“She thought of time as like a ribbon unspooling; the present moment was the only inch of the stuff you could grasp as it cascaded past you, framed by the diamond buckle of now.” I shall confess to two things from the start of this review: a love of Martine Bailey’s previous books and a […]
Review: Emily Brontë Reappraised by Claire O’Callaghan
On the bicentenary of Emily Brontë’s birth, Katherine Clements reviews a new ‘biography with a twist’. Emily, the elusive Brontë sister, is often portrayed as antisocial, difficult, perhaps even slightly unhinged. Two centuries of Brontë scholarship have created an inscrutable image of this singular woman; Emily as enigma has become integral to Brontë myth making. […]
Review: The Story Keeper by Anna Mazzola
“It was the birds that woke her, their liquid voices trickling into her dreams.” An apt quote from a novel that does precisely that: trickles in and won’t let you go. Anna Mazzola’s second novel The Story Keeper is inspired by the West Ham vanishings: the unexplained disappearance of a number of children and young […]
Windrush: Songs in a Strange Land
Jason Hewitt visits the Windrush exhibition at the British Library. Tucked away in one of the many audio recordings at the British Library, a Caribbean woman describes her first experience of the ‘strange’ English custom of eating fish and chips out of newspaper. It is one of the hidden gems within the British Library’s new Windrush […]
Van Gogh and Japan
Lesley Downer visits the new exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam. ‘All my work is based to some extent on Japanese art,’ wrote Vincent Van Gogh. This absorbing and beautiful exhibition at the glitzy Van Gogh Museum explores Van Gogh’s fascination with Japanese art and with Japan – you could almost call it obsession […]
Review: Making Thunder Roar at the Brontë Parsonage Museum
Katherine Clements visits the new exhibition at the Brontë Parsonage Museum, Haworth. Emily Brontë is the most elusive of the famous Brontë siblings. We know little about her, beyond her propensity for solitude, her preference for simple domestic life and her love of the moorland landscape surrounding the Haworth Parsonage where she spent most of her […]
The Coffin Path by Katherine Clements
The Coffin Path is a seventeenth-century ghost story. A story in which the oppression and wild beauty of the Yorkshire moors provides a compelling backdrop, where a sense of encroaching malevolence seeps like a ‘winding sheet of fog … silent, still, watching’ through the very stones of Scarcross Hall, and the fates of all who live there. Scarcross […]
Review: Britannia, Episode 1
We’ve all been waiting to devour Britannia, we history buffs, just as the Romans did nearly 2000 years ago. Where Julius Caesar turned and ran, Aulus Plautius returns, nine decades later, in AD 43, brimming with bravado. ‘I am lucky,’ he tells his second-in-command, the wonderfully named Perfectus, vowing to succeed where Caesar had failed. […]