From the introduction-in-progress to my book-in-progress An Awful Rainbow: Reading the Romantics in a World on Fire. All photos by me. – A glittering blue day at the top of the world: Montenvers in the Alps above Chamonix, France. January 15, 2020. Elevation 6276 feet. Everything here is ice and rock and sky. Look up […]
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Did I ever think I’d be writing the words, “My first novel is published today?” Not really. But I am. And here it is, from Bowen Press Books. As a twenty-one-year-old dreaming of being a writer, I never could have imagined I’d be sitting here (in the British Library, no less!) marking this day. Nor […]
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At first they look like sites of human sacrifice, some kind of Victorian Thunderdome-meets-Coliseum on the banks of the sweet Regents Canal with its houseboats and its ducks – round rings of iron columns, enclosing a space somehow charged, vaguely menacing. Step inside the circle and do battle! But they’re actually called gas holders, or […]
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Hunkered on a funeral urn, he howls into the void. Howls? Is that mouth open or closed? Is that even a mouth? In the dim gallery, walls dappled all around with trees, I circle him like John Keats at the Grecian urn. We’re in this forest together now. Dug out of the earth in Spong […]
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It’s not often that a movie lives up to its press, but “The Favourite” does – and more. It also reanimates a story coming to life in front of me, right now, in the first six-volume history of England written by a woman, published around the American Revolution and resting on my desk in the […]
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“All the things that are wrong in the world seem conquered by a library’s simple unspoken promise: here I am, please tell me your story; here is my story, please listen.” – Susan Orlean, The Library Book — Is this the year we finally learn to distinguish story from myth, and lies from both of […]
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Two men in tunics and hose, their backs to me, lean on the wall of a castle balcony and look down at something happening on the other side. A slim tree leafs out elegantly to the left. They’re relaxed, intent, faces totally hidden. What’s going on down there, in this picture’s entirely private world? Framed […]
Read moreThis weekend I read Tara Westover’s new memoir Educated in one sitting.
Read moreIn one of his famously long, thinking-out-loud journal letters to his brother George and sister-in-law Georgiana, finished and sent in January 1819, John Keats talks about cats: There is another thing I must mention of the momentous kind;– but I must mind my periods in it—Mrs. Dilke has two Cats – a Mother and a […]
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