If you walk through the streets of central London, it won’t be long before you come across one of the city’s famous blue plaques. The markers are visually ...
Tag: London
Rachel Cusk’s Disappearing Act
In 2001, after a decade or so as the author of well-regarded, modest-prize-winning fiction, Rachel Cusk began to develop into a kind of memoirist provocateur ...
Rebuild by Design: Interviews with Ricky Burdett and Hitoshi Abe
There is a growing feeling among both critical social scientists and design professionals that the two groups need to undertake a more intensive dialogue. In the New York region, some of this ...
Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a ...
O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s ...
Loving Pickwick
The amorphous literary period that directly preceded Queen Victoria’s ascension to the English throne in 1837 is notorious for true crimes of book history, from the suspicious disappearance of the ...
Must We Have Lives?
“Hermione Lee was very kind,” Penelope Fitzgerald once wrote of the woman who would later become her biographer. “Although she clearly thinks I am hopeless about feminism, and says this is the ...
The Cost of Copying
Two recent books about copying remind us how the digital age has made Bambis of us all: we struggle, as Disney’s fawn did, to find our balance on the ice, confused by the absence of the friction that ...
Abney Park Cemetery
This is a new installment of Public Streets, a biweekly urban observations series curated by Ellis Avery. Salvation Army officers don’t die; they are “promoted to glory.” In Abney Park Cemetery there ...
The Great [National] Novel
When Capital was published in Great Britain earlier this year, it was immediately heralded as the first important novel about the recent financial crisis. And this made sense since its author, John ...