• Books

    3 Lessons Learned From My First Time Reading ‘Anne of Green Gables’

    August 1, 2025 - By 

    Wishing I’d Met Anne Sooner After I finished reading L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables for the first time this year, I couldn’t help but wish I had read it as a child – not unlike other children’s books I have been exploring lately. If Anne Shirley is so simpatico to me as a grown woman, I can only imagine how much I would have related to – and found comfort in – her when I was a young, overly imaginative little girl. Montgomery writes about relationships and the natural world in such a beautiful way without feeling overtly preachy…

  • Books

    Five Wonderful Moments From ‘A Bear Called Paddington’

    March 16, 2025 - By 

    The short, simple nature of children’s books make them the perfect material if you’re looking for a break between more arduous reads. I’ve picked up the habit of reading a short, classic kids book between novels ever since I started reading Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit series. However, before delving into any children’s fiction, I’m always a little wary of finding them too childish to enjoy as an adult. I was therefore pleasantly surprised by A Bear Called Paddington, as I had gone in expecting little more than a picture book, but instead received something more substantial. The language used by…

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    Books - Literary Britain

    Lacock Village and Abbey: A Hollywood Favourite Hidden in Wiltshire

    March 9, 2025 - By 

    There are people who can’t help but break out the trivia when watching movies and TV shows with others, turning into a veritable human IMDB page as soon as the lights go down. How else would we get to hear, once more, that Viggo Mortensen broke his toe when he kicked that helmet, or that Indiana Jones wasn’t originally meant to shoot the swordsman? My own particular movie watching vice is in this vein too: I can’t help but point out filming locations if I know they are either local or somewhere we’ve visited before. This happens more than you…

  • Books

    My Favourite Books Imagined as Pre-Raphaelite Paintings

    February 28, 2025 - By 

    Sadly, I cannot be considered an ‘art expert’ in any capacity, but luckily for my ego, Taschen’s ‘Basic Art’ series allows me to pretend I am. These slim books which act as crash courses in key artistic movements have equipped me with just enough knowledge to delude myself, quite happily, into thinking I have the art knowledge of a Tate curator. I’ve just finished Taschen’s entry for the Pre-Raphaelites – a group of artists who came together in the 19th century as a ‘brotherhood’ in defiance of the English Royal Academy of Arts. The brotherhood favoured composition styles that pre-dated…

  • Video Games

    Why Silence is The Great Strength of Dragon Quest III

    February 14, 2025 - By 

    Playing the recent HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest III, it didn’t take long for me to realise that this game is special. At first, I attributed it to the stunning, ultra-detailed art style and soothing soundtrack, which has a nostalgic quality even for first time visitors to the Dragon Quest franchise. The magical journey to defeat the evil archfiend Baramos has never looked or sounded better. But I soon realised that there’s more to Dragon Quest III in what it – or rather, its central characters – leave unsaid.  The Silent Protagonist of Dragon Quest III A silent protagonist can…

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    Books

    The Unexpected Nature of War in 3 Classic Children’s Stories

    January 31, 2025 - By 

    The three children’s stories that I enjoyed reading the most in recent years shared two things particularly in common. First, the fact that they feature anthropomorphic animals, which perhaps isn’t surprising given that this is pretty standard fare for children’s stories. But the second commonality, which is the fact that in each text, those animals went to war and actively engaged in at least one battle or more, did surprise me – especially when I considered the treatment of warfare in each book. **Spoilers for The Wind in the Willows, Watership Down and Redwall ** In Watership Down, life is…

  • Reviews - Video Games

    Control: My Spellbinding Time With Remedy’s Twisted Fairy Tale

    November 29, 2024 - By 

    Late to the Tea Party  I’m late to the party with Control. I had heard the combat was fun, but beyond that, it’s often been described to me as generic or uninteresting. I hadn’t really considered playing it until I found myself looking for something at least mildly scary to play this past October. Knowing it was developed by Remedy, the team behind Alan Wake, I considered myself set up for a spooky, if slightly dreary, time. What I got instead was a game that had me hooked from the get go, equal parts menacing, zany, and a blast to…

  • Books - Literary Britain

    My Unexpected Visit to Agatha Christie’s Grave in Wallingford

    November 13, 2024 - By 

    The End, to Start With Thinking about the lives of my favourite authors often feels like an abstract exercise. Even more so if they are considered literary ‘legends’ – Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen – their level of prestige often elevates them to a point where they feel completely removed from reality, and it becomes difficult to consider them as real people who lived real lives. For authors further back in the past, whom we already have precious little information about, they become almost mythological, above the normality of life and death, existing mostly in the hearts and minds of generations of…

  • Reviews - Video Games

    Why ‘Justice For All’ Is More Spectacular Than the First ‘Phoenix Wright’ Game

    November 3, 2024 - By 

    Here’s my hot take for a game with a cult following that released almost 25 years ago* – I struggled to get through Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. I desperately wanted to love this game, which seems to be ingrained into the cultural zeitgeist, but I struggled to connect and understand why people love this series so much. Looking back, after having recently finished the second installment – Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Justice For All – I realised that I had gone in to the first game with entirely wrong expectations. I had anticipated a more typical detective game, one…

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    Books

    Personal Demons and the Fear of the Other in ‘The Woman in White’

    October 24, 2024 - By 

    I suspected The Woman in White would be an excellent Autumnal read. A gothic mystery novel published in 1860, it seemed sufficiently sensational and spooky enough in the lead up to Halloween. The title itself evokes ghostly connotations of my most feared variety – spectral women dressed all in white, wandering around graveyards and doing the creepy things that ghosts tend to do. While The Woman in White does have plenty of brushes with the supernatural, this actually isn’t what made it so eerie to read. Ultimately, Wilkie Collins avoids obvious scares in favour of creating a more subtle, secretive…