The home of hungry readers
In my last post I blogged about Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, inspired by My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, a poem which I taught frequently during my career as a secondary school English teacher.
The text that inspired this post – Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – was also one I taught frequently (as well as also studying it when I was at school). Continue reading “Food and generosity”
There is a general assumption that men and women operate very differently when it comes to friendships: whereas for women the focus is on emotional intimacy and support with a smaller number of friends, men tend to have more friends but their friendships are more transactional and based on shared activities and interests. Continue reading “Male friendship and food”
I’ve written before about rivalry between women – a common theme in literature – in Rosamond Lehmann’s 1953 novel The Echoing Grove and Zoe Heller’s 2003 novel Notes on a Scandal. Female rivalry also appears in Elizabeth Day’s psychological thriller Magpie, entwining with the theme of infertility and the devastating emotional and psychological impact it can have on those affected. Published in 2021 Magpie is a gripping read with a clever, unexpected twist a third of the way through which forces the reader to reappraise what they have read so far. Continue reading “Culinary competitiveness”