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Views From Sixteen: The Books That Impacted Me The Most Between Sixteen and Eighteen
This is a list of some of the books that have had the biggest impact on my thinking or were earth-shattering for me in some way. Coincidentally, these are all books I read at sixteen or seventeen while studying for my A-Levels (not my A-Level texts themselves) so maybe there’s just something about the books… Continue reading
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The Texts From My Degree That Have Impacted Me The Most: Prose Fiction
1. The God of Small Things (1997) by Arundhati Roy 2nd year text *This book features child sexual abuse, domestic violence and other kinds of violence, graphically depicted. “At Papachi’s funeral, Mammachi cried and her contact lenses slid around in her eyes. Ammu told the twins that Mammachi was crying more because she was used… Continue reading
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Review: You Are Here by David Nicholls (Sceptre, 2025)
Time is a sensation that alters depending on where you are, and the cursed hours between three and five on a February afternoon lasted forever, as did the same hours in the morning, times when she had nothing to contemplate but the same circling anxieties and regrets, times when she was forced to acknowledge the… Continue reading
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Review: The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods (One More Chapter, division of HarperCollins, 2023)
‘… It’s time you took your head out of your books and faced reality.’I clung tighter to my book. A rare first American edition of Wuthering Heights, a gift from my father, along with a deep love of reading. … It was not in perfect condition; the cloth boards were worn on the edges and… Continue reading
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Review: If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin (Dial Press, 1974)
Daniel tried to tell Fonny something about what had happened to him, in prison… Sometimes, when Daniel spoke, he cried – sometimes, Fonny held him. Sometimes I did. Daniel brought it out, or forced it out, or tore it out of himself as though it were torn, twisted, chilling metal, bringing with it his flesh… Continue reading
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‘Thou art a Roman, be not barbarous’: Civilisation & Barbarism in Titus Andronicus and Othello
The Oxford English Dictionary defines barbarism as ‘rudeness or unpolished condition of language’ as well as the ‘absence of culture’, further defining it as the opposite of civilisation.1 Both definitions of the word have been in use as early as the late sixteenth century. While Europeans during the Age of Discovery often attributed the label… Continue reading
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‘An Act of Love’: The Representation of Bodily Autonomy and Free Choice in Octavia Butler’s ‘Bloodchild’
In the afterword to ‘Bloodchild’, her self-described ‘pregnant man story’, Octavia Butler writes that she wanted to challenge herself to write a story of a man becoming pregnant ‘as an act of love — choosing pregnancy in spite of as well as because of difficult circumstances’. ‘Bloodchild’ imagines a world in which humans (called Terrans)… Continue reading
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Foreigners and Foreignness in Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Dutch Church Libel (1593)
In the chapter on foreigners in Keywords of Identity, Race and Human Mobility in Early Modern England, Nandini Das and others explain that in early modern England, the identity category of ‘foreigner’ was thought of in three ways: those with a place of origin outside of England, those spiritually estranged from God by way of… Continue reading
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Liberty in John Milton’s Paradise Lost
As a text depicting the Fall of humanity, the question of liberty and by extension, free will, is central to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, with questions of Adam and Eve’s freedom in the poem being the subject of extensive criticism. The discussion of the characters’ liberty—most commonly defined as self-government or the state of not… Continue reading
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Human and Non-Human Entanglements in Mid-Late Medieval English Literature
Carolyn Dinshaw begins her chapter ‘Ecology’ in A Handbook of Middle English Studies with a discussion of medieval roof bosses depicting humans with leaves sprouting from their heads and growing out of their mouths. The ubiquity of these sculptures across Europe, as ‘one of the most popular decorative motifs in medieval ecclesiastical sculpture’ demonstrates a… Continue reading
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Report: The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, A Portugal
The voyages and adventures of Fernand Mendez Pinto, published in 1653, is the first English translation of Fernão Mendes Pinto’s 1583 memoir Peregrinação, which details Pinto’s experiences in various parts of the world not yet widely explored by contemporary European powers. In being translated into English at all—around the beginning of the English book trade’s… Continue reading