One Good Turn is the second novel in which Kate Atkinson featured her private detective, Jackson Brodie. Brodie is attractive, compassionate and flawed. Appealing of course, with the added attraction that he… Read More »One good Turn by Kate Atkinson; ‘A jolly Murder Mystery’ for Bolton, Bury and Manchester!
A NOISELESS, patient spider, I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated; Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament,… Read More »Soul adventures with Walt Whitman!
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light, Of what we say we feel – below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel – there flows With noiseless current… Read More »Why reading poetry helps us know ourselves better?
The trees rustled encouragingly as she hurried towards the familiar destination: another meeting at Spicer’s bar. She did not, absolutely did not, allow herself to imagine the figure waiting for… Read More »Another Misssion by Anna McNamara
Daphne Du Maurier – “The Old Man” Being unfamiliar with Du Maurier’s work, I didn’t know what to expect from this short story, and, having scanned the contents page of… Read More »Daphne Du Maurier's 'The Old man' with Alison Ridyard
Carol Ann Duffy – “You” – The Volatile Nature of Love In a characteristic adaptation of the sonnet form, Duffy expresses the contrasting emotions of passion and passivity, and the… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's You: The Volatile nature of Love by Alison Ridyard.
Carol Ann Duffy – “Havisham” Adopting the persona of Charles Dickens’s infamous spinster, ‘Miss Havisham’, and delivered in the form of dramatic monologue, Duffy offers an insight into the disturbed… Read More »Carol Annn Duffy's Havisham by Alison Ridyard
Sometimes days become more fluid than chocolate milkshake! The other week I had the Emily Dickinson phrase, ‘started early, took my dog’ in my head in connection with the latest… Read More »Kate Atkinson and Jackson Brodie.
When You Are Old WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, … Read More »GCSE, A Level English Tuition: W B Yeats' When you are old.
This poem, ‘You‘ begins Carol Ann Duffy’s sequence of love poems, unambiguoulsy called Rapture! Aliosn Ridyard’s commentary on this blog is excellent and discusses the techniques by which Duffy communicates… Read More »Carol Ann Duffy's You from Rapture: Commentary
