Crossing Europe by train last summer, it was only on arrival in Romania that I realised we had unwittingly followed the very route (Paris-Munich-Budapest) taken by Jonathan Harker, the young solicitor at the start of Dracula (1897). Returning home to Bridport – in excellent health, I should probably add – I mentioned this to a […]
Speaking on a post-election-special of the talk show Ballaró, Giulio Anselmi, the president of the ANSA press agency, was asked what had surprised him most about the European Elections campaign: “I was most struck by how they [the campaigners] didn’t talk at all about European issues, but then that’s a tradition in European elections in […]
What are the ramifications of the widespread electronic surveillance undertaken by the United States’ National Security Agency, as revealed by Edward Snowden? How does knowing that your online activities (social media, email, search engines etc) could be monitored affect how you discuss and research sensitive topics? How does widespread surveillance affect how journalists and writers […]
I’ve broken an arm, right at the elbow, where it seized. I’ve torn out ligaments, burned a hole into my wrist with an iron that still shows up bandage perforation and always will. Scars run like tributaries along kneecaps, triceps, ankles. I even bear the forceps marks of birth. None of that is strange. Everyone […]
Heartless Bastards, the band centred around the songwriting and vocal talents of Erika Wennerstrom, have been recording and touring for more than ten years now (they were signed to Fat Possum records back in 2004 after a demo was passed on by Patrick Carney of the Black Keys), but have only come to TMO’s attention […]
How do British schoolgirl classics like the Chalet School and Mallory Towers translate to todays bestsellers like Twighlight and The Hunger Games? Amy Ellis-Thomas compares the stock situations and rhetoric of the 1950s boarding schools to today’s equally codified young adult literature.
The Confidence of Youth My friendship with McGiolla was in some ways the story of my college career. I met him towards the end of my first Michaelmas term, on a cold night in November 1990. At that stage, we were both heavily involved in the debating society – the debsoc – but had yet […]
Have you had the suspicion that simple narratives about subprime mortgages, last minute bail-outs, and sweaty-palmed bankers fail to adequately explain what has happened to the global economy since 2008? If so, then I can heartily recommend you pick up a copy of Yanis Varoufakis‘s The Global Minotaur – America, Europe and the Future of […]
Meike Ziervogel is a writer and journalist living in London. She grew up in northern Germany and came to London to study Arabic language and literature. In 2008 she founded Peirene Press, an independent publishing industry dedicated to producing contemporary European novellas in English translation1. In 2012 she was voted as one of the top […]
From their shared fascination with Moby-Dick, writer Philip Hoare and artist Angela Cockayne came together to curate, first, an installation in Plymouth, England, celebrating the book – Dominion: A Whale Symposium. They put together a book with the same title earlier this year then organised and recently launched the Moby-Dick Big Read (www.mobydickbigread.co.uk), a website […]
