Category: book shops
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The Meaning of Everything
Dictionaries are supposed to be descriptive (ie, presenting examples and definitions of how words are being used out in the world) not prescriptive (ie, their job isn’t to tell you what the words ought to mean, or how they ought to be used). What they definitely should not be is proscriptive (ie, they can’t tell…
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A million birds, two books, one life
Imagine you’ve been swept up into a high-flying flock of birds – a flock as numerous as a gathering of every swirl of starlings ever seen on a winter’s night. Imagine flocks of every species spiralling into one; every colour, every aspect and temperament that birds can display flickering around you as you swoop and…
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Talk of the Village
When when word got around that William Wood had put together a whole story collection inspired by snapshots of life in the village where he lived, some people were a bit worried. “Am I in it?” “You didn’t write about what happened to X, did you?” “Where do you get your ideas from?” — A…
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Can you keep a secret in a village?
Many years ago on holiday in Cumbria, author William Wood was enchanted by a village not unlike that portrayed in his new book. “Imagine what it would be like to live here,” he said to Anna, his wife. Neither ever dreamed this dream would come true. William was brought up in the South East and…
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The Battle for Home
Imagine this: you’ve been barred from your home district while those who are conducting a war got on with it. You’ve spent your time trying to find food and get on with life in the parts of your town that are still semi-functional, whilst trying to teach your kids to recognize and find shelter from…
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“Do more!”
Did you think it was you being childish, impatient? Did politicians manage to convince you that they’re more sophisticated than you, did they say they are not ‘playing safe’, they are ‘playing a longer game’? Among her reasons for not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, my MP assured me that the government was doing…
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The Battle of the Land
This is the latest result of a favourite pastime of mine. One of the main reasons I still hang onto a library ticket and the habit of walking into actual buildings with actual books in them is the opportunity it gives to meander around and let things you didn’t know you wanted to read catch…
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What every women’s rights campaigner wants for Christmas
The glorious wave of new feminist books published in this decade has been one of the joys of the women’s rights campaign. For a while, my favourite was Julie Bindel’s Feminism for Women… Oh hang on, before that there was Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women… A lot of people swear by Helen Joyce’s TRANS, but…
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What are you laughing at?
I could tell a tale of a catastrophic accident at the printers, where sixty grandsworth of gargantuan printing machine is fouled up by someone feeding Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity into one end and Helen Joyce’s TRANS into the other, and turning the feed up to max. But that would be to entirely miss the point.…
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They may not exist but they keep producing good work
In the month that the Scottish courts finally went so far down the rabbit hole they’ve succeeded in convincing themselves that women don’t exist as a material entity, the tabloid press have reached the point where most people are aware that something rather silly is going on but most have yet to realize the gravity…
Kay Green 