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Articles

Essay | A Humming Republic of Others by Leaf Arbuthnot

Somewhere in my friend Ayla’s flat in London is an A4 pile of emails written by me in 2003. I was eleven at the time, and a very young eleven: dorky, so freckled you could barely see my eyes, anxious that my new secondary school didn’t have a playground. The emails are from me. But they’re also to me. That school year, I kept up an impassioned digital correspondence with myself. The exchanges are deranged, but also charming in their way. ‘How are you?’ […]

Fiction | Bottles by Jelle Cauwenberghs

My arms are very long, much longer than I remember. And I am flaking. It is that time of year, when the ice glitters on the bark of trees and the orioles start to shiver in their thicket by the station. It used to frighten me, but now I just clean up after the moult. I wipe the shower tray and eat the crumbs and dandruff like a mouse that eats her own young. I am very tired and all I want to do is sleep. At night I wrap my arms around my torso. In conversation I do the same […]

Fiction | The Wild Laughter by Caoilinn Hughes

The night the Chief died, I lost my father and the country lost a battle it wouldn’t confess to be fighting. For the no-collared, labouring class. For the decent, dependable patriarch. For right of entry from the field into the garden. Jurors were appointed to gauge the casualty. They didn’t wear black. Don’t they know black is flattering? The truth isn’t. They kept safe and silent. I didn’t. When is a confession an absolution and when is it a sentencing, I’d like to find out […]

Essay | One, Two, Three, Four by Craig Brown

Fame came with advantages. One quiet Sunday, the singer songwriter Donovan was sitting in his flat in Maida Vale when the doorbell rang. Paul McCartney had arrived, with his acoustic guitar. They smoked a joint or two. Paul played Donovan two songs he was working on. One of them was about a yellow submarine, and the other went: Ola Na Tungee,
Blowing his mind in the dark with a pipe full of clay – No one can say… In time, Ola Na Tungee would transmute into Eleanor Rigby […]

Fiction | Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud

I understand a kitchen. I’m not saying Miss Betty can’t cook. But give Jim his gym-boots. She hand nowhere near sweet like mine. Two of us coming home from work, same tired, so I took over the cooking three times for the week. As it’s Sunday I decided to do my nice steamed kingfish, callaloo with salt meat, rice and, just for Solo, a macaroni pie. While the pie was in the oven I went on the porch. Solo was there swinging in the hammock, head in the iPad as usual. Why’s lunch not ready? […]

Poetry | St Clement’s mystic brew by Rishi Dastidar

Rishi Dastidar St Clement’s mystic brew (after ‘Electric Relaxation’ by A Tribe Called Quest) Ever been the ghost at the…

Fiction | The Amnesty by Jen Calleja

Jen Calleja The Amnesty CASE STUDY 4 Below you will find extracted responses from the writings of PERSON A and…

Essay | My London by David Gentleman

David Gentleman My London David Gentleman has lived in London for almost seventy years, most of it on the same…

Review | Arrested Development: Caleb Klaces’s Fatherhood & Ben Lerner’s The Topeka School by Houman Barekat

When my little brother was a baby he was extremely fond of a certain turquoise-coloured comfort blanket from Mothercare, which he christened Sha. Nobody knew why he called it that. Was it, perhaps, some obscure tribute to the Shah of Iran? This seemed unlikely: it was 1993 and the Shah, having been dead for fourteen years, was rarely if ever in the news. Some years later I read about Noam Chomsky’s famous thesis that the capacity for language is not something learnt but innate […]

Poetry | My Name is Dai by Will Harris

I heard him say his name was die, and seconds later that it was short for David, spelt D-A-I. We had just sat down when he walked up to me and Susie. He said he recognized her from the National Portrait Gallery. The one with the large forehead above the door. People miss it. The sad smile. Beer sloshed against the edges of his glass like a fish trying to escape its bowl, but in this case the fish was dead and only looked to be alive because of Dai’s swaying. There are people who relieve themselves […]

Poetry | A ‘Hymn’ to Marlowe by Niall McDevitt

Marlowe empurpled, the state and stations of death / archive his cloven mind as it conjugates / the Latin of reality into past/present only. / the future is the faces of the triumvirate / † an English agent is not an English patient / crossing blood-brain-barrier into night’s syllogism / in time for Faustian bells to relay / news to the newscasters of the hourly schism

Essay | Gordon Burn: Sequins in the Muck by Daniel Marc Janes

Hamilton Street, in the west end of Newcastle, was a classic strip of two-up two-down terraces: the visual shorthand of the northern working class, of the kind immortalised in the credits of Coronation Street. In 1973, Newcastle Council announced the Hamilton Street Compulsory Purchase Order after finding it ‘unfit for human habitation’; estate agents suggested a ‘piecemeal’ redevelopment in line with the recommendations of the Heath government’s White Paper […]

Essay | The Crisis Diaries by Heathcote Ruthven & Miranda Gold

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless’. There are only the deliberately silenced or the preferably unheard.” – Arundhati Roy. A festival of care in aid of the homeless has taken place in Britain each winter since the Seventies. Crisis at Christmas offers seven nights of accommodation, three cooked meals a day, medical care, dentistry, eye tests. Guests have access to showers, a cloakroom, computers, film screenings. Tailors are on hand for clothing repairs […]

Essay | The Disappearing Acts of Robyn Denny by Jonathan McAloon

From the earliest formation of his artistic intellect, the British painter Robyn Denny (1930-2014) was interested in the way images lose their greatness and meaning over time. From his 1957 Royal College of Art thesis, which began with a photograph of the Rosetta Stone: ‘Some walls have been decorated in this way so frequently that the message has been obliterated, layer upon layer carrying the conflicting symbols of passing generations, and finally expressing […]

Review | Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

In October another fatberg the size of a double-decker bus, reportedly weighing in at a modest 40 tonnes, was hand-scraped from the sewers of London by Thames Water engineers. Monuments to our collective waste, these titanic coagulations of faeces, fats and unflushables – a mixture of common household products, cotton buds and wet wipes – are a uniquely unnatural disaster and symptom of modern living. They are a sordid example of what happens when a system becomes ill-equipped to deal with the unprecedented quantities of crap pumped into it […]

Fiction | Sex, drugs and dead birds by Clare Fisher

The birds kept dying. They kept dropping out of the sky and splatting onto the pavement. They were a Sign – of what, I didn’t know: I just documented them on my phone in the hope they would make their meaning clear, if not to me, then to one of my friends […]