English Resources

”And if you feel like you are spending your life running from dragons, isn’t it nice to know that you’re never more than one thought away from peace?” http://www.geniuscatalyst.com/ Michael… Read More »Michael Neill's Genius Catalyst

There are short story writers and then there is William Trevor. A simple yet devastating truth. Reading his story ‘Friendship’ from his 1996 collection ‘After Rain’ just now, I just… Read More »After the rain: William Trevor

Reading may confirm things that we have known or lost or hoped for. We  come across a parade of arranged words and something magical may happen, something that we hear… Read More »Death beyond constant love: Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“Don’t make money your goal. Instead, pursue the things you love doing, and then do them so well that people can’t take their eyes off you.” – Maya Angelou

Secret Heart by David Almond David Almond’s books are strange, unsettling, wild things – unfettered by the normal restraints of children’s literature. It is hard to say with any certainty… Read More »Secret heart by David Almond -Review Guardian

In Chapter four of David Almond’s The Savage, the narrator Blue expresses the seemingly incidental event of his own inclusion in his Savage story. I love the emphasis on the… Read More »One day without really thinking about it, I put myself in the story for the first time..'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-V7in9LObI How poignantly uncanny this video representation of Bill Viola’s Ocean without a shore. In a way reminds me of Rachmaninov’s Isle of the Dead and even Almodovar’s Volver. Even… Read More »Ocean without a shore: Billy Viola

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 all… Read More »Isabel Allende: The House of the Spirits

Sometimes, magic realism works and sometimes it doesn’t. On the other hand, you will find those elements in most literature from all over the world – not just in Latin… Read More »Isabel Allende : Magical Realsim

ISBN: 0552995886 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… Read More »Isabel Allende – The House of the Spirits

ISBN: 0141439564 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… Read More »Charles Dickens – Great Expectations

ISBN: 0099273934 Probably my favourite book of all time: read it after requesting the novel as a leaving present and was staggered at its transcendent humanity. I felt that this… Read More »Toni Morrison – Beloved

ISBN: 1860498833 ‘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… Read More »Sarah Waters – Fingersmith

ISBN: 0099366517 Bought at the airport, and read in the blistering heat of a Carolina summer, this is the book to raise all your temperatures. For like Dickens, everyone in… Read More »James Ellroy – The Black Dahlia

ISBN: 0140620117 ‘Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain and little, I am soulless and heartless? – You think wrong! – I have as much soul as you,… Read More »Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre

ISBN: 1853260916 ‘One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none, I think.’ Woolf writing in her diary… Read More »Virginia Woolf – To the Lighthouse

ISBN: 033037690X ‘I shall have to learn how to miss you.’ says Caravaggio in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Caravaggio’s acknowledgment that his missing of another is a form of… Read More »Amy Bloom – A Blind Man call tell how much I love you

ISBN: 0140621202 Like so many relationships, Bleak House begins in the fog: ‘Fog everywhere. Fog up the river…fog down the river…chance people on the bridges…with fog all round them.’ Repetition… Read More »Charles Dickens – Bleak House

ISBN: 1840222654 ‘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… Read More »Katherine Mansfield – Collected Stories

ISBN: 0856463035 ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard. Not a day since then I haven’t wished him dead. Prayed for it…’ Duffy’s poem ‘Havisham’ begins with a vehement outcry: ‘Beloved sweetheart bastard.’ This… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy – Mean Time

ISBN: 1853261955 ‘The rectory struck a chill into their hearts as they entered. It seemed ugly, and almost sordid, with that dank air of that middle class, degenerated comfort which… Read More »DHLawrence – The Virgin and the Gypsy

ISBN: 0192833391 ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind…’ ( Macbeth) If each man kills the thing he loves, then Macbeth’s murder of King Duncan propels him into terminal nightmare.… Read More »Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist

ISBN: 0099734419 ‘Bridges join but they also separate.’ ‘I like the collision between different realities’, she says, as she prepares two mugs of Irish tea. ‘It’s exciting at the level… Read More »Jeanette Winterson – The Passion

ISBN: 0192802380 Elizabeth Bennet teases Darcy and he cannot resist her. ‘Indeed I do not dare…’ I have long regarded this exchange as one of the sexiest in fiction and… Read More »Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice

ISBN: 978-0755331420 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 »Jed Rubenfeld – The Interpretation of Murder

ISBN: 978-0140620474 Reading this novel again in 36 degrees of heat in Tunisia was a delightful and slightly unusual experience! As I sat moderately baking in occasional shade, Bathsheba and… Read More »Thomas Hardy – Far from the Madding Crowd

ISBN: 978-0-670-91726-6 I remember reading Katherine Mansfield’s story The Garden Party during a sixth form lesson and finding its indirect, impressionistic style haunting and yet real. Mansfield’s young protagonist Laura… Read More »William Trevor – Cheating at Canasta