness’ sake.”

He uses his own form of nonsense to address big topics close to his heart.

‘Egg and Soldiers’ alludes to the

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“the one that

went so deep that I basically learned all the words to, was Fantastic Mr Fox” “When I first recorded the cuckoo I was over the moon with excitement – skylarks too. It gave me the idea, because they’re completely crazy – like drum and bass.”

In his free time, Cosmo enjoys baking bread (back before the oven stopped working) and fermenting vegetables – he offers me great advice on kimchi.

The outdoors is vital to his creativity: “‘One of the things I do without fail is get outside for a bit, go for

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Photo: Peter Flude

a walk.” He reads a lot too. His favourites include Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. From childhood, he had one very rooted obsession. “The one that went so deep that I basically learnt all the words to, was Fantastic Mr Fox.” At times, he appears cut-off from the mainstream, in ‘Cosmo’s World’ (which sounds like a tragic 70s sitcom). But then he’ll nonchalantly mention jamming with viral musician Jacob Collier (“We got together and made a tune one day, he’s an absolute beast”) or discuss the perils of streaming platforms, which show his feet are firmly planted in the earth. Visible from the window behind him, is a birdfeeder and his head twists at any disturbance outside. Perhaps the ‘eccentricity’ of Cosmo is his unapologetic joy at being completely at home in nature.

He belongs to the birds. ◆

Illustration: Tim Weaving

climate disaster, through the language of nursery rhymes. “I try to get to serious subject matters through non-serious means that don’t trigger the same kind of antibody responses. Often the rational engagement of that kind of thing can lead to a sense of despair.”

Wake Up Calls (2020), his latest album, tackles another environmental issue: The declining population of British birds. Each song, named after a species on the UK’s red or amber conservation list, is narrated entirely by the bird itself – relying once more on nature’s orchestra. Just one, ‘Cuckoo Song’, includes Cosmo’s own voice and lyrics in a folk-like duet with the endangered bird, told from its perspective.

One song had a particularly profound effect on the artist. “There’s such a haunting feeling being in the woods with a nightingale. It’s quiet at that time of night, so hearing the shattering of the silence with its pure piercing kind of rhythmic singing is such an enchanting feeling – like you’re listening in on very intimate encounters.”

Having collected avian recordings for the last decade, Cosmo layers birdsong in climbing lyrical patterns to raise attention for their plight. It is equal parts environmental campaign and music passion project for this sound-obsessed magpie:

Japanese Psychedelia Ed Cunningham deepdives into the psychedelic music movement in Japan, a drugless take on America’s hallucinogenic dream

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IIlustrated by Rowan Bailey

echnically, by pure definition, psychedelia doesn’t hinge on drug use. The word itself, derived from the Greek ‘psyche’ and ‘deloun’, quite literally means to reveal one’s soul.

But the term was originally coined to describe the effects of hallucinogenic drugs, and in the UK, US and Europe, the psychedelic movement of the 1960s was defined by its association with acid, hallucinogens, LSD, mescaline, DMT – whatever could addle the mind and warp one’s sense of reality. The rest – hippies, Beat poets, garish tiedye and free love, man – is history.

In Japan, however, psychedelic drugs have always been curiously absent from psychedelia. The country is infamous for its stern drug laws: since the 1950s, Japan has upheld prison sentences of up to seven years for the mere possession of psychotropic substances. To this day, even being caught with certain inhalers and allergy tablets can carry a significant prison term.

‘Japanese psychedelia’ might therefore seem a tad oxymoronic. But Japanese musicians have, over the past half-century or so, proved that the out-of-body and inner self can thrive outside of a drug culture. Psychedelia has saturated the Japanese musical landscape for generations, and produced countless works of frazzed out, mindbending, worldbuilding psych music.

So where does one begin with such a daunting and lasting phenomenon? Japanese psych obviously can’t be condensed to a few pages (and its history has often been warped by oversimplification).

It warrants books. So this isn’t a history; just a very, very brief overview, singling out some key subgenres and releases along the way.

A good place to start is, naturally, at the very beginning – or close to it. Good ol’ ‘traditional’ psychedelic rock took hold in Japan sometime in the late 1960s. In the quest to reveal their own souls, early Japanese psych rockers absorbed many of the musical, visual and holistic tropes of the psychedelic movement elsewhere. Fixated with South Asian mysticism, their music was bluesy and surreal, while bands employed typically ornate, warped art nouveau visuals – and a notable male gaze fondness for images of naked women.

As time wore on, Japanese artists moved away from merely reinterpreting the drug-addled works of American and British bands like The Beatles, Cream and The 13th Floor Elevators. Japanese

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Benzaiten (or God of Music and Water) by Osamu Kitajima (1976)

bands such as the proto heavy metal Flower Travellin’ Band and the free-improvisational, droning Taj Mahal Travellers experimented with complicated song structures and uncommon time signatures.

From psychedelic rock, it’s only a short step to psychedelic folk, a subgenre grounded in somewhat similar themes and aesthetics, but with jangly, acoustic, more pastoral (in short, folky) characteristics.

Psychedelic folk ranges immensely, from reverberating big bands to mystically-tinged singer-songwriters. Check out Doji Morita’s A Boy (1977) for a sombre folk work with a haunting edge,

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and look to Osamu Kitajima’s Benzaiten (1976) for a masterful large-scale melding of entrancing psychedelic grooves and traditional Japanese folk instruments like the ‘biwa’ (a kind of short-necked lute), ‘koto’ (half-tube 13-string instrument) and ‘tsuzumi’ (hand drum).

But, as in the US, UK and Europe, psychedelia in Japan wasn’t simply about seeking out-ofbody experiences. It was unshakably tied to counterculture movements of the 1960s. Japan too experienced a decade of student mobilisation, radical political organisation and police brutality, and this era of protest and unrest, naturally, took musical form.

The most notorious group of the era were the incendiary, cultish Les Rallizes Dénudés. Formed at a university in Kyoto in 1967, the group were shrouded in mystery and trailed by rumours of revolutionary politics. The original bassist Moriaki Wakabayashi assisted in the 1970 Japanese Red Army hijacking of a civilian airliner before supposedly fleeing to North Korea, while lead singer Takashi Mizutani was also accused of Red Army affiliations. But little is really known about Mizutani – including, to this day, whether he’s even still alive.

Les Rallizes Dénudés never formally released any music, but their trail of bootlegs and discarded studio recordings were enough to ensure their reverence in tales of Japanese psychedelia. In their three decades of activity, the group bridged initial Japanese psychedelic rock and wilder, more abstract later acts, offering a clear link between

Satori (or Awakening) by Flower Travellin’ Band (1971)

psychedelic rock and noise rock.

The music of Les Rallizes Dénudés combined Mizutani’s shrieking, cavernous vocals with reverberating, piercing guitars, distinctively anchored by a bluesy bass – and all played out at staggering volume. ’77 Live (1991) is their most famed document, but it isn’t on streaming, so a good taster is my personal favourite, the lightly-named Heavier than a Death in the Family (2002, though mostly recorded in 1977).

If psychedelia sought ‘to reveal one’s soul’, noise rock took to revealing all, even when one’s inner self was tortured, disfigured or violent. For noise rockers, visions of the soul weren’t hyperactive blitzes of swarming shapes and colours but raw expressions teeming with existential dread.

Noise music has its own very complicated and illdefined history. Rooted in several of the twentieth century’s most influential art movements, noise can literally mean any sounds that one doesn’t want to hear.

Nevertheless, the term has become synonymous with certain extreme clichés, and noise rock simply means to fit common features of noise music (feedback, dissonance, distortion) into the norms and structures of rock music (verses, choruses, and so on).

In the 1980s, noise rock typified a new kind of Japanese psychedelic music. Some, such as underground marvel Keiji Haino’s band Fushitsusha (foo-sheet-soo-sha), channelled the expansionist drones of Les Rallizes Dénudés. Others grew rawer and faster – still broadly within the remit of psychedelia’s hypnotic textures and rhythms.

If all this seems too distracted from psychedelia’s initial age of transcendental self-discovery, fear not. The most recent phase of psychedelic music, neo-psychedelia has lasted from the 1980s to the present day, and throws back to the genre’s 1960s roots.

Neo-psychedelia came to Japan from Europe and America, a subgenre that sought to apply the disorientating, fantastical spirit of psychedelia to more modern sounds and techniques. Elsewhere, this rejuvenating movement was again fuelled by drugs – but, again, not in Japan.

The bracket of neo-psychedelia is enormous.

It can range from those feeding on psychedelia’s

spirituality to others taking influence from any number of psychedelic subgenres worldwide. As such, that broadness makes it difficult to pick out its most effective works or artists.

Boredoms, initially a noise rock and punk band, grew out their sound with space-age electronics.

Using synthesisers, turntables and computers,

‘Tayorinai tenshi’ (or ‘Unreliable Angel’) by Fishmans (1992)

their Vision Creation Newsun (1999) ditched thrashing screams for lush, cacophonous psych rock – a triumph of atmosphere and spirituality.

Closer to pop were Fishmans, a band that fashioned their own kind of dreamlike, aquatic audio landscapes. Long Season (1996), the band’s studio opus, featured textured sonic exploration with mellow repetition and free improvisation, all over the course of a single 35-minute track.

In the world of actual, charting pop music, Japan in the 1990s witnessed Shibuya-kei (‘Shibuyastyle’, named after one of Tokyo’s 23 wards), a pop movement drenched in kitsch, escapist nostalgia.

Shibuya-kei artists used samples to build their own washed-out, surreal worlds. It was a phenomenon in itself, but one example is Cornelius’ Fantasma (1997), a fluorescent sugar rush and patchwork masterpiece.

So there you have it, a taster of the immense and endlessly faceted world of Japanese psychedelic music. Countless artists and subgenres, even from just within Japan, have gone unmentioned; this is but one country’s faction of a global movement, the tip of a psychedelic iceberg. ◆

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A musical journey

Soundtrack your book(ish) experience: Cara Laskaris recommends classical music to transport, provoke and delight

Finland

France

Einojuhani Rautavaara Cantus Arcticus

“It is my belief that music is great if, at some moment, the listener catches a glimpse of eternity through the window of time.”

So said Finnish avant-garde composer Rautavaara, a self-confessed mystic whose expansive sound worlds will transport you far beyond the normal rush of time.

Cantus Arcticus, written in 1972, features birdsong recorded near the Arctic Circle and evokes the bleak beauty of this cold landscape like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

Olivier Messiaen Quartet for the End of Time French classical composer Messiaen had synaesthesia, a condition that enabled him to see sounds as colour – so there is only one way to listen to his work: eyes closed, for full aural-chromatic immersion

U.K.

Anna Meredith ‘Stoop - Spring’ from Four Seasons

If you don’t already know about Anna Meredith, welcome to a whole new world of genre-defying craziness. An experimental electro/classical composer who has supported the likes of James Blake and These New Puritans, Meredith has written for the BBC Proms and was shortlisted for a Mercury award in 2020.

The frenetic violin scrubs and heavy meta-rhythms of ‘Stoop Spring’ evoke a heady spring vibe that’s more underground club than flowery meadow – a gritty contrast to Vivaldi’s Venetian original.

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around Europe Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time has a deeper significance though. It was born out of the most brutal of circumstances, written and premiered in 1941 when Messiaen was being held in a Nazi prison camp.

With manuscript paper smuggled in by a sympathetic guard and the unusual instrumentation – violin, clarinet, cello and piano – drawn from the fellow prisoners, it represents a tortured yet miraculous transcendence into another world.

scan to listen

Romania

Grigoraș Dinicu ‘The Skylark’

There’s a deep, dark corner of Eastern Europe that some call ‘the land that time forgot’. It’s wooded, mysterious and the home of a certain Dracula.

But Romania is hiding another thrilling secret: classical music.Inspired by a rich folk tradition that encompasses Arabian and gypsy influences, it is amongst the most exciting and alluring on the planet.

Anghelus Dinicu premiered ‘The Skylark’ in 1889 at the opening of the Eiffel Tower, but his grandson’s reworking of it has become a popular staple for Dmitri Shostakovich Eastern European orchestras.

Fifth movement of String Quartet No. 9 It features the cimbalom, a Time to crank up the volume. Shostakovich is classical metal strung box that is hit with music’s answer to Rage Against the Machine. Gritty? hammers, and a virtuoso violin Check. Clinically insane? Almost certainly. Irresistible? line which emulates said skylark Absolutely. in stratospheric tones. ◆ Like a ride through a demented carnival, this piece is a terrifying but thrilling dive into Shostakovich’s frankly quite loopy musical world. There are mad drones, violins that sound like demonic chickens, even a trippy waltz. Just go with it.

Russia

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Illustrated by Gemma Lawrence

Fi r e in the booth “Drill music isn’t inciting violence - it’s the reality of austerity and oppression”

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Isabelle Gray explores London, the epicentre of the UK rap scene, and examines the social issues and politics embedded within music

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n a 2011 Fire in the Booth session, Akala said: “We don’t hit the road cos we are thugs / Don’t come out the womb, wanting to sell drugs / If we got the right guidance and love / Would we fight people just like us? / How could I knock the hustle to get by? / How do you think I ate as a child?”

With London being the epicentre of the UK rap scene, lyrics like these are a common testament to what it means to live in London, a city fractured by discrimination through race and class.

Ben B.C., an R&B artist, who experiments with forms of gospel, pop, rap, hip-hop, garage and grime, describes his experience of living in the city of London: “There’s so much stuff to do in London, and I had a sudden realisation recently of ‘oh I haven’t

“it’s this weird

feeling of being trapped in a city that has so much opportunity, but you just can’t enjoy it” really done anything yet’. And it’s almost this weird feeling of being trapped in a city that has so much opportunity, but you just can’t enjoy it.

“In one of my songs, I talk about how much I love ends, but I’m probably not going to live here when I move out because I can’t afford it. West Norwood is my ends, but the tax man is telling me you can’t live there, still!”

Does he consider his art a source of social commentary and a space to learn? “So for me it’s music first, message second. And then if it’s something that other people can latch onto, great.

“But I don’t want to feel like that’s what I’m supposed to do as an artist, and I don’t want people to expect that of artists in general. They gotta say something, especially with Black musicians - that ‘struggle’ has to be an integral part of storytelling. I’m not a poet though, I’m a musician!”

Black art should be allowed the space to be a place of joy and freedom - the use of social commentary in music should be up to individuals and not an expectation. Moreover, when musicians do disclose this part of themselves, it’s often opportunistically taken in bad faith.

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Currently, drill and rap music are being used as evidence in trials claiming the music incites violence.

In 2019, a young man was stabbed to death following an altercation with a rival gang. ‘Violent’ lyrics from the defendant’s songs were used as evidence against him in the murder trial. The prosecution claimed: “Either they describe the life he already leads, or they describe the life he aspires to lead.”

This is hardly surprising, as music rooted in Black art forms is rarely recognised for what it is: a place of joy and a form of resistance. The art form is also one of the few ways to access firsthand testimony of the Black experience.

But does drill music incite violence? Bell Ribeiro-Addy, MP for Streatham, says: “The argument that music normalises or influences the behaviours of the listener has been used for decades to divert the blame for the pressing issues facing society, whether it be the rivalry between mods and rockers supposedly caused

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by 1960s British rock, 1990s gangsta rap promoting gang culture, and now drill music causing a surge in youth violence.”

“the argument

has been used for decades to divert the blame for the pressing issues facing society” She adds: “Music has often been the focus of moral panics, simply because it is easier to suggest that a certain type of music normalises a certain type of behaviour and is therefore to blame, rather than addressing the real issues at hand – the failings of the state.

“Young people have sadly seen their opportunitues taken away over the past two decades. Austerity measures are certainly the most prominent factor causing knife crime and youth violence... [which] can mostly be blamed on the failure of our government to invest in our young people.”

Across time, Black genres have influenced protests and grassroots movements, and in turn have become an empowering art form. Without rappers, the experience of being Black in London would be less known and understood.

While powerful and positive associations are overlooked, the genres’ possible negative effects have been discussed again and again throughout history. This negates the important conversations that need to be had about austerity and structural inequalities suffered at the hands of the state, that can force people into violent lifestyles. This targeting reinforces how Black people can quickly become both the victims and suspects of violence in London. ◆

reviews

Insatiable by Daisy Buchanan book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Photo: @nellreadsbooks

Reviewed by Rhiannon Jenkins

Daisy Buchanan describes Insatiable as “a love story for greedy girls” – for those with a ravenous and animalistic appetite for life.

The main character, Violet, is a disillusioned social media manager in her late twenties. Recovering from a broken engagement to her long-term boyfriend Mark, she meets Lottie, a successful older woman clad in designer clothing.

Lottie is the type of woman Violet longs to become, so when she offers her an exciting job at her new start-up, Violet can’t believe her luck.

But, after a business lunch with Lottie and her “billboard

hot” husband that involves thigh-stroking and snogging, Violet soon realises that her new bosses expect more of her than she first thought, and she is lured into their world of threesomes and sex parties.

Like many in their twenties, Violet is lonely and trying to find purpose in life. Journalist Buchanan perfectly captures the essence of being lost in one’s twenties.

Insatiable is written for any young woman who has ever felt lonely in a big city. And while Violet is relatively privileged, she is far from perfect – and that, along with the sex, is what draws people in. ◆

Luster by Raven Leilani book(ish) rating:★★★★★ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★ Reviewed by Chloé Meley Raven Leilani’s debut book, Luster, immediately sets the scene of a love story fit for the digital era with a fully clothed virtual romp “bathed in blue computer light”.

But this virtual encounter - and all the promises it holds - between 23-year-old painter Edie and middle-aged businessman Eric, quickly loses its magic as it is transplanted into the physical realm.

As the protagonists’ opposite worlds collide for the first time - Edie is a broke Black woman, Eric an affluent white man - Leilani dissects the affair through Edie’s eyes and expertly paints the young woman’s ambivalent attitude to-

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Photo: @zp_books

wards the burgeoning relationship.

Things take an unexpected turn when Edie gets fired from her job and moves into Eric’s house, forming a strange yet sturdy bond with his wife.

As Edie attempts to navigate this bizarre situation, she reflects and grows.

Leilani writes her protagonist’s inner monologue so vividly that the whole novel feels like a story whispered in confidence, from Edie to you. You will gasp at times, erupt in laughter, nod in agreement, and shake your head in confusion. And until the end, you’ll listen intently. ◆

Photo: @whatssarahreadingnow

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart book(ish) rating:★★★☆☆ readability: ★★★☆☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Nicola Lewis

Shuggie Bain, the debut novel and 2020 Booker Prize winner by Douglas Stuart, centres on the tender relationship between the eponymous character and his mother. Shuggie, from the age of five, has looked after his mother, as she suffers from alcoholism.

The attempt to grapple with troubling and heartbreaking themes makes for an emotional read. On the one hand, Stuart’s writing is visceral and transportive. On the other, descriptions can be too dense.

The writing often feels confusing - The Scotsman likened it to that of Dickens.

The novel straddles between presenting the struggle of this life and the tender family relationships forged despite difficult circumstances.

The extreme level of violence and deprivation in the novel attests to Stuart’s own exposure to working class life in Glasgow in the 1980s. His own mother died of alcohol-related issues, which gives his writing a real authority.

However, the often tangential prose is difficult to keep up with, and it was hard to remember what the purpose of a paragraph was at times. This was the largest let down of the novel. ◆

10 Minutes and 38 Seconds by Elif Shafak

Photo: @book_nest_

book(ish) rating:★★★★★ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★ Reviewed by Bea Tridimas

Set in mid-late twentieth century Turkey, 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World follows the life of Tequila Leila, a sex worker, until her untimely death on the outskirts of Istanbul.

At the novel’s core, lies the transience of human existence, as each chapter recounts a moment in Leila’s life from the point of view of her soul as it departs its dying body.

But what might from the outset seem a rather bleak tale is, in fact, a story of resilience, camaraderie and hope. Shafak avoids existential angst and instead tackles death with a distinct quirk and thought-provoking philosophy.

Leila finds a home with the misfits of 1970s Istanbul: a transgender woman, a runaway bride, a Somalian immigrant and a dwarf. Each presents an opportunity to question the misogynies of Istanbul, making the novel a refreshing contribution to contemporary women’s fiction.

Her language is like a melt-in-the-middle desert – indulgent, but it slips off the page with ease and fills you up simultaneously with warmth and bitterness.

Daring and beautiful, 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World is a deeply passionate reflection on the oppression of women and marginalised genders. ◆

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Photo: Tim Weaving

Klara and the Sun

by Kazuo Ishiguro book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★★ Reviewed by Becca Challis

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, and his first since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.

Highly anticipated, the novel does not disappoint; it builds on Ishiguro’s previous successes, providing further nuanced and relevant observations on what it means to be human.

As a solar-powered artificial friend (AF) intended to prevent loneliness in children, Klara is chosen as a companion for Josie. From then, Klara is immersed in the complications of human relationships, power struggles, love, hate and everything in between.

Ishiguro’s writing is like a welcoming embrace, guiding you

through some pretty deep questions. Will childhood love last forever? Who can you trust when people are so hard to read?

Familiar themes emerge like innocence and individuality, reminiscent of those explored in Never Let Me Go. What remains distinct to Klara and the Sun is its relevance. Ishiguro completed his manuscript before the pandemic hit, yet themes of isolation, pollution, and artificial intelligence feel as urgent right now as they are timeless in their relation to humanity. Once again, Ishiguro adds another masterwork to the mix. ◆

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Carina Murphy The titular Hamnet, Shakespeare’s young son, who dies of plague and inspires the similarly dubbed ‘Hamlet’ has a small part in O’Farrell’s eight book. But this novel isn’t about the famous poet, play, or the boy. Our real protagonist is the long-ignored wife and mother, Agnes, known as Anne.

In fittingly sensual, feminine prose, we are finally given Agnes’ perspective. Attuned to the elements and blessed with intuition, Agnes is a witch, though O’Farrell never lumbers her with stereotypes, opting instead for the greenfingered, mysterious fey conjured in Shakespeare’s plays.

As rumours circulate in small town Stratford-upon-Avon,

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Photo: Carina Murphy

Agnes falls in love, starts a family, grieves for her son and comes to terms with her husband’s long abandonment.

Anyone who has studied ‘The Bard’ will spot O’Farrell’s nods to ‘key themes’ (twins, cross-dressing, ghosts). But the historical detail makes this novel so immersive: the market town, the hocus-pocus Elizabethan medicine, the primal mossy forest.

In Hamnet, expect both fantastical escapism, a timely examination of grief, and an act of narrative resistance that will leave Agnes, not her husband, haunting your memory for weeks to come. ◆

Photo: @thenameofthebooks

First Person Singular by Haruki Murakami

book(ish) rating:★★★☆☆ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★☆☆ memorability: ★★★★☆

Reviewed by Chiara Wilkinson The hype around Haruki Murakami’s 22nd book has been coming-of-age attraction. The narrator recounts a highpredictably grandiose for the acclaimed Japanese author. school crush they admire from a distance, until one day she First Person Singular is a collection of eight short stories - vanishes “like smoke”. blurring the lines between the real and the surreal, the col- First Person Singular ticks all of the boxes for hungry and lection has the hallmark of all Murakami’s work: simplicity. impatient Murakami fans: the talking animals, the blunt Murakami’s skill in bending simple language into beautiful accounts of one-night stands, and even the trademark deprose is part of his appeal as a writer. But in First Person Sin- scriptions of a “simple meal”. But what it lacks - and what gular, the simplicity verges on clumsiness. It is saved only by Murakami’s novels typically do so well - is any depth of the adult subject matter, which is peppered with Murakami’s character. Without it, it is difficult to convince the reader signatory subtle erotica throughout. that the microscopic moments were worth writing about in The fourth story, ‘With the Beatles’, is a reflection on the first place. ◆

Broom, Broom, London Review of Books

book(ish) rating:★★☆☆☆ readability: ★★☆☆☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★☆☆☆ memorability: ★★★☆☆ Reviewed by Liz Gregory

For those looking for a romp amongst green-tinted, broom-wielding, gleefully cackling hags, Broom, Broom is not it - it is far more terrifying. The anthology begins with Rosalind Mitchison’s 1982 ‘Transformation’, an introduction to witchcraft in Scotland and Europe between 1590-1670.

The essays that follow are no less potent: Indologist Wendy Doniger writes about horse-ripping in southern-England, and Marina Warner recounts the tale of Tituba, the first woman to be accused of witchcraft.

Broom, Broom works as an enduring selection as the witch continues to fascinate. The collection is interested in the

Photo: Liz Gregory & Fauzan Ardhi

witch-figure’s ever-lingering power to possess communities the world over: “Throughout these rich essays, ‘never again’ whispers between the lines, but one can’t be sure.”

Witch figures in both history and fairy tales were often poor, older, or sickly. “Yet they inspire delighted shivers of terror and a strong desire to emulate their witchy powers,” writes Warner. This is the case in the collection too.

You do not need to be interested in witchcraft to find this collection compelling, and history-fans will find the content more enjoyable. Although the essays deal with darkness, the reader is left enlightened and oddly inspired. ◆

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Photo: @cathybbookshelf

Adults by Emma Jane Unsworth book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★

Reviewed by Nicola Blackburn Adults opens with Jenny pondering over how to caption her Many of Unsworth’s stereotypes are pointedly told Instagrammed croissant. It’s the perfect introduction to the from a “white girl” perspective, which detracts from her 30-something-year-old protagonist, whose social media otherwise brilliant satire, but her chopping and changing of habits are ridiculous, relatable and downright hilarious. form will leave you entertained.

Adults is about Jenny’s struggle to situate herself in a Her habit of terminating a chapter mid-sentence mirrors society where womanhood is fraught with expectation. Jenny’s woeful attention span, damaged by her Instagram Surrounded by women making bold statements about addiction. Her text conversations reveal her friendships are who they are, from her bohemian mother to her friend taking the toll of her self-absorption. Adults declares the Nicolette who “looks like a Russian supermodel”, and impossibility of capturing a 30-something white woman’s as columnist for a ‘feminist’ magazine, Jenny endlessly experience in London. And this is why Adults gets my heart commercializes womanhood. ‘like’. ◆

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are by Rachel Bloom

Photo: Sara Deck

book(ish) rating:★★★★★ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Chloé Meley Bloom’s debut is a hilarious memoir about coming into one’s own and the hurdles faced on the path towards selfassurance. She is best known as the creator and star of the TV series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are tackles similar themes like romantic tribulations and mental health, exhibiting the same eccentric humour as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

The influence of the TV series’ musical comedy formula is also palpable but I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are is not merely a disjointed collection of comedy sketches adapted in book form. Instead, Bloom weaves together

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two-stories - one about her mental illness, the other her career - with refreshing nuance. Her honest descriptions of living with anxiety, depression and OCD are the high points of the book.

Those more serious chapters are also where she flaunts her comedy chops, using humour in a way that never feels distracting or gauche. Bloom paints the portrait of a woman who intimately knows herself. A woman who now can, at 33, look back and understand what it all meant.

She writes candidly about her successes and setbacks, but never goes overboard with the self-deprecating anecdotes. ◆

Photo: Kay Ean Leong

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★☆

Reviewed by Kay Ean Leong Joan Didion famously wrote that “we tell ourselves stories in on’s early struggles with writing. At university she fails an order to live”. At 86, she continues to do so. assignment out of “adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a collection of 12 short pre- be good and a fright that I would never be, of terror that viously unpublished essays. The collection presents slices of any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not mid 20th century American life, each tackling a different good enough”. theme, yet offering a glimpse of Didion’s coolly penetrating Let Me Tell You What I Mean is Didion at her essence. Anyvision. No subject stands out more than the subject of writ- one familiar with her work will find the same delightful coning. In “Why I Write” – a title borrowed from Orwell – she struction of language, and sentences that roll off the tongue explains that for her, she writes to understand. To distil. To and insist on leaving an imprint on the mind. make sense of the images in her mind.

Didion’s is a unique voice in this world, one that the collec“Telling Stories” paints a more relatable picture of Didi- tion does well to capture. ◆

A Table for Friends

by Skye McAlpine

Photo: @sarah.tomczak

book(ish) rating:★★★★★ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Rhiannon Jenkins Skye McAlpine’s Instagram feed is a feast for the eyes. Mismatched china plates heave with creamy burrata and buttery brioche and shots of glassy Venice canals spring up like postcards from the writer’s home on the Italian coast.

Thanks to McAlpine’s latest cookbook, A Table for Friends: The Art of Cooking for Two or Twenty, we can all have a taste of La Dolce Vita. An ode to the writer’s hearty appetite and creativity, it’s a collection of simple, Italian-ish recipes and beautiful visuals to inspire your own dinner party. And you needn’t be an experienced cook to pull it off.

Recipes include seasonal menu plans and pairing sugges-

tions, such as roast chicken with juicy and sharp roasted plums. I tried the ‘Sicilian Extravaganza’ from the spring collection, a Sicilian couscous salad, a timballo of baked courgettes, and a svergognata – a concoction of whipped ricotta with candied peel, bitter dark chocolate and pistachios. It was easy to make and deliciously moreish.

The best part of McAlpine’s book is the fuss-free guide to hosting a dinner party. The ‘cooking by numbers’ and ‘cooking by timings’ sections are incredibly useful. Recipes to ‘throw together’ and bake ‘in the oven’ are particularly handy when you’re cooking for a crowd and lack oven space. ◆

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My Last Supper by Jay Rayner book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★ Photo: Levon Bliss

Reviewed by Nicola Blackburn

My Last Supper is everything that Jay Rayner is: flamboyant, ambitious and delightful. Rayner’s memoir is about his final meal on Earth (minus the imminent death) and he concludes by serving a dinner with all his favourite foods, for all his best friends.

For the UK’s suavest restaurant critic, My Last Supper is surprisingly honest and often self-deprecating. Expect to grimace through passages about young Rayner’s sexual experiences and encounters with mushrooms (not the kind that go well in a fry-up). For anyone familiar with his work,

Hungry by Grace Dent

it’s not what you’d expect from the man of immaculate suits and cravats, and it’s refreshing.

Bread is pulled apart to reveal San Francisco’s absurdly scientific approach to sourdough, oysters shucked to reveal New Orleans’ rough history of oyster farming. Woven throughout the book, too, are tales of Rayner jumping through the journalism industry’s hoops.

Every chapter is dedicated to an item on his menu and celebrates the stories around food as much as the dishes, so non-foodies will love it too. ◆ Photo: @narwhalbooks

book(ish) rating:★★★★★ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★ Reviewed by Catherine Entwistle Hungry is a deliciously satiating tribute to how food shaped Grace Dent’s life. Home cooked meals as a 70s child evolve into sugar-laden multipacks of donuts at the advent of ASDA in the 80s. Deprived of food and love she was not, but Dent was hungry for more of life’s treats, beyond the North West, and her steely determination saw her climbing every rung of London’s unforgiving media ladder.

The overarching theme is her bond with her Scouse dad.

Beautifully, she describes Liverpool genes leaving a trace like “a rogue pair of red knickers in the washing machine with your whites”.

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At times almost eaten up by the capital’s unstoppable pace of life, the magnetic force of family over 300 miles away pulls Dent back home to care for her father who is slowly gripped by the cruel hands of dementia.

With a humour as bone-dry as a glass of Muscadet, she manages to find comedy in even the darkest of situations, although, soft tears will roll down your cheeks by the end.

True to form, Dent’s mastery of language is meshed into every fibre of this memoir; each sentence lovingly marinaded in her signature recipe for absorbing writing. You will not be able to resist gobbling it up in one sitting. ◆

Distraction Tactics Film Club book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ watchability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ Photo: Netflix

memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Narzra Ahmed

Since lockdown, virtual film clubs have seen a rise in popularity. Frontman of British band Bastille, and self-confessed “film nerd”, Dan Smith, recently formed the Distraction Tactics Film Club with writer Charlotte Bogard Macleod. It’s hosted on Smith’s Instagram page (@bastilledan).

Each week they pick a film from a different country around the world. One of the first countries they chose was New Zealand - the team recommended viewers watch Hunt for the Wilderpeople, which was mostly filmed in the country’s Waitākere Ranges. The film’s director Taikia Waititi made an appearance on their show, and Lindsay Lohan has been known to tune in too. Bastille’s World Gone Mad was on the soundtrack of Taikia’s film, Bright, in 2017.

Photo: Piki Films, Madman Entertainment

The film club has also had Simon Pegg, Emily Mortimer, George MacKay and more as guests, not to mention the ‘surprise’ guest (it’s always Kyle Simmons, Bastille’s keyboardist).

Another film recommendation has been Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A cult classic. It’s a film I had been meaning to see for years but had never actually sat down and watched, and it was a joy. Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle was another brilliant recommendation, and another film I might not have otherwise seen.

Let’s be honest. This is not a high scale production (nor does it pretend to be), and the technological hiccups are quite endearing. It goes out from Smith’s neon green living room. Instagram live videos end abruptly, guests have problems joining the livestreams...you name it.

Photo: Focus Features

Smith also makes jingles each week about the films they discuss. He says he makes them “for people to take the piss out of,” but they’re actually good and they’re enjoyed by viewers. The show has had up to 60,000 views. At the heart of the show, Smith and Bogard Macleod speak to actors, directors and fans about what the films mean to them.

Distraction Tactics provided something to look forward to in a desperately bleak time. This is a show with excellent guests, excellent hosts and great film recommendations.

A way to connect people through film. ◆

Photo: Studio Ghibli/Toho

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Photo: Marvel Studios/Disney+

Falcon and the Winter Soldier book(ish) rating:★★★☆☆ watchability: ★★★☆☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Narzra Ahmed

In Marvel Studios’ new Disney+ series The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan play Captain America’s best friends: Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes. They can’t stand each other, but the pair have no choice but to work together to stop evil forces.

Sam was entrusted with The Shield by Captain America at the end of Avengers: Infinity War and now faces a potential future as the patriotic hero in a country confronted by systemic racism.

Meeting Isaiah Bradley, a veteran who had been injected with super serum and imprisoned and tortured, only fur-

Nomadland, dir.

Chloe Zhao

thers Sam’s concerns.

Bucky has his own demons to deal with as he attempts to achieve redemption for his past sins.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier will be much more enjoyable if you have seen the previous Marvel films, but if you haven’t, it’s still very entertaining, and raises important questions about race and identity.

The series also stars Daniel Brühl, Emily VanCamp as Sharon Carter, and Wyatt Russell as John Walker. It’s a classic blockbuster with a lot more to offer - director Kari Skogland has made a miniseries worthy of a lockdown binge. • Photo: Searchlight Pictures

book(ish) rating:★★★★★ watchability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Becca Challis Chloe Zhao’s Best Picture-winning film, Nomadland, is a journey unique to each viewer, entirely dependent on their own emotional experiences. Starring Frances McDormand, the film shares the intimacies of van life for Fern, a widowed woman who is struggling after the Great Recession.

Depicting both the lonely moments and the warmth of the nomad community, Zhao has achieved a quietly epic piece which lays bare the tragic heart of the American dream.

Never shying away from big issues, Zhao has attempted something seldom ever touched by Hollywood by focusing on the lives of the invisible in society: women, the ageing, the poor and the homeless. Real-life nomads appear in the

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film, as fictionalised versions of themselves: Linda May, Swankie and Bob Wells, adding real authenticity to its telling. Finally, we have a film that doesn’t show life ending at 60, or zoom through the heartbreaks, discomfort or unexplainable in montages at breakneck speed. Instead, Zhao and McDormand have created a poetic kind of beauty, with raw filmic quality and nostalgic colour pallettes.

Perhaps particularly poignant after the events of the last year - we know the feeling of being cooped up and downtrodden all too well. Nomadland reinforces the power of small everyday kindnesses, the immense healing abilities of nature, and our intense dependency on feeling free. ◆

Photo: Interscope/EMI

Sin Miedo by Kali Uchis book(ish) rating:★★★★★ listenability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Eva Levy

Kali Uchis’ new album Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) is the sonic equivalent of a bowl full of candy in the boring pantry which represents our lives right now. It’s like adding sugar to a strong coffee, because that’s what Kali does with her music.

The 26-year-old Colombian-American singer gained fans with songs such as ‘Tyrant’ featuring Jorja Smith. Uchis always manages to convey an empowered voice through her music.

It’s hard to categorise Uchis’ music: Latino RnB, Neo-soul or bedroom-pop. In 2018 she blessed us with Isolation, an album full of her heritage, yet still predominantly in English.

in the violet hour

by Saint Clair

But Sin Miedo is almost entirely in Spanish and celebrates her roots.

Every song Uchis creates is dream-like. But the good kind of dream - the one where you’re at the beach, sipping the most delicious cocktail you have ever had. In her video trailer for Sin Miedo, Kali appears among stars, riding a Harley Davidson with the delicate music of ‘la luna enamorada’ the first song on the album. We are instantly hypnotized.

Her voice is deep and electrifying, and she keeps this vibe in the entire album.

This album is like the best road trip you ever took. It will help you escape the banality of life for a moment. ◆ Photo: Eone Music UK

book(ish) rating:★★★☆☆ listenability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆ Reviewed by Narzra Ahmed Saint Clair (born Emma Topolski) explores the different stages of grief with her deeply personal EP, in the violet hour, recorded following the death of her father. What unites ‘goddess’, ‘violet hour’, ‘elegy in c’ and ‘better’ is the running theme of loss. in the violet hour, named after a line from TS Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, exposes the reader to an underlying vulnerability.

The lonely piano keys of the opening track, ‘goddess’, are suspenseful and unnerving. “Heartache / What have you done to us?,” she asks. The chorus is upbeat, yet Saint Clair’s lyrics are steeped in melancholy: “When you’re lying

on the kitchen floor / Nothing’s godly anymore”. Saint Clair sings about being “bulletproof” but also admits to feeling fearful. It’s a very honest track.

In ‘violet hour’, she feels like she’s in a “daydream”. “You couldn’t be there for me,” she sings angrily. ‘elegy in c’ is the highlight of this brilliant EP. The opening lines of the song are especially heartbreaking. “I only miss you when I’m breathing / I’d miss you if I’d never seen your face before”.

After the emotional heaviness of ‘elegy in c’, ‘better’ is sonically lighter, but lyrically just as devastating.

Saint Clair articulates the all too real feelings that accompany grief in a non-romanticised way. ◆

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Don McCullin exhibition at Tate Liverpool book(ish) rating:★★★★☆ enjoyability: ★★★★☆ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★★ memorability: ★★★★★

D

Photo: @robinpopephotos

on McCullin’s photographs are both difficult to look at and difficult to ignore. In a career spanning over 60 years, McCullin’s unflinchingly honest and eye-opening oeuvre has made him one of the world’s leading photographers. But, at the age of 84, he still refuses to call himself an artist. Currently on display at Tate Liverpool is a major retrospective of McCullin’s work.

Many galleries have adapted their exhibitions to be viewed online while lockdown endures. Nothing can replicate the slow meandre around a peaceful gallery, but getting a sneak peek at McCullin’s work gives a flavour of what to expect from the real thing.

The online display is a video tour of different photographs from McCullin’s display and moves chronologically through his career. We are greeted by three dishevelled-looking boys standing on a Liverpool street in the early 1960s. The large-scale print fills the wall and one of the boys looks down the camera lens with the confrontational stance of someone who has had to grow up very quickly. The young lads have a sense of unsettling authority, as though they are the gatekeepers of McCullin’s exhibition. It is, after all, taking place on their stomping ground.

Initially we see McCullin’s early documentation of destitution, political protest, and violence in London before moving to photographs from his international travels. Scenes from the 1964 dispute in Cyprus between the Greek and Turkish Cypriots show death, blood and the anguished faces of bereaved family members. In 1968-9, McCullin captured the impact of the Nigerian civil war in Biafra in a shocking image of a young albino boy. Stooped over, he is so emaciated that his ragged jumper hangs limply off his skeletal frame. The pain in his face is palpable.

In later years, McCullin photographed the Troubles in Northern Ireland, but some of his most impactful work was of the effect deindustrialisation had on areas in the North of England. Parallels between this destitution and the way

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Reviewed by Catherine Entwistle McCullin grew up struck a chord and he returned to Liverpool frequently. Displaying these photographs in the Albert Dock Tate gallery makes them especially poignant.

McCullin knows his work is disturbing but it is also empathetic. Photographing traumatised and grief-stricken civilians among conflict and deprivation means he has bonded with his subjects rather than just documenting a scene.

Many of McCullin’s subjects are staring straight down the barrel of his camera lens; a technique used often by the

“If I haven’t captured their eyes, I haven’t captured their soul” photographer to truly connect with the individual. In a voice over, McCullin says: “If I haven’t captured their eyes, I haven’t captured their soul.”

Viewing art virtually does have its limitations and nothing can truly replicate the experience of viewing artworks in a gallery. A space that is curated to tap into multiple senses and emotions, the silence would lend itself well to viewing McCullin’s poignant work.

Similarly, the grey walls act as an extension of the dark photographs, making the dust, soot, and grit from the scenes almost tangible. It does, however, include a running commentary from McCullin and assistant curator, Tamar Hemmes, adding a certain intimacy to the virtual viewing.

McCullin’s ‘Homeless Irishman, East End, London 1969’, is particularly powerful. We are faced with a close-up portrait of a homeless man, covered in filth and grime from London’s streets.

There is no denying that McCullin is truly great at what he does, and although viewing his work in real life would be incomparable, the chaos, destruction, and evil of conflict is translated so perceptibly through his chosen medium that you are transported to the scene of each photograph, even when viewing the pieces virtually. ◆

Accidentally Wes Anderson by Wally Koval

book(ish) rating: ★★★★☆ readability: ★★★★★ recommend to a friend?: ★★★★☆ memorability: ★★★★☆

Photo: Tim Weaving

Reviewed by Simone Fraser s there any director with a more distinctive aesthetic and cinematographic style than Wes Anderson? Head-on shots, vivid colour palettes, and an eye for perfect symmetry characterise everything he creates, from BAFTA award-winning The Grand Budapest Hotel to stop-motion classic Isle of Dogs.

The filmmaker’s style is so unique that no real life scene could ever compare, right? Wally Koval, the brains behind The New York Times bestseller Accidentally Wes Anderson, would disagree.

The book showcases spontaneous scenes across the world that have the distinctive Anderson style. Londoners may recognise Queen Charlotte’s Cottage in Kew or Woolwich Town Hall, but the images in the book span all seven continents, ending with a shot of penguins surrounding a ramshackle shed in Port Lockroy, Antarctica.

I

Illustrated by Rowan Bailey When I first bought this book, I was concerned that I was paying £25 for something I would flip through once and then never pick up again. There are only so many shots of perfectly still Art Deco swimming pools and Bavarian hotels framed by turquoise skies you can see before the concept starts to become worn. The creators already have a free Instagram account with 1.4 million followers, so the book needed to have something extra.

This splash of interest comes in the form of the short introductions to every scene. In reading the book I have learned that you can cross from one continent to another on the Turkey Ferry in Istanbul, and Iceland’s Althing Parliament is the oldest in the world having run since 930 CE. The book provides a level of cultural immersion I wasn’t expecting but am grateful for. The photos themselves become a stepping-stone to a book that is an enjoyable read in its own right.

Accidentally Wes Anderson is an excellent coffee table book. Packed with beautiful scenery, it’s a wonderful thing to flip through on a grey day.

Whether you’re looking for escapism or an indepth travel guide, you’ll find it in these vibrant pages. This book provides a trip across the world, immersing the reader in architecture, history, and culture – all through a distinctly Wes Anderson style lens. ◆

127

The

drunk novelist Take a look inside the mind of wannabe author Kitty Chrisp after a few too many wines, because we’ve all been there

W

hat is it about late nights and existential lightbulb moments? These are my thoughts at 2am, 1.95 bottles of Malbec deep, alone in bed. Suddenly I’ve got it. I type: “How to write a bolk if you have never tried can’t but really want to try hELP!” Google was not helpful. I tried again: “How to write a book.”

“Before you start writing your book...”

Wait, what? Before? Not a good sight for impatient pipe dreamers like myself. It’s like when you start to follow a recipe and the first sentence is “marinate the chicken and leave to sit for 70 days and 70 nights”. The bastards. Who on earth has time for a multi-day recipe? Flat-dwelling, sunshine starved ogres, perhaps. Not me. I don’t like this step. The overwhelming temptation is to simply write, otherwise adrenaline may ebb away into nothing. But this is no chicken recipe. I am serious about this pursuit. So I read on.

“Assemble writing tools.”

Hang on; tissues? Why do I need tissues? A ruler? A PENCIL? I am surely not expected to write this thing with my bare hands. That would be madness. The last time I wrote with a pencil and paper I got a blister. It was a shopping list.

The inclusion of “beverage mugs” as an essential writing tool is the last straw. I shall not clutter myself with dirty mugs before I have even started. What a ridiculous idea.

128

“To write well, you must first read.”

Crap. I am currently in a deathly cycle of buying non-fiction books in a last-ditch attempt to educate myself - which of course means I never finish them. But, then, I have read Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at least 100 times, so I guess I am an expert in some very niche way. If only I’d thought of Harry Potter. I could be a millionaire like JK Rowling, but much less transphobic and much more fun.

“Settle on a big idea.”

Oh dear. To get an idea I probably need inspiration. I put Bridget Jones’s Diary in my basket. Next day delivery. Inspiration on its way.

Excellent. A pang of envy pulses through me when I confront the fact that Helen Fielding got there before me. But Bridget Jones is based on Pride and Prejudice, so even Jane got there before Helen.

Maybe all the good ideas are taken. Or maybe I could also copy a classic plot and put my own brilliant spin on it. But I do want to avoid romance if at all possible. After all, I am a feminist.

“Open another bottle of Malbec.”

Just kidding. But that’s what I did. I’m not sure whether it’s the wine or all the hard thinking I’ve been doing, but I definitely have a headache. ◆

Sparrow

by Kostya Tsolakis The day before the royal wedding, rainbow flags jostled for air with Union Jack bunting. Hurrying up Old Compton Street, I phoned my father.

From neon posters, near-naked boys invited me to all-weekend-long parties at the clubs.

Every stranger I passed looked happier than me.

I cried so much the night before.

Said perhaps I can send my yiayia: two floors down from their flat, she could tell them over breakfast.

I could picture her doing it: pink dressing gown over her nightdress, light-footed in her fluffy slippers.

The angel with the message.

If it came out of her mouth like a velvet ribbon, surely they couldn’t turn their faces from it?

My mother looking at her scrambled eggs as if they were vomit.

I said to Dad we could no longer live like this.

And in my ear Dad said, It’s all right, in the careful voice I’d heard him use when talking to sparrows – those curious little things, so easy to frighten, that would perch, hollow-boned, on the railing as he tended his delicate balcony plants.

book(ish) beginning Meet the team . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Read all about it: book(ish) news . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Zoom bookcases of the year . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Influencer book deals in an age of authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Welcome to BookTok . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Explore the world of book nooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 12 self-help reads inspired by the zodiac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

end Ali Plumb’s podcast picks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 Cruella: blank slate or devil woman? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Who killed cinema? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 Shall I compare thee to a Shakespeare play? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Heartburn: cooking with Nora Ephron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 How Jay Rayner survived lockdown . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 Food for thought with Dr Annie Gray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 10 books to help you break into the Asian kitchen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Cosmo Sheldrake: through the looking glass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104 Japanese psychedelia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 A musical journey around Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110 Fire in the booth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .112 Reviews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 The drunk novelist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128

SUMMER 2021

Interview with Megan Nolan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 North & South . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .24 Q&A with Yousra Imran . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26 Is our government playing the fool? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Georgina Lawton: Raceless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 Sathnam Sanghera: Empireland. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 The art of protest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Noughts & Crosses: 20 years on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Anthony McGowan: how to get down with the kids . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Q&A with Holly Bourne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46 Let’s talk publishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Rakaya Fetuga: spoken word . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .50 Writing the greats: Claire Tomalin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 The beauty of sadness: Victorian art & literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Why ‘Wuthering Heights’ is the best literature-inspired song . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 The secret lives of sex writers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 Dr Kate Lister: A Curious History of Sex . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 Bonkbusters: Lady Chatterley’s Lover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Loo reads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Writing your way to happiness with Ella Dove . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Bedtime stories with Drew Ackerman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Kostya Tsolakis: coming of age in Athens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Alim Kheraj’s Queer London . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Fran Lebowitz: a tonic for this time . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 LGBTQI+ fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Why EM Forster’s Maurice is still a queer icon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Bridget Jones’s Diary: 25 years on . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

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