‘On a hill above the valley there was a wood. In the wood there was a huge tree. Under the tree there was a hole. In the hole lived Mr Fox and Mrs Fox and their four Small Foxes.’ These are the opening lines of Fantastic Mr Fox by Roald Dahl. It’s July […]
Read More… from Read: Blog From the Treetops in the Roald Dahl Woods
Amy Caitlin
It was a windswept Saturday afternoon in early February this year, as I huddled by the doorway of the Coach House at Kelmscott House, Hammersmith waiting to meet the writer Zakia Carpenter-Hall. “… the wallpaper man.” A snippet from a breeze-snatched conversation interrupted my thoughts. William Morris: Wallpaper Man. Somewhat irrationally the words irked […]
Read More… from Read: William Morris and the Art of Dissent
Clare Conway
Dundee, where I grew up, is currently among the world’s coolest small cities. It has a V&A and hotels surrounding the V&A, not just to mask the city centre from visitors. In my day, Dundee was post-industrial, reliant on a few failing employers, full of health and social risks, particularly for the poor. But […]
Your new book is about a very special tree and – perhaps – it’s also about our relationship to time, human time versus ‘nature time’? Could you tell us a bit more about what inspired you to write it? Has your relationship with this tree changed the way you perceive other trees? Can you […]
Read More… from Read: Q&A With Radio 4 ‘Book of the Week’ Author James Canton
James Canton
For a Coming Extinction (after W. S. Merwin) You whom we have named Charger, Challenger, Great King, and Noor the shining one, now that you are at the brink of extinction, I am writing to those of you who have reached the black groves of the sky, where you […]
On the last day before the hospitality sector in England locked down, my wife and I sat in a hotel garden in Cumbria watching the comings and goings at a bird feeder. The occasion was my birthday and the dinner had been booked for months. It just happened to fall on the last day […]
There’s an argument that we all feel a need to belong. Somewhere, to someone beloved – to something. To a place where our books are; music, pictures and stuff, that we can call home. And to some kind of ‘-ism’, a position in the spectrum of opinions, a locator in society. This text may […]
This blog was originally published on July 9th 2020. This week, on his first trip abroad as Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador is meeting with Donald Trump in Washington, presumably to celebrate the new US-Mexico-Canada Agreement, an updated version of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement. This visit has been harshly criticized […]
I remember the moment of panic on the tube as it clattered towards Waterloo. Was I really going to go through with this? I was in my mid-fifties, a grandmother to two, and I had agreed to be part of a topless protest on Waterloo Bridge. What was I thinking? Let’s begin with the easy […]
Read More… from Read: Where Are Their Cats?
Jessica Townsend
The world is holding its breath. We are in lockdown, each of us caught somewhere along the spectrum between hell and heaven and the sense of waiting pushes down on my shoulders and steals my breath. If I go up the hill to ask What do you want of me? (I live on the […]
Read More… from Read: On Being a Conscious Evolutionary
Manda Scott
As I lay in the middle of the road outside Downing Street, surrounded by police, awaiting my imminent arrest, I looked up at a cloudless blue sky. It felt like a sign that the rain had finally stopped and, as I enjoyed the sun on my face, one of London’s famous parakeets flew overhead. […]
Read More… from Read: Tear Gas or Tea? A Very English Arrest
Beth Pitts
There was a meme circulating a few months ago which contrasted the competing virtues of Greta Thunberg and the Dutch inventor Boyan Slat as poster children for the climate movement. Both Greta and Boyan are young, idealistic and passionately committed to environmental causes. They were both still teenagers when they first came to public prominence. […]
Read More… from Read: Telling the Story of Climate Crisis
Philip Seargeant
When the sun started shining, earlier in the month, I couldn’t decide whether it made lockdown harder or easier to bear. To begin with, the answer seemed obvious: even people who don’t have a garden or a balcony could still get to a park for their daily exercise, and those that had to self-isolate could […]
Read More… from Read: Floods and Plagues and Other Things
Edward Platt
I only went to a dog meat market once. If you don’t know what a dog meat market is, it’s exactly as it sounds. It’s where they slaughter and butcher dogs and sell their meat. You can find them throughout Asia – I went to Moran Market in South Korea. As the co-founder of an […]
Read More… from Read: Where Dogs Die, Change is Still Possible
Harry Eckman
ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? < RANT WRITTEN TO BE READ LOUD WRITERS REBELLION, TRAFALGAR SQUARE, OCTOBER 2019 > THIS IS THE WRITERS REBELLION CALLING! I AM HERE FOR THIS! ARE YOU HERE FOR THIS? CALLING ALL MY BOOKISH COMRADES. ALL THE INKY-FINGERED INTROVERTS, THE BESPECTACLED PEN PUSHERS, CALLING ALL WRITERS AND READERS, BOOK LOVERS […]
he says, whose preferred flag is a blank cheque. on mornings made pejorative with foxes. pissy macho stink of them on everything. the grim, diminished sting of drill, its glitchy phobic diss and bleat. stuck on repeat. like foxes. solja boys gekkering thin threat up from behind the wheelie bins. these, our russet buccaneers, sarcoptic […]
Nine months later, and for the first time in my life, I am on trial, for breaching a ‘Section 14’ order intended to clear rebels off the streets. In the dock, I take the oath to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Telling the truth because other people haven’t. The […]
Individualism and spending time alone is base-line normal for writers. We visit friends, we eat with people, we go to parties. But we work alone; get things going alone; get things done alone. Well, alone with our imaginary friends. Sometimes this makes me sad. I look at the long lists of credits at the end […]
This is an exclusive excerpt from Jini Reddy’s new book, Wanderland. ‘In south-west London, trying to make sense of it all – not just my father’s and sister’s deaths, but what felt like a total failure to make anything stick – I’d gravitate like a homing pigeon to Holland Park. It brought me back to […]
Good news has been in short supply — save the reports of frontline heroism, community kindness and spectacular fundraising efforts — since the planet was struck by this meteorite of contagion, smashing into our world with catastrophic consequences. Our spikey sci-fi nemesis, the coronavirus COVID-19, has taken literally incalculable lives: our death-counting systems cannot keep […]