It’s UK publication day for ‘A Poem for Every Question’, my new collection of poems for children, illustrated by the brilliant Joe Berger. Inside there are poems to answer all sorts of interesting questions: how many stars in the universe exploded today?; who had the first holiday?; how many times a day do we laugh?;…
Literature
I took delivery yesterday of some advance copies of the gorgeous new edition of ‘You Took the Last Bus Home’. In celebration of that, here’s the title poem … You Took the Last Bus Home you tookthe last bus homedon’t know howyou got it through the door you’re always doing amazing stuff like the time…
Last week saw the release of ‘Sounds Made by Humans’, an album of ‘poem songs’ I’ve made with the brilliant Catenary Wires. The album is out now on vinyl and CD; it’s also available for streaming on Spotify and elsewhere, and can be downloaded. Some places where you can find it… BANDCAMP SHOPIFY ROUGH TRADE…
With the boisterous energy of direct speech, the novelist Ferdia Lennon takes on both the playfulness and the harsh realism of Euripides.
The post Playing for Time appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
One online petition to reverse the ban had over 40,000 signatures, with another exceeding 10,000 signatures before the Cumberland Council overturned its ban in a decisive vote of 12 to 2.
As we encounter Shakespeare’s tragedies it becomes terrifyingly clear that we are not in a moral universe of comeuppances and rewarded virtues.
The post No Comfort appeared first on The New York Review of Books.
As philosopher and broadcaster Scott Stephens suggests in his introduction to Justice and Hope, Raimond Gaita’s principal contribution to the practice of moral philosophy is to have opened it up to readers and audiences that wouldn’t usually encounter it. Most notably in his memoir Romulus, My Father (1998), but also in A Common Humanity (2000) […]
This review was first published in The Weekend Australian * Running to almost half a thousand pages, prodigiously researched and immaculately written, David Marr’s Killing for Country is surely one of the books of the year. Modestly described as a ‘family story’, it is in fact as solid a work of history as one could […]
EVERY NOW AND then a sort of morphic resonance overtakes the world of literature. For reasons that are far from obvious, a number of books about (or around) the same broad subject will suddenly materialise in a way that itself transforms public interest and even shapes public sentiment. In 2023, for example, the name of […]
John Mitchinson explores the attributes of the character that long pre-dates 'Santa Claus’