When I was growing up, phrases such as ‘no-one likes a show-off’ and ‘pride comes before a fall’ were common family currency, ‘getting above yourself’ was a crime, and punishment by being ‘taken down a peg or two’ was swift and inevitable. In short, as a child I was taught not to place too high … More The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas by Gertrude Stein
When my brother became a vegetarian in his teens it caused a bit of a flap. This was the mid-1970s, we lived on a council estate in Liverpool, and the nearest we’d got to vegetarianism was eating fish on Fridays. So to find we were living with someone who’d stopped eating meat was like being … More The Vegetarian by Han Kang (translated by Deborah Smith)
Doris Lessing died in November last year, aged 94, with more than 50 published novels and a Nobel Prize for Literature to her name. And at that time I hadn’t read anything she’d written. (Actually, now I’ve typed it I’m beginning to think I might have read one of her novels for a tutorial at … More The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
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