Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These might be a slip of a book – it is only 110 pages long – but it packs a mighty punch. Continue reading “A Christmas Tale”
Category: The Novel
Food and paranoia
In Virginia Feito’s debut novel Mrs March, a food establishment – the eponymous protagonist’s ‘favorite patisserie – a lovely little place with a red awning and a whitewashed bench in front’ – is the site of a humiliating episode that precipitates a nightmareish journey into paranoia. Continue reading “Food and paranoia”
Food and the nun’s life
When I started my A Level English Literature studies in the late 1980s, the first text I had to read was one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale). I’d never encountered medieval literature before, but from the outset I was hooked. Continue reading “Food and the nun’s life”
Food and eccentricity
Every year since 1901 Nobel Prizes have been awarded in the fields of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. The awards system was founded by Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer who left money in his will when he died in 1896 with an instruction that it be used to award prizes to those who have ‘during the preceding year… conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind‘. Continue reading “Food and eccentricity”