Category: book shops
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Sylvia, not Emmeline
Some thoughts on that far-right bookshop article’s bumpy journey round the world It is certainly a stereotype to say that a meeting of women is an argument, a stereotype that has a lot of evidence to keep it going. To my mind, it’s not really a criticism – I think it’s because women’s gatherings tend…
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Find a loose thread, and pull!
Did you know that the average lifespan of a state is 326 years? What’s even more exciting is that mega-states – hierarchical organisations of control that cover more than one logical, geographic area – only last an average of 155 years. Did you know that the overarching reason for states’ extreme obsession with secrecy is…
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The alarming tale of the far right bookshop in rural Suffolk
Guest blogger Simon Edge was horrified to find a far-right bookshop on his doorstep. He was even more horrified to discover it was backed to the hilt by some prominent gender critical figures. The Suffolk village where I live is a well-known destination for day-trippers and prides itself on its quirky range of independent shops.…
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Requiem for a Woman’s Soul
I’ve been trying since last week to write a blog about the election but so far, it’s a mess. It’s a mess because I keep failing to sleep at bedtime and/or I wake at the very weird hour of four ay em. That’s not, actually, because of the latest horror story to come out of…
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Bookshop to bookshop railway
Or, what I did on my holidays We had booked a week in Settle. The aim was to ride up and down the Settle to Carlisle railway, finding great Yorkshire walks and interesting bookshops and above all, avoiding the internet and all things work and big-media related. We succeeded, and I came home feeling renewed.…
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A truly terrible book
I picked this book up because it’s subtitled Why Our Species Is on the Edge of Extinction, and it got a further punch of urgency from the strapline by Eric Idle, ‘Put this at the head of your reading lists immediately’. I thought it might be about one of the emergencies the great and the…
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Complicated?
I still see people around social media saying ‘it’s complicated’. I still see them pointing out creases and chasms in the history of Palestine which they use to suggest firstly, it’s hard to see who Palestine ‘belongs to’ and secondly – and incredibly – that this difficulty means they can’t roundly oppose mass killing, displacement,…
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Fly a kite, tell a story, read a book…
In February last year, I went to a talk by Dr Zahira Jaser, which focused on what it’s like being a Palestinian woman in the UK lately. One of the issues mentioned was some people’s attitudes to people wearing the keffiyah. These days, people seem to think it means ‘terrorist’. Jaser spoke eloquently about the…
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A shameful day for the English
One of the ironies of any work in publishing and the book trade is that, because your work involves a lot of reading, you’re always at least a decade behind on what ‘everyone’ has read. That’s why, now the book-work is down to a minimum, I like doing my occasional series of ‘reviews of old…
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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…
Kay Green 