DESPERATELY SEEKING MUCH NEEDED RELAXATION, THEY DROVE INTO THE COUNTRYSIDE. UNEXPECTEDLY A TERRIER RAN IN FRONT OF THEM. SWERVING SUDDENLY, THEY MISSED HIM…… TAIL WAGGING,HE HURRIED BACK HOME FOR TEA. …… FROM… Read More »Drive by Eileen
Margaret Shilton had the clearest eyes that anyone could bear to see. And she would turn her head and the blue would reach you before you could compose a face. She had met Demeter once at… Read More »Blue
MAKE SURE YOUR BRAIN IS ENGAGED BEFORE OPENING YOUR MOUTH! HIS FINAL MOCKERY KILLED THE GOOD WITHIN HER. MANY YEARS LATER, SHE MET HIM AGAIN. NOW TALLER; BREATHING DEEPLY;… Read More »Zanussi by Eileen
When the sore throat came it seemed so commonplace. A Spring Friday. Bright yellow daffodils by the door. He promised to take aspirin. See us Monday. By then an angry scarlet cavern. He… Read More »Elephant
The shape of fear is always a surprise: you are meeting something from within when you believe you are meeting something from without. Today I saw that dismal glow again… Read More »Body Language
Only a dog without hope could run like that. So she went out one morning and bought an explorer’s ticket for a new life. He didn’t come. He had hated… Read More »Sadness
In a far corner of the garden a handsome boy was burning a book. Cowardly words eaten alive. Carbon calmed him. He dropped the book on the grass, held his… Read More »Window
A mean man fell from a window above her head. That’s life she thought and started to file a broken nail. It took over three weeks to replace that glass :… Read More »Albatross
Jackie knew two things. She was beautiful and she hated cheese. Then she fell in love. Now she’s sure of nothing.
The last stages of the novel kept me under the duvet all morning! Hurrah for half-term! ‘ I don’t want to sleep with you, Mrs Banwell.’ Every man wants to… Read More »Jed Rubenfeld's Final Interpretation of Murder
Wild nights! Wild nights! Were I with thee, Wild nights should be Our luxury! Futile the winds To a heart in port, Done with the compass, Done with… Read More »Emily Dickinson's Rapture! ( Eat your heart out Carol Ann Duffy!)
I find this poem magnificent. It consoles, makes one braver and reassures us that there are things far far bigger than ourselves. It is a real resource… Read More »Emily Bronte's Last Vision?
Freud only visited the States once and that was quite enough; though why it was enough remained a mystery until today, when Rubenfeld’s novel explores a possible explanation.… Read More »The Interpretation of Murder : Jed Rubenfield's walk on the Wild side?
‘I haven’t written a word since October and I don’t mean to until the spring. I want much more material: I am tired of my little stories like birds bred… Read More »Katherine Mansfield's Journal: Fatigue and Illumination
My father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs, to which I had access (for it adjoined my own) and which nobody else in… Read More »Reading as If for life: David Copperfield's secret sanctuary
‘But Briar crept on me. Briar absorbed me. Now I feel the simple weight of the woollen cloak with which I have covered myself and think, I shall never escape!… Read More »Ink, Ink everywhere! : Sarah Waters's Fingersmith
We all need our dreams. We have all fallen in love. Dickens’s susceptible hero Pip believes that the ‘star’ of his dream is the beautiful Estella, because she had… Read More »Pip's fallen fairytale Romance: Dickens's Great Expectations
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five -thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He… Read More »Death and Resurrection Combined: Marquez's wildest opening?
I can still remember reading Allende’s opening lines in Liverpool’s Bold Street Waterstones. ‘Barrabas came to us by sea, the child Clara wrote in her delicate calligraphy.‘ I tingled… Read More »Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits
‘I should say a great deal about The Hours and my discovery: how I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I… Read More »Virginia Woolf and the Caves
October Wind in the poplars and a broken branch,a dead arm in the bright trees. Five poplarstremble gradually to gold. The stone faceof the lion darkens in a sharp shower,his dreadlocks of lobelia grown long,tangled, more brown now than blue eyed. My friend dead and the graveyard at Orcop,her short ride to the hawthorn hedge, lighterthan hare bones on men’s shoulders, our facesstony, rain, weeping in the air. The gravedeep as a well takes the earth’s thud, the slowfall of flowers. Over the page the penruns faster than wind’s white steps over grass.For a while health feels like pain. Then panicrunning the fields, the grass, the racing leavesahead of light, holding that robin’s eyein the laurel, hydrangea’s faded green.I must write like the wind, year after yearpassing my death day, winning ground. ‘The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle’s jaws directed all its vengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred into motion, and boiled like… Read More »Gillian Clarke's 'October' poem with a trace of Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd
‘Where i lived – winter and hard earth.i sat in my cold stone roomchoosing tough words, granite, flint, to break the ice. My broken heart – i tried that,… Read More »Demeter: What questions should I ask?
She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.… Read More »Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Friend of the Mind
Oranges are not the Only Fruit was a source of joy on one month’s Inter-rail. The book was passed around between us in carriages and acquired pizza stains and sand… Read More »Winterson's original passion: Oranges for Valentine's Day!
Skellig is a novel whose eponymous protagonist lives in a garage, eats aspirin and Chinese take away, all washed down with brown ale. He is also an arthritic angel who… Read More »Skellig: David Almond's Angelic owl
”A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, and seen things, even as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to… Read More »Introduction
`…it is not drawn with the free lines of a free man; it has the half-witted secrecies of a hunted thief. It does not look merely like a picture of… Read More »Fagin in his cell: Oliver Twist's Nemesis pictures his end
No guesses for why Rimbaud remains a cult figure! A poem for all those of us with shamanistic tendencies! To me. The story of one of my eccentricities.… Read More »Rimbaud: The Alchemy of the Word( from A Season In Hell)
“The greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites. It gives you knowledge of the world and experience of… Read More »Why read?
