If you’re the fastidious sort who cares about historical accuracy, then you probably aren’t the right audience for Don’t Want You Like A Best Friend. Billed as “a swoon-worthy debut queer Victorian romance”, US author Emma Alban brings us the …
Did Virginia Woolf write the first trans novel?
“Yesterday morning I was in despair… I couldn’t screw a word from me; and at last dropped my head in my hands: dipped my pen in the ink, and wrote these words, as if automatically, on a clean sheet: Orlando: …
People are still being buried alive
I hadn’t given the dangers of being buried alive much thought before my visit to an Edgar Allan Poe museum in Richmond, Virginia. I knew what every schoolchild knows — that some Victorians were so terrified at the prospect of …
How Zadie Smith succumbed to history
Why bother with fiction? That’s one question. Why bother with history? That’s another. And they’ve both been torturing Zadie Smith, who has now produced the sort of fiction she once dismissed as “aesthetically and politically conservative by definition” — a …
The dirty truth about sewage
“The sewer is the conscience of the city,” Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables. “The mass of filth has this in its favour: that it is not a liar.” I thought about that quote recently, when I heard how Britain’s …
The love life of JS Mill
In our age, Victorians don’t stand a chance. Even the most enlightened of them appear to us either as quaint traditionalists (at best) or unforgivable reactionaries (at worst) — snobs, bigots and misogynists, one and all. There is, however, one …
We are living in Mystic Meg’s world
In 1564, John Dee was “appointed Royal Advisor in mystic secrets”, official astrologer and magician to Elizabeth I. If he had been born in the 20th century, would the astronomer, scientist and occultist have ended up writing for the News …
Poverty is not inevitable
The energy companies are drowning in dollars, while a season of strikes continues to dismay much of the media. Cathy Newman of Channel 4 News talks about “taking on” the trade unions, as though they were a bunch of armed …
Dickens hated Oliver Twist
Charles Dickens hated Oliver Twist. Rarely in English letters do we find a case of an author so embarrassed, so fundamentally ill at ease with his own creation. Oliver spends the first half of the novel crying, begging, whining, and …
