• 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…

  • 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…

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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…

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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…

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    Books

    Hidden Melancholy and Nostalgia in Howard Pyle’s ‘Robin Hood’

    September 24, 2024 - By 

    In modern times, our perception of myths is very much shaped by different translations. With the Robin Hood legends, I mean this both literally and figuratively: the earliest Robin Hood ballads date back to the 15th century, and there have been many translations of the Middle English tales since. Howard Pyle’s 1883 children’s novel The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood is one of these, along with dozens of film and television adaptations which base themselves on the medieval tellings. For many people born after the 1970s, their awareness of the character will stem from the likes of Disney’s Robin Hood…

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    Books

    Farming, Love, Fate: The Natural World in ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’

    September 11, 2024 - By 

    Nature is one of my favourite elements in a book; whether it is soaring mountain peaks in a fantasy adventure, or the simplistic English countryside in a short but sincere novella, I love seeing the ways different authors present the natural world. I decided to read Far From the Madding Crowd with the expectation that Thomas Hardy would immerse me in the sort of sweeping nature prose I encountered while reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles – with a healthy dash of Victorian melodrama – and I wasn’t disappointed. Nature turned out to be a core characteristic of the novel, one…

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    Books - Reviews

    ‘The Wolves of Savernake’, a Shadowy But Subtle Medieval Mystery – REVIEW

    August 18, 2024 - By 

    I bought my copy of The Wolves of Savernake as a ‘blind-date’ book – it was wrapped in brown paper, with only a tag that read “Historical novel where you can delve into the medieval world of Savernake Forest! Intrigue, crime, detective.” I picked it up from the used bookstore at Avebury Stone Circle, which as it turns out, was an incredibly appropriate place to buy this book. Synopsis of The Wolves of Savernake Set in the Wiltshire countryside following the Norman conquest, The Wolves of Savernake follows Ralph Delchard and Gervase Brett, two men commissioned by William the Conqueror to…

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    Books - Reviews

    ‘Jamaica Inn’ Convinced Me – Daphne du Maurier is the Master of Writing Popular, ‘Real’ Literature

    June 26, 2024 - By 

    Margaret Forster once wrote that Daphne du Maurier ‘satisfied all the questionable criteria of popular fiction, and yet satisfied too the exacting requirements of “real literature”, something very few novelists ever do.’ Having read Rebecca a year ago, I knew that du Maurier was particularly talented when it came to creating suspenseful stories, books that have lent themselves to being not only re-read but also re-adpated, again and again, making du Maurier one of the most beloved English language authors I have covered. But it was reading Jamaica Inn this summer that I realised how right Forster was. It’s difficult…

  • the st andrew and st mary s church in watton at stone england united kingdom
    Books

    J.L Carr’s ‘A Month in the Country’ and Handling Trauma

    May 10, 2024 - By 

    Published in 1980, J.L Carr’s A Month in the Country follows Tom Birkin, an art restorer on his first job who visits Oxgodby, Yorkshire following the first world war. Birkin is to spend the summer uncovering a medieval church mural, finding as much to interest him in the people of the village as the mural itself. There’s the Vicar’s wife, Alice Keach, whose kindly yet lonely manner charms Birkin fairly quickly; Kathy Ellerbeck, the teenage daughter of the stationmaster (who doubles as a Wesleyan preacher); and Charles Moon, a young man of roughly the same age, hired to find the…

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    Books

    My New Favourite Crime Series: The ‘Detective Kindaichi Mysteries’

    April 10, 2024 - By 

    What is it that you enjoy most about crime fiction? Is it the complexity of the mystery itself, or is it following an eccentric detective as they piece together what happened? Is it the personalities of the suspects themselves, or is it the locations – either far off, exotic shores or something closer to home? My favourite crime novels usually play with all of these elements, and possibly more if it is brave enough to get a little gruesome. Seishi Yokomizo definitely wasn’t afraid to push the envelope when he wrote his series of 77 books following Kosuke Kindaichi, known…