Review: Peas On Your Knees - A Life In The Poems Of Michael Rosen
To read Michael Rosen’s poems out loud is to hear an echo. For to give voice to a random selection of his most performable verses is to be accompanied by Rosen himself, declaiming at one’s shoulder, but with infinitely greater skill and idiosyncratic grace.
Reading between the class lines
A new edition of The Bee argues that Britain's reading crisis looks rather different once you know where to look. Britain, we are told, has stopped reading.
A Tale Of Death And Life: The Mourning Necklace By Kate Foster
What must it feel like to be hanged, only to wake up four hours later, in your own coffin, and to climb out and walk into your own wake? Ask Maggie Dickson, because in Chapter One of The Mourning Necklace that is precisely what happens to her. The year is 1724 and the place, Edinburgh. Will the honest men of law decide to give her a reprieve or will they choose to hang her again?
Poem Of The Week: From Cheshire By Kit Wright
From Cheshire For Anna Come home safe: I think of you driving Over the Runcorn Bridge in our senile car, Its toothless ratchets, arthritic pistons conniving To take me away from wherever you are. Its steering like that old prostitute working a living on Huskisson Street outside our door: Its raggedy brake shoes thin as the wind, giving Nothing but ice to your foot on the floor.
Poem Of The Week: Among The Talk And The Laughter By Norman MacCaig (1910-1996)
Among the Talk and the Laughter Why does he fall silent? Why does that terrible, sad look tell he has gone away? He has died too often.
Wild Pages Turn: Nature Writing's Biggest Night Crowns Birds And Lost Worlds
Two illustrated books — one a plea for Britain's vanishing birdlife, the other a journey back through deep time — have taken the top honours at the UK's foremost nature and conservation writing awards, in a year the judges said proved storytelling can still be "a powerful step towards awareness, action, and ultimately, hope".
Understanding The Stone: The Green Parcel By John Challis
Visiting a medieval country church whose bells were forged during the reign of Elizabeth I, and whose tones must have tolled the passing of the Civil War and the Napoleonic dead, we were reminded of another form of commemoration, in the numberless wedding celebrants who also passed this way over the intervening centuries.
Ilkley Literature Festival Has A Stellar 2026 Line-Up
The north’s longest-running literary festival, Ilkley Literature Festival, has announced its 2026 line-up. A host of household names including politicians, national treasures, journalists, novelists, poets, historians, comedians, and academics head to the spa town across 17 packed days from Friday 2 to Sunday 18 October.
…And All That: Bayeux Tapestry The Epic Poem By Martin Kiszko
The Bayeux Tapestry, a seventy-metre long embroidery, which tells the story of the French invasion of Britain and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, is a masterpiece. It has also come to the UK for the first time in nearly one thousand years, to be displayed in the British Museum, from September ’26 to July ’27, and tickets to see it are selling fast.
Tonight The Music Seems So Loud - The Meaning Of George Michael By Samantha Sanghera
George Michael’s life has always seemed almost too big to fit between the covers of a book. From global pop stardom with Wham! to becoming one of the most distinctive and accomplished solo artists of his generation, his story is one of extraordinary success, personal struggle, reinvention and, ultimately, tragedy.
Thirst By John Robins
My friend asked me if I had any books on sobriety. Having never had a drink in her life, she wanted to understand her new partner's five-year recovery. Being the go-to for matters of addiction, abuse, and homelessness (I'm quite the library), I furnished her with a few, assuming that the reason I'd hung on to them was they were the best of the crop. Time passed.
Poem Of The Week: Hilltop By Ruth Sharman
Hilltop You see it sometimes: the way the light strikes a distant hill, singling out that space between trees like a sudden bolt of memory, or an answer coming through from the other side. A benign shock of emergent energy, Ruth Sharman's fine, profoundly distilled poem encourages a sense of the falling away of scales, of belated recognition.
In For A penny…: In A Summer Season By Elizabeth Taylor
The introduction to this novel tells us it is ‘the portrait of a middle-aged, middle-class housewife’, but that does it an injustice because it is so much more. The intro also says that ‘even if a literary work concerns unintellectual subjects, it is, nonetheless, the product of intellect’. How true!
Book Review: Tim Pope - I Shoot Rock Stars
Tim Pope is the visionary director behind some of the most famous pop music videos, including Queen’s It’s A Hard Life and Soft Cell’s Bedsitter besides David Bowie’s 50th birthday concert at Madison Square Gardens in New York in 1997. Of all your favourite videos, Pope was probably the director.
The Suitability Of Love: No Fond Return Of Love By Barbara Pym
This book came recommended to me by another lover of reading. It is so good to be offered something you might not pick up yourself.
Citizens Of Nowhere: Journeys Of Hope - The Letters Of Meyer And Sonia By Alison Marshall
Alison Marshall’s capturing of a circuitous historical journey between Russia, South Africa and the UK embodies, almost by definition, a testament of first-hand witness: following in the footsteps of her grandparents, by means of a long correspondence conducted over several pre-war months, Marshall painstakingly pieces together an unbreakable relationship whose strength brokers the pain…
The Power Of One Voice: Camino Ghosts By John Grisham
When in any doubt or perhaps when facing too much choice, it’s a safe bet to reach for an old faithful, so I did just that when I picked this Grisham from the TBR pile by the bed. For the uninitiated, TBR means To Be Read or should that be BTBR – Begging To Be Read.
The Graveyard Shift: The Dacre Dilemma By Rebecca Tope
This novel opens in the Henderson household, the everyday ‘chitchat’ establishing the ‘cosy’ genre. Who knew that a small florist’s business in the Lake District could be so busy, but Simmy is rushed off her feet. Husband, Christopher, is just as busy at his auction house in Keswick and between them, they juggle the care of their only son, Robin, who is two.
Poem Of The Week: Marky By Ian Duhig
Marky Is minic do bhris béal duine a shrón. - Irish proverb Watching this cormorant on the Wharfe hold open its wings to the admiring sun, I recall Marky Malone on his stag night removing his silk suit jacket very slowly to show off his Bullworker pecs to us and the man he'd picked out to fight - who smartly coshed him across his beak and swanned out of the silent public bar…
From Solving Crimes To Signing Books: Yorkshire Detective Heads To Glasgow Book Bonanza
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Yorkshire crime author Roshan Pitteea will travel to Scotland later this month to meet readers and fellow writers at one of the UK's fastest-growing independent author events.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t: GRQ By Steven Bernstein
A change is as good as a rest they say and this novella is certainly a change. If you need waking up, this is the book for you, with its short chapters and fast pace. Despite the narrator’s protestations, it is not an advice manual, not a manual of good advice, at least.
Stairwell To Heaven: York’s Most Passionate Indie Publisher Turns Twenty One This Year
Since its birth in a stairwell in Connecticut, it’s been quite a ride! Stairwell Books founders Rose Drew and Alan Gillott reflect on how it all began… ‘It was 1994 and I was a single mum living in a house in Connecticut, about 45 minutes from New York City,’ remembers Rose Drew, the editorial half of the team.
Review: There's No 'F' In Wonderful By Bill Broady
Few writers are able to nail the retrospective surreality of a place and time in history with the elegant efficiency of Bill Broady. Set against the backdrop of a seedy, institutionally misogynistic and terminally necrotic Leeds of the 1970s, the unnamed narrator of There’s No ‘F’ In Wonderful is a knowing flâneur, a recorder of the sociocultural zeitgeist.
In The Dark, Hiding: Love after Love By Ingrid Persaud
This is a beautiful novel which evokes all sorts of emotions. Set in Trinidad and partly in New York City, it is written in a patois which has a musical lilt to it and which quickly becomes familiar. Likewise, although the dialogue is not punctuated, it is laid out in such a way as to make it easily readable.
Poem Of The Week: Sleeping Through By Faith Lawrence
Sleeping Through He wakes, reaches for my hand and says ‘it’s very morning’, which is true.
Poem Of The Week: Abra-Cadabra By Grace Nichols
Abra-Cadabra My mother had more magic in her thumb than the length and breadth of any magician Weaving incredible stories around the dark-green senna brew just to make us slake the ritual Sunday purgative Knowing how to place a cochineal poultice on a fevered forehead Knowing how to measure a belly's symmetry kneading the narah pains away Once my baby sister stuffed a split-pea up her no…
A Bit Of A Lark! The Impossible Fortune By Richard Osman
They’re back, The Thursday Murder Club! The residents of Cooper’s Chase Retirement Village. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are on the trail of the baddies once more and, as ever, are aided by Chris and Donna and of course, Bogdan, among others. The familiarity is comforting, like a cup of cocoa on a winter’s day. It’s a new puzzle but you know you’re surrounded by helpful friends.
Poem of the Week: When I Land in Northern Ireland By Colette Bryce
When I Land in Northern Ireland When I land in Northern Ireland I long for cigarettes, for the blue plume of smoke hitting the lung with a thud and, God, the quickening blood as the stream administers the nicotine. Stratus shadows darkening the crops when coming in to land, coming in to land.
Stop At Nothing: The Woman From Book Club By Carrie Hughes
I have often wondered where ‘The Book Club’ originated. It seems (I think) to be a predominantly female affair. From what I’ve heard, some groups are very serious and engage in rigorous debates about ‘this week’s choice’; some are more gossip-fests where the wine flows freely and local scandal is shared.
'Yes, M’lady': A Thorn in the Rose By Samantha Lee Howe
When the book arrived, I flicked through it initially and spotted the phrase, ‘Mel…the motorbike’ and thought this may just be for me. The prologue is set in London in 1941 and we’re introduced to Mel Greenway, on her nineteenth birthday, the day ‘the letter’ dropped through the letterbox, the letter inviting her to enlist.