Category: book shops
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There’s a one-in-five chance you just don’t matter
What if someone convinced you that we have a government that has consciously abandoned around one fifth of our population to a miserable life and an early death? Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want to leap over all the bullshit and fix this hellishly dysfunctional country? In the course of education…
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Viva FiLiA!
It’s three weeks now since I got my hands on a copy of Rahila Gupta’s ‘British Feminism Through a FiLiA Lens.’ I’ve been reading furiously ever since, and have only just emerged. 384 closely printed pages about all that FiLiA has instigated, inspired or been a part of over the last ten years. To say…
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Nobody here is innocent
I wrote elsewhere about the weekend I spent at Winchester Writers’ Conference, way back in – oh I don’t know, the early years of the 21st century. It was great – Terry Prachett was the guest speaker, and brought a jazz band along. Carol-Ann Duffy and Michael Morpurgo were there doing signings. I went to…
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Not a single firefighter, police officer or soldier had come
“Nearly 20 minutes had passed since Huda and her staff had come across the burning bus … she and the UN nurses gently carried burned children to waiting volunteer cars…” The drivers would take the burn victims to “the nearest accessible hospital. For most of them, that was Ramallah. The hospitals in Jerusalem were far…
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Sweet little UXB
Why am I tempted to say ‘this is a sweet little book’? It’s no such thing and anyway, I don’t say things like that but I’m trying to figure out how Xiaolu Guo has cunningly disguised an unusual and important piece of work as a sweet little book. The rare and quiet determination of someone…
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The most extraordinary thing I learned from Marilyn Garson
There are 30 million Christian Zionists in the United States, and there are only 16 million Jews on the planet. Therefore the colonialist project known as Zionism is not primarily a Jewish force. What’s more, with the rise of post-colonialist, anti-racist attitudes in the younger generation, the overlap between Jews and Zionists is getting steadily…
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The Fifth Risk, and then some more risks
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis This book was published in the UK in 2018. It has date stamps in the front from 2020 and 2021 (some of the Sussex libraries still sometimes do things the old way). I borrowed it earlier this year, to read just in case. Since then, the Biden/Harris circus shot…
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When the war is lost and won
An ode to Hampden Park The spuggies were singing at Hampden Park this morning. They were called sparrows when I was a kid, and they were everywhere. Every bush and tree went cheep! cheep! Every sudden movement by humans was answered by the whir of a hundred sparrows taking flight. A generation ago But my…
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Re-open, re-read, re-treasure
Once upon a time, I became a published author. – guest post by S P Moss The year was 2012 and it was all courtesy of Kay Green and her brainchild, Earlyworks Press. Or, more correctly, twin brainchildren as my first novel was published by Circaidy Gregory. [Earlyworks Press was for competition anthologies, club and…
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The old stories are the best
When a good author gets hold of a classic theme, like Antigone for example, and applies it to an important current topic like what happens to Muslim families when politicians are trading on hatred and fear, the result is likely to be a gripping read. That’s why although Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is a story…
Kay Green 