Great Expectations I’m reading it again, struck this time by the names – Pip, a chirrup of a boy, Magwitch mad with hate, and there, between the pages where Pip steals the pie then ferrets a file down his trousers, there’s a note from you to my brother, Tea in oven, Tomo called round, bus back at 6.
Whatever the organisation, there is always the possibility of malpractice, of fraud, of people taking the helm who are not as innocent as they should be, and that goes for religious groups as much as anything else.
Harrogate International Festivals announced today the 18 titles longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2024, the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious crime fiction award now in its twentieth year.
Off Duty Is my face just right, am I looking as a widow should? I pass the funeral parlour where four weeks ago the ceremony unfurled. Now I’m laughing with the children. The director of the solemn place is lolling out front, sucking on a cigarette.
CrimeFest, a European crime writing convention, has announced the shortlists for its annual awards. The awards began 16 years ago when CrimeFest launched in 2008; they honour the best crime books released in the UK in the last year, and feature the hotly-contended Specsavers Debut Crime Novel Award which offers a £1,000 cash prize.
Cargoes Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir, Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine, With a cargo of ivory, And apes and peacocks, Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine. Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus, Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores, With a cargo of diamonds, Emeralds, amethysts, Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.
It makes a change to enter the world of spies and spying; fast action, drama and tension with a good old fashioned Russian enemy who needs to be stopped when all efforts to thwart him are, in turn, thwarted by a traitor, at the very heart of British Intelligence.
Sarah Wimbush’s alignment with the miners, and their cause, is never less than partisan. In her latest collection of themed poems, as in her wider poetic oeuvre, that sense of affiliation is front and centre, indissolubly bound up with the connective tissue of her South Yorkshire roots.
Harrogate International Festivals has announced Peter James as the final Special Guest for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the "world’s largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction" taking place 18-21 July.
It was quite a defining moment for Martin Venning. The West Yorkshire author is sitting down to discuss his third novel The Value of Luck and tells me he started writing to stop him getting bored after a serious accident that left him spending six months in hospital.
Home Thoughts, from Abroad Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
The sheer colour and vitality of Leeds’ annual West Indian Carnival, and of the exponents of cultural identity in all of its dynamism, endorses the patchwork pageant of integration that mostly seems to work in despite.
I had an early holiday, actually - I was house and dog-sitting for friends and picked up two books to put in the suitcase; well, the weather forecast was bleak. Yet again, coincidence hit the spot.
Group Editor Andrew Palmer delves into The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography a new biography of probably one of the most misunderstood opera stars of her day, the incomparable soprano Maria Callas, whose life has been so vividly captured by music critic Sophia Lambton with a cornucopia of never-published personal correspondence. Who was Maria Callas?
Anthem Love begins in a country Where oranges weep sweetness And men piss in the street. Your hands are forever binding Black strands in a plait. Your mother’s Childhood friend has steeped Your skin in coconut oil, tucked Her daughter beside you – the night Is a womb, live with twins. Heat’s body presses every body.
Owl Is my favourite. Who flies like a nothing through the night, who-whoing. Is a feather duster in leafy corners ring-a-rosy-ing boles of mice. Twice you hear him call. Who is he looking for? You hear him hoovering over the floor of the wood. O would you be gold rings in the driving skull if you could? Hooded and vulnerable by the winter suns owl looks.
But Ronnie Butler is dead! Florence Claybourne lives in an assisted-living home for the elderly and Florence, or Flo to her friends, has fallen. The hours tick by as she lies alone in her flat and thinks about events both in the distant past and the recent. Florence is ‘on probation’.
An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump Is a recreation, revised again by Wright, with the lark replaced by a grey cockatiel, witnesses repainted with faces of patrons, and the philosopher borrowed from a study by Frye, so the dim observers, who weren’t there, can’t have seen it open one moonlit wing as the pressure fell as if the last thing it felt was it felt like flying. Ali Lew…
The title of Christopher Arksey’s new pamphlet for Broken Sleep Books gently ironises the elegiac nature of his poems. A backward glance to a life well-lived, Variety Turns extrapolates alternative meanings from the suggestion of a theatrical playbill to describe, instead, the many faces of his subject, his mother, who died in 2016.
I am a self-professed chocolate and cream queen. Chocolate in all its forms never disappoints but for me, king of the crop has always been Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, with Fruit and Nut as its Consort. That Edward Cadbury’s aim, as articulated in 1953, was to make the Cadbury village of Bourneville ‘a happy place’, comes as no surprise.
I know my faults. I can be greedy. I would rather have no chocolate at all than limit myself to just one square from the bar; give me a good book and I like nothing better than to read at every possible moment, getting acquainted with the characters and immersing myself in the action.
Rolling News Blues BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose This misery soup is on a loop Rolling news blues There’s nice people doing nice things Most of the time I can’t prove it but you gotta believe me You wouldn’t hear it on the public dime BBC – the daily Guardian - you choose Deep concern could only earn you the Rolling news blues There’s never been a better time to be…
Barry Reay and Nina Attwood’s compelling enquiry into the murky publishing world of the early to mid-twentieth century uncovers several complex truths regarding motive and reward.
Leeds Lit Fest is back for its 6th year! Festival organisers are delighted by the city’s support they have received over the last 5 years and aim to make this an engaging and inspirational festival filled with all things literary and a whole lot more!
Prayer Prayer, the church's banquet, Angel's age, God's breath in man returning to his birth, The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, The Christian plummet sounding heaven and earth; Engine against the Almighty, sinner's tower, Reversèd thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear, The six-days world’ transposing in an hour, A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear; Softness, and peace…
Harrogate International Festivals has announced the Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, the largest and most prestigious celebration of crime fiction".
A black swan falls out of the sky causing Esther Wilding to pull over, as her windscreen shatters. Having witnessed the incident, Tina Turner approaches and wants to help. Confused by this bizarre opening to a novel? I’m not surprised, but things, especially Tina Turner, are not always as they seem. Esther is on her way to her sister’s memorial. Aura walked into the sea a year ago.
Chaudhri Sher Mobarik looks at the loch Light shakes out the dishrag sky and scatters the water with sequins. Look, hen! says my father, Loch Lomond! as if it were all his doing, as if he owned it, laird of Lomond, laird of the language.
It is a tribute to Bradford-born author, Vicky Parsons’, tenacity and skill that she should succeed in bringing her story, or more properly the story of her life, into the public gaze.
Sniper In the street, tanks, rubble. Soldiers wear patterns of sand. The village a jigsaw of dust. Children in doorways hold the hands of ghosts. I sight along the muzzle buried in a hole in the air. You are small, distant. The size of a sparrow. Smaller. You have no family. Were never born. You are just a single dot of God. I crouch behind chimneys. Aerials. Satellite dishes.