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The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley is a writer that one generally associates with three things – Brave New World and science fiction, along with real life science, like eugenics; drug experimentation, particularly with LSD; and the Eastern spiritualism he practised in California. Huxley came from a distinguished scientific and literary family and was bound to achieve ‘great things’. Brave […]
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The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
The New Journalism movement of the 1960s was about reporting the situation exactly as it was by way of the journalist involving themselves in that situation as much as possible. This meant going in and talking to the protestors, spending nights with them in the tents, attending the entire political conference and getting to know the […]
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Perlmann’s Silence by Pascal Mercier
For his first novel, originally published in Germany in 1995 and only now being published in English, Pascal Mercier chose the academic world of linguistics as the background for the story. More specifically he chose a small group of professors meeting for a conference on the Italian east coast, in a seaside town not far […]
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The White Review No. 3 launch at Foyles
The night of Thursday 13th October saw the launch of issue no. 3 of The White Review, a new quarterly dedicated to art and literature. Foyles hosted the event in the Gallery at their Charing Cross Road shop, a calm white space with wooden beams in the ceiling that remind one of a Grand Designs-type […]
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October’s Faber Social at The Social
Every month Faber holds its Social at The Social (ha ha). This month’s Social (held on Monday 3rd October) celebrated the art of the short story. The readers were Hanif Kureishi (charming, modest, witty), Sarah Hall (energetic, quiet but with a glint in her eye), Stuart Evers (lots of hair and jokes) and the amazing Edna O’Brien (ingratiating, engaging…lovely). They all read a story from […]
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Tides of War by Stella Tillyard (2011)
Stella Tillyard is primarily an historian; it is therefore unsurprising that Tides of War, her debut foray into fiction, encapsulates every aspect of the Peninsula War of 1812 – 1815 from the social impact in England to the daily life of the soldiers fighting in Spain. The novel’s title is extremely fitting, though at first […]