James Shapiro’s outstanding 1606: Shakespeare and the year of Lear, is a great resource for teachers of the play, as well as of the other two plays Shakespeare wrote in that extraordinary period, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. Here are some notes that refer to Lear, especially from the chapter ‘Leir to Lear’, in which Shapiro examines how Shakespeare reshaped the main source text, King Leir.
Read MoreZadie Smith’s new book is both slight and capacious. Intimations: six essays is just 81 pages long in small format paperback, but into these pages Smith packs an enormous amount.
Read MoreTeaching Walkthrus is a stimulating resource: practical ideas are laid down with great precision. It will help a lot of teachers to clarify their practice.
Read MoreThe constant undertow of R.C. Sherriff’s 1931 novel The Fortnight in September is time. The two significant words in the title are about time, and it colours everything that follows, but this is not a melancholic story.
Read MoreThe Nickel Boys is an excavation of a part of American history that I had not known about. Reform ‘schools’ took in children of any colour, but given the overt racism of the Jim Crow era, the brutality of such places was particularly horrendous for black children.
Read MoreIn Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Linda (Willy Loman’s widow) says, ‘Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person’, and this is what Hallie Rubenhold is doing in The Five. She rescues the murder victims from history, from their erasure by stereotype, laziness and misogyny, and makes them real again.
Read More‘Family narrative and social narrative are one and the same’. This is a great narrative about family, first as a child and moving through the teenage years to marriage, motherhood and eventually being a grandmother. It is also about France itself, culture, technology, consumerism and so much more.
Read MoreBernardine Evaristo’s 2013 novel Mr Loverman is hugely enjoyable, just like her Booker Prize-winning Girl, Woman, Other.
Read MoreDorian Lynskey’s The Ministry of Truth: a biography of George Orwell’s 1984 is a superb introduction to the novel, and a vital read for English teachers.
Read MoreThis is the text of a talk I gave on Thursday 23rd March 2017 as part of an event to mark the life and works of William Trevor. In the second part of the event, the author Joseph O’Connor read Trevor’s great story ‘Another Christmas’ and answered questions from the audience about Trevor’s work.
Read MoreBernardine Evaristo’s Booker-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other is wonderful: such a tonic for ‘our time.’ While I found the previous Booker winner, Milkman by Anna Burns, an extraordinary achievement in sustaining a voice (dense, intense, disturbing), Evaristo’s book is just so hugely enjoyable.
Read MoreThoughts on Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, and Robert Macfarlane’s Twitter Book Club #CoVirusReading
Read MoreThe first poem in Roger Robinson’s book is ‘The Missing’, dedicated to ‘the victims of the Grenfell Tower disaster’, and the last poem is ‘A Portable Paradise’ itself. In between hell and paradise there are poems of tremendous thematic and formal variety. It is a book I’ll keep returning to.
Read MoreSpring is the third in Ali Smith’s seasons quartet. It will be interesting to see what these books, written out of the heat of immediate events in British culture, will look like in 20 years' time. Without that perspective, all we can say for the moment is that they are unique responses to the world today: complex, agile, rangy, funny, surprising and intellectually dazzling.
Read MoreOne of the deepest pleasures in life: being a child snuggled up to a parent, listening to a story. And also being a parent holding your child, telling that story (such as, for instance, Sam McBratney’s gentle series Guess How Much I Love You ). It is simply The ineffable magic in the mingling of a voice, a narrative, loving attention, and physical closeness.
Read MoreReader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world (2018) is an elegant and insightful analysis of how deep reading is under threat, and of how this particular form of attention is being eroded by the digital universe in which we now live. For an English teacher, the book is essential reading. For me, it is one of the most important books of our recent years.
Read MoreWe are in a golden age of writing about teaching, much of which (though not all) has been prompted by online connections and blogs. Here is a small selection of books aimed at English teaching, or which will be of interest to English teachers. It will be added to gradually.
This is my selection of new books I read last year, published for the first time in either hardback or paperback.
Book of the Year
Robert Macfarlane: Underland: a Deep Time Journey. Macfarlane is simply one of the best writers working today, and this immense achievement shows again how close he is to the most important issue of our time.