Tag: fiction

E.M. Forster invents the iPad

September 30, 2022 3 Comments
E.M. Forster invents the iPad

Years ago my friend C and I challenged each other to read, all the way through, a Classic Long Book.  My challenge was Moby-Dick, and his was Bleak House.  Whether C ever reached Melville’s majestic final line, ‘… and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago’, I […]

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Richard Owain Roberts’s ‘Hello friend we missed you’

November 20, 2020 0 Comments
Richard Owain Roberts’s ‘Hello friend we missed you’

Hello friend we missed you is Richard Owain Roberts’s first novel.  Published by Parthian, it was nominated for this year’s Guardian ‘Not the Booker’ prize.  It duly won the award in October 2020 after a readers’ vote. In the book Roberts sets himself a big challenge: how to engage us as readers with a protagonist […]

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Allies against slavery: Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne

January 6, 2019 4 Comments
Allies against slavery: Ignatius Sancho and Laurence Sterne

Ignatius Sancho was one of the most prominent black Britons of the eighteenth century – and without doubt the most multi-talented.  Born in Africa, according to his own account (or on board ship, according to his biographer, Joseph Jekyll), he was shipped across the Atlantic to be a slave in the Spanish colony of New […]

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Selling body parts in Little Hintock

January 13, 2015 0 Comments
Selling body parts in Little Hintock

After a visit to Dorchester we stayed on New Year’s Eve in a B&B high above Bradford on Avon. At midnight all the guests stood outside as fireworks blazed in distant towns and villages. The house, several centuries old, was full of books available for us to read, and one that took my eye was […]

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