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A walk down history lane …
(9 minute read) Luca La Monica takes the reader on a fascinating wander down the main street of his home town in Southern Italy.
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Reading a building colonially
(8 minute read) They’re pulling down statues, but what about houses? Adam Brocklehurst looks behind the bricks and mortar to discover challenging truths about the culture that crafted some of England’s most iconic buildings.
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Many Happy Returns
(7 minute read) Marie McCoy recalls the link between happy birthdays and traumatic births and finds good reason to celebrate.
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Editorial: Don’t just survive, thrive!
There was a time when survival writing was a rather niche market. If you looked really hard, or asked the bored assistant, bookshops tended to stock a light range of boy scout-esque manuals on what to carry as emergency rations, the joys of Kendal Mint Cake and how to light a fire with sticks. More recently (before the lockdown, of course), if you mentioned the term “survival writing”, you would have found yourself conducted to the shelves containing another genre … generally filed under “self help”, the survival in this case being of a different order: how to survive a divorce, how to survive a bereavement, how to survive redundancy…
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Covid-19: a chance to build bridges between generations
(7 minute read) Lisa Fraser explains how volunteering to buy groceries for an isolated elderly neighbour has changed the way she relates to older people.
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A guide for restless hearts: in conversation with a classic of world literature
(4 minute read) It’s time to explore your own mystery, says Luca La Monica, guided by one of history’s greatest thinkers.
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For the valleys I sing
(2 minute read) Leonard Franchi writes a hymn to the life of valley villages, from the Vale of Leven to the Valle del Comino.
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Telling life’s real stories
(8 minute read) The best stories are often those not written down, believes Joseph Evans.
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When the storm clouds gather inside
(11 minute read) Zoë Dukoff-Gordon reads a book about weather where the storms are more personal than meteorological.
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Nurse Ratched vs Fred Rogers: Order without peace
(10 minute read) Jeff Nottingham sees echoes of his good and bad parenting approaches in two characters from US culture - the admirable Fred Rogers and the scary Nurse Ratched.
