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Philip Pullman: Grimm Tales (2013, Penguin Books, Limited)
In this beautiful book of classic fairy tales, award-winning author Philip Pullman has chosen his fifty favourite stories from the …
Margaret Cavendish's life as a writer and noblewoman unfolded against the backdrop of the 17th Century English Civil War and …
The word "bitch" conjures many images for many people but is most often meant to describe an unpleasant woman. Even …
A missed opportunity. The author is self-deprecating but also distastefully deprecating of the people he encounters. It's also curiously uninformative, with no map, and no explanation that the Bootle he visits is not the large town in Merseyside.
I read this book as a collective portrait of schoolchildren painted with understanding and sympathy. So I was surprised to see it criticised for dealing in stereotypes and disdain. It's true, for instance, that Clanchy writes about one pupil that 'poverty is stamped through Cheyenne like letters in a stick of rock, manifesting itself in her rotting, nineteenth-century mouth'. This isn't a gratuitous dig about a girl too lazy or stupid to brush her teeth: it comes towards the end of a chapter which faces head on issues of poverty, class, and the author's own privilege.
Is Clanchy's language clumsy? Often. Does she insist on physical and racial labels for every child? Afraid so. Did she pretend that her critics had fabricated quotes? Astonishingly, yes. And yet, this is also a book that shows sensitivity to and celebration of children's individuality.
To get away from her pregnant stepmother in New York City, fifteen-year-old Daisy goes to England to stay with her …
Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements is a 1962 book about the history of anarchism by George Woodcock.
The Invisible Man is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in Pearson's Weekly in 1897, it …
Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This …
Yeine Darr is an outcast from the barbarian north. But when her mother dies under mysterious circumstances, she is summoned …
Emma Smith: The making of Shakespeare's First Folio (2015)
"In late November 1623, Edward Blount finally took delivery at his bookshop at the sign of the Black Bear near …
