Literature

Frankly I blame beer for it, this whole obsession over sporting records. If it wasn't for beer's foaming head giving the men who drink it equally foaming heads would we really care who scored how many goals or runs in however many games in the year of one's father's birth? Such statistics are shouted, scribbled on napkins, or carved into foreheads in certain waterfront drinking establishments in order to settle arguments. Those arguments in turn begin in order to settle...

As much as I truly enjoy reading a good mystery novel – within the broad term of genre fiction mysteries are by far my favourite – they do present a positively infernal problem in writing about them. Most of the major touchstones used by a thoughtful reviewer in assessing a book's worth have to be equivocated. Plot is obvious; nobody will give a moment's worth of deciding whether or not to read a whodunit if they already know whodunit. One...

If you have not heard of the Irish writer Karl Parkinson before, well let me tell you two things. One, you really need to move in better and more alternative circles; and two, you're missing out on something special. Parkinson's first novel, The Blocks, like a great thoroughbred on its maiden race broke screaming with nostrils flared from the gate. It was the novel Ireland had not only waited for, it was the novel Ireland needed – no false nostalgia...

Review by Isolde Walters, follow at @isoldewrites  I have always been bookish. When I was a child, my father nicknamed me 'bookmark', partly because I was slight but mainly because my nose was forever in a novel. One summer I read George Eliot's Middlemarch in five heady days - that's over 700 pages of heavy Victorian prose, long meandering sentences with clauses and sub-clauses and semi-colons galore. But I fell in love with the characters and their stories and was...

Being curious about curiosity truly does sound like something out of Alice in Wonderland, whose lead character was observed saying 'curiouser and curiouser' about Mad Hatters, talking playing cards and the like. Although you know, if the Queen of Hearts leaps out of the desk and starts crying 'Off with their heads!' in the midst of your monthly evening of euchre with friends; well if that doesn't raise a burst of inquisitive curiosity then there's just no hope for you...

A London bookshop has uncovered a shocking conspiracy about the coveted Griffin Poetry Prize, linking winners of the award to the TV drama Midsomer Murders. The thread, which starts "does anyone want to hear my conspiracy theory", links winners of the poetry prize to elements of the show dating back as far as 2005. Although the latest incidents seem quite normal - Alice Oswald won the Griffin Prize in 2017 for 'Falling Awake' and her brother, Will Keen, played 'Preaching' Pete Kubatski in Midsomer...

Let us speak then of victimless crimes, the pretense that somehow by expunging certain acts from the criminal justice system we are in fact advancing civilization, casting aside the repressions, the myths, the lies our churches told us for centuries upon centuries that those acts were evil when of course we the educated sophisticates know ever so much better that they are not evil merely ... pleasures that do no harm to no one else. If I choose to smoke...

There is a reason I love short stories as much as I do. Show me a city, I'll write you a novel; read me a short story and you sing the whole planet. Yes I know that seems counter-instinctual. After all, how can three hundred or three thousand words possibly be more revealing of more of life than three hundred pages probing, extracting, peering at through the magnifying glass of words the lives of major characters with all their psychology...

If I might go out on a limb, there is a bit of wisdom learned through observation that I think the comedian and author Sara Pascoe and I hold in common as both truth and strategy. It is, if you want an audience to take you seriously make them laugh first. A decent framework of comedy is not to be confused with the forced smiles and gargled cough-laughs that greet your company's CEO at the Region Meeting when he hauls...