Category: Book reviews
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The Subject of Desire
I always hate it when a “sexuality” question turns up in all those random forms you have to fill in. Even when you get past “do I want to tell you this,” you still have the problem of what to put – is a bi woman lesbian when she has a female partner? Is she…
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Half a Yellow Sun and the Whole of the Moon
Think of the starving children in Biafra. If you’re my age, you’ll remember being told that, probably over the pig-bins in the school dining room. Kids used to joke, asking if the school would send the contents of the pig-bins to Biafra. What did they know? My life changed a lot after my first visit…
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What’s Nigel doing these days?
In the front of our first ever poetry anthology, Routemasters and Mushrooms, I wrote, “the works speak for themselves. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do. We intend this collection to be the first of many.” That was 2006. The winning poem, which opens the book, is by Nigel Humphreys. The writers…
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We girls were double-divided
There’s a puzzling range of controversies raging over ‘entertainment’ and ‘the arts’. Social justice warriors are busy finding items – books, films, statues, to condemn for racism, and whilst libraries obediently bury offending books, the women’s movement battles over misogynistic and mind-bending traditions such as nightclub drag queens crossing yet more boundaries to present as…
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I’m on strike – Cormoran Strike
Lethal White by Robert Galbraith If anyone asks, I don’t like detective novels – same way I don’t like spy novels. For one thing they’re menz stories set in a menz world, however many dynamic women you put in them (yes, yes, I saw all the innovative series about females acting like the eternal private…
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How the Gender Identity Industry Broke Politics
Before the world went mad, when I was still Vice-Chair of a Labour CLP, and active with my union, and had a seat on the committee of my favourite lefty group, I started hearing really weird things about sex and gender, including being told by a couple of therapist friends I knew that they were…
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Two more reasons to celebrate Mo Farah
I nearly didn’t write a blog about Mo Farah. I nearly settled for a Facebook comment… … That’s because – well, he’s famous already, it’s a headline story already, so it doesn’t need one more telling from me – but then I realised there’s something missing from most of the big media stories. Yes, we…
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The Good, the Bad and the Greedy
Go on, ban more things! Bad News for Labour Someone tried to launch a book at Waterstones in Brighton during the 2019 Labour conference. The shop cancelled the launch. That was all I knew about the book at the time but, as soon as I got home, I marched into my local indie bookshop and…
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Under-rated heroes and forgotten wives
Happy anniversary, Gustav and Isobel Holst A guest post by author Philippa Tudor Fame and fleeting, modest fortune Aspiring but not-yet-famous composer Gustav von Holst and Isobel Harrison were married on 22 June 1901. It was a quiet wedding in Fulham Register Office (a former workhouse), witnessed by Isobel’s brother and Gustav’s aunt, who had…
Kay Green 