Look Up!
Dapo Adeola/Penguin Random House
Here are some books that will make reading time more enjoyable for children and the adults reading to or with them.
Lilly James as Rebecca in the new Netflix film.
KERRY BROWN/NETFLIX
Wild coastlines, rich folklore and a sense that it’s a place unto itself, at once England and not, has made Cornwall the ideal setting for Gothic tales.
People have sought more security and safety in their reading.
Andrii Kobryn/Shutterstock
From reading more to re-reading safe favourites, there are early signs that the COVID-19 has influenced how and what we are reading.
Ethan Hawke plays John Brown in Showtime’s new miniseries.
Showtime
The abolitionist’s legacy is often molded to fit various political agendas. Yet the Brown who appears in Showtime’s new miniseries is one we haven’t seen before.
Portrait of the writer Vernon Lee by John Singer Sargent.
Wikimedia
There are reasons many female writers chose to publish under male pseudonyms. Republishing their books under their female names denies them agency.
Zadie Smith’s debut White Teeth was part of a wave of interest in “multicultural writing” in the early 2000s.
ROLF VENNENBERND/EPA
Interest in Black British writing has grown and shrunk since the late 1940s. Is the current wave going to crash like those before it?
A low aerial view of Monte Cassino Abbey, south-east of Rome, after the February 1944 bombing.
(Wikimedia Commons/The Imperial War Museum)
In 1944, the former archbishop of Canterbury mounted a case to preserve the Italian abbey, renowned for centuries for scholarship and devotion, but Allied forces had just destroyed it.
Chris Pietsch/AP
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic book, first published in 1941, is a story of isolation, and seeing things anew.
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How writers hear their characters in their heads.
Many films that address race end up lulling audiences into complacency.
TriStar Pictures
Books, movies and records that seem to challenge racism also subtly advance the idea that progress shouldn’t happen too quickly.
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Sci-fi, fantasy and rom-coms: books with LGBTQIA+ characters are as diverse as their readers.
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Limited promotion and marketing budgets reinforce false ideas about how well diverse books and writers will sell. This leads to a negative cycle for black, Asian and minority ethnic writers.
The post-apartheid system of participatory democracy is generally considered to have failed.
EPA-EFE/Yeshiel Panchia
The challenge for the deepening of South Africa’s democracy is that the very existence of vanguardism prevents the realisation of empowered citizens.
Elizabeth Farm, painted by Joseph Lycett, c1823.
Wikimedia Commons
The newest novel from the author of The Secret River is an imagined diary, detailing the ‘true’ story of Elizabeth Macarthur.
Dennis Brutus’s life is synonymous with South Africa’s freedom struggle.
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Brutus’s life was closely interlinked with the rise of apartheid and offered a way to look at resistance to this system.
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Eco-fiction to help you rethink your role in the climate crisis.
To some Americans, the figures on Mount Rushmore are patriotic leaders; to others, they’re colonizers.
AP Photo/Stephen Groves
For some viewers, President Trump’s July 3 speech at Mount Rushmore represented love of country. Others saw it very differently.
IMDB
After decades of banned books, arrests and raids, Penguin Books Australia decided to take a stand against literary censorship. A new book tells the inside story.
Harriet Jacobs, writer of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
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The problems and ideologies that define American culture were formed in the 19th century.
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The feedback from regular readers was better than the feedback from professional economists.