Joining the Club

15 August 2016 London My review of A Question of Upbringing, the first Anthony Powell’s twelve-volume novel series A Dance … More

Women Take Back the Write

19 May 2016 London Is feminism dead in the UK? This month’s Something Rhymed Literary Salon series re-opens a much-needed debate about … More

Not Far From the Middling Crowd

16 May 2015 London The BBC and Thomas Vinterberg’s prettified adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From the Madding Crowd fails … More

Diff’rent Strokes

8 March 2015 London  Fifty Shades of Grey continues a well-worn and lucrative literary tradition of bad writing about kinky … More

Publish And Be Damned

19 February 2015 New Zealand Margaret Atwood’s essay collection On Writers and Writing is a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon. Just don’t … More

The Road Less Travelled

18 January 2015 London Wild, a fantastic film adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, creates a new kind of movie heroine – the … More

O, What A Lovely War!

12 January 2015 London Testament of Youth, a new British film based on Vera Brittain’s celebrated WWI memoir, is deeply … More

A Brief History of Marriage

5 January 2015 London The Theory of Everything, a new biopic about disabled physicist Stephen Hawking, is – against all odds … More

Who’s That Girl?

4 October 2014 London Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s potboiler about a violently dysfunctional marriage, has the big screen adaptation it didn’t … More

Swimming Against the Tide

31 August 2014 London Barracuda, Christos Tsiolkas’ fantastic new novel about the rise and fall of a young Greek-Australian swimmer, … More