What does it mean to pay attention to an artwork? To really pay attention – not scroll past, not glance, not skim the wall text and move on. It means giving up control. It means letting the artwork speak before you speak over it. When I first stood before Yee I-Lann’s Orang Besar Series, I […]
Non-Fiction
My Family and Other Rock Stars
The following is an extract from Tiffany Murray’s memoir My Family and Other Rock Stars, published by Fleet in May 2024. Chapter 1, ‘Killer Queen’ A call came from a manager or a record label far away and Mum told me this new band, Queen, was from London where once upon a time she had […]
What is a Doctor?
The opening chapter from Phil Whitaker’s new book, What Is a Doctor?, published by Canongate in July 2023. Chapter 1 – Medical Records I was seventeen and had not long passed my driving test. I helped my mum into the back of the car, her hands clutching a kitchen mixing bowl. It was the middle […]
Time Stuck
A glimpse into Ewart Milne’s painfully intimate collection of poems. Ewart Milne’s Time Stopped is not a book: it’s an open wound. In a prefatory note, Milne calls this collection of poems ‘the story of the narrator’s life as seen in retrospect after the death of this wife.’ The problem is that Milne’s life stopped when […]
Here be dragons: a love letter
An extract from Ilona Bushell’s biography of Margery Allingham, The Beckoning Land. The first book by Margery Allingham I ever bought was Mystery Mile. It is a little Penguin classic with a green jacket, identifying it in the genre of ‘crime fiction’. Across the front is a white strip containing the title and the black […]
Blowing away the morning dew
An extract from Caroline Davison’s work in progress on how the true story of the brutal murder of a cabin-boy at sea was transformed into a musical evocation of rural Norfolk by one of England’s most renowned composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams. All with my garling spikk I misused him So shamefully I can’t deny […]
A Plaid for Lady Grange
An extract from a non-fiction work in progress, Shouting from the Edge of the World. In January 1732, Lady Grange was abducted from an Edinburgh boarding house. She recognised the men who wrestled her to the ground, bound her in cloth like a corpse, and tied her to the back of a rider on horseback. […]
