Features
Like eunuchs in a brothel
A bowl filled near to the brim with spat-out red sits on a denuded table. The Yellow Bittern has just finished a wine tasting session. Post-luncheon cigarettes go up all round, lit, of course, by Cook’s Matches. Hugh Corcoran, sat at the table, is a busy maître. Our conversation is squeezed in before a book launch being hosted that evening at The Bittern.
Landing the big fish
My working life very often involves inserting myself into places I’m not wanted and have no particular businesses in being. Most weeks, I find myself preparing to send a litany of ingratiating cold emails and texts, to people whose interests would probably be best served by ignoring them. Sometimes I receive a reply and sometimes I don’t. There is no specific formula to success or failure.
Sexy elves and alpha dwarves
The worst part about ghostwriting multiple erotic novels at once is when you type the wrong guy’s name during sex. I wonder if my editors feel that pang of infidelity in their gut: what do you mean Bryce and not Hank?
Meeting mother
Everything was a secret. I drank secrets with my mother’s milk. Or later, breathed them in with the adults’ smoke, as they talked and drank.
Listening in the dark
Even as the creator of Pitchblack Playback, I am still often overawed by the experience of listening to an album from start to finish on a big sound system in the dark with no-one talking, singing or bumping into me. I’ve had transformative experiences with albums I thought I already knew intimately, where I’ve felt like I’ve only truly understood their sonics for the first time after knowing them for years.
King Herod in Florida
As usual on my visits to Miami, I was sitting on my parents’ balcony, drinking Bustelo coffee and eating Haitian patties while my family discussed ‘the situation’ in Haiti.
Reading through my girlhood past
Back in 2012, while my rebellious 13-year-old peers were smuggling cigs and replacing their parents’ depleted vodka with tap water, I had a different kind of contraband hidden in my school bag.
Burning cottages
As any Celt will tell you, moving to the dominant nation of this island is an exercise in being misunderstood. To attempt to assert Welsh identity outside of Wales is more often than not to be met with bemusement: ‘Isn’t Wales basically a suburb of England?’ a fellow fresher asked me at a toga party back in Bloomsbury Antica circa 2010.
Sexy elves and alpha dwarves
The worst part about ghostwriting multiple erotic novels at once is when you type the wrong guy’s name during sex. I wonder if my editors feel that pang of infidelity in their gut: what do you mean Bryce and not Hank? Or whether it’s just a standard, known secret that everyone of us ghostwriters is secretly writing as other people, too.
The female literary agents who made Modernism
For anyone interested in censorship, 1928 was a landmark year in literature, with the publication of two ‘shocking’ and ‘obscene’ books that would both end up on trial. Standing in the shadows supporting Radclyffe Hall and D.H. Lawrence through the tumult were their literary agents, Audrey Heath and Nancy Pearn, both powerful forces in publishing in the inter-war years.
Life off the high wire
Unannounced — and perhaps later unwelcome — fame crept into my life as soon as I landed back on the south tower of Notre-Dame-de-Paris on Month 8, 1971, ending a surprise high wire walk of several hours. Parisians were briefly amused by the 22-year-old self-proclaimed aerial poet, but France did not react. Yet the world did — on front pages of newspapers in dozens of languages.
Little bodies as battlegrounds
*CW: this feature mentions eating disorders and anorexia
October half terms were my favourite. For reasons best known to our parents, my brother and I went to different schools whose half-term breaks didn’t overlap, so I got to spend a week with our grandparents without competition or distraction. I was my grandfather’s princess, my grandmother’s darling.
Reviving tradition
On a bus bouncing across the moors from Whaley Bridge to Glossop, I fumble with my phone and attempt to message my friend Becky, who has been asking about our upcoming plans to go to the well dressing at Saddleworth.
Haunted by Robert McClure
There’s a line in a letter, written in 1853 from the Polar Sea, that has haunted me for several years.
Celebs, myths, and neon glory
There is an imagined London place that for over a hundred years has been called ’Soho’. You may have been there when you were younger, read about it in books, seen it in films and heard about it in songs. You can walk, drink, eat, play — even have sex — in Soho, the dense grid of streets south of Oxford Street, West of Charing Cross Road, north of Shaftesbury Avenue and East of Regent Street, but you probably won't find ‘Soho’ there.
Axing the hatchet job
Every once in a while, someone notices that book reviews aren’t what they used to be. Unherd lamented ‘The dying art of the hatchet job’ in a 2021 think-piece, and in 2023 the Economist claimed that ‘Critics are getting less cruel. Alas’.. Note the present participles: this has been the case for most of our century, but it’s still being experienced as a relatively recent turn.
Out of print
I’m sure you remember how things were a decade ago. Every school child was to have a Kindle. Bookshops on high streets were to be a thing of the past. Print was dying, a corpse to be deposited pitifully into the grave.
Dreaming back the years
Forgive a man in his mid-fifties, stuck in an MRI tube, his recourse into nostalgia. I was in there hoping to get answers to questions lately posed by a knee badly damaged while playing American football long ago.
Jeeves and the Big Sleep
My father, who is 78 and lives in Malaysia, has lunch once a week with a group of his high school classmates. I’m in awe, and not a little envious, that he has a group of friends who are so committed to each other that they convene weekly, six decades after they first met.
Annotating Apollo: The Command Module Transcripts
Sometime around 1982 my year 3 teacher Mrs Hill played the class an audio recording from the moon landings. I can't recall in detail if it had a tremendous impact at the time but it must have done, on some level, because not long after that space became my primary interest.
Beyond the great debut
There’s a girl I remember often. She didn’t always have a laptop so she wrote at her university or local library. She was doing an MA while juggling two jobs – commissioning damp reports or working for moon festivals putting together moon jazz playlists. An image came up in her mind and she’d write from North London to UCL on the train, sometimes sketching when words couldn’t come fast enough. Interviews for texture were conducted in cafes and kitchens.
Ginsberg in Newcastle
In the summer of 1965 I was 19 years old, a father of a two-year-old boy, and living with Connie, a married woman who was my two-year-old’s mother. We’d been homeless for a couple of years during which time we’d rented a near derelict old turret up a tall narrow forbidding back lane used by prostitutes, petty thieves to unpack their swag, and those desperate to get a quick one off the wrist, haunted by the risk of being caught with the evidence in hand.
London Irish beyond Kilburn
There are 32 counties in Ireland but there’s a 33rd in northwest London. Or at least, that’s how Kilburn was known until very recently. When people emigrated from the old country, they found a simulacrum of Ireland up the Kilburn High Road. County Kilburn gave them GAA matches, pubs with snugs, and most importantly, other Irish people.
When Hollywood puts your darlings on the block
In an inspired speech to the MusicCares Foundation, in 2015, Bob Dylan observed: ‘These songs of mine, more than anything I think of them as mystery plays, the kind Shakespeare saw when he was growing up. I think you could trace what I do back that far. They were on the fringes then and I think they’re on the fringes now.
The strange truth about literary prizes and the impossibility of judging a book: dispatches from the front
It can be a challenge, when January finally chugs round, to escape an avalanche of potential avenues for self-improvement, one of which is inevitably to stop scrolling and to read more books. I am, essentially, a Professional Reader, and yet this remains a perennial resolution of mine. One way to guarantee you’ll read more, of course, is to judge a literary prize.
The wisdom of the crowd
You could be forgiven for thinking that the crowdfunding model used by Unbound is a relatively novel invention. But it runs back far beyond the internet age.
Getting away with it all
It was the summer of 1954. America was still troubled by the fear of the 'Red peril' – supposed communists at the heart of the establishment. Senator Joe McCarthy was leading a campaign this imaginary enemy. And McCarthyism, while not quite as powerful as it had been, was still a force to be reckoned with.