Twenty-year-old Maverick Sabre is an Irish Londoner equipped with a unique hip-hop style and a blessed way with words. For more info, music and pictures take a look at the Beatnik interview.

He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip when you go by in the morning,’ he’d said, ‘and an empty one when you come home at night.’ The plot of land had been paid for out of capital left to her by her father, as had the shed he had built in the garden and the concreting in the yard. Earlier in her marriage to Mr Gregan she had once or twice protested at his way of appropriating her money, but he had pointed out that it was essential to invest money in a sensible manner rather than to purchase clothes with it, or household luxuries that would wear out quickly. He had a way of speaking about such matters over a period of several weeks, making his point after tea every evening when they sat down by the fire. ‘A garment can let you down,’ he would say. ‘A fur coat taken off the back of some misfortunate animal could be eaten by our friend Master Moth and then where’d you be? Or you’d have it stolen off your arm by some brigand when you were out walking in the Botanic Gardens. You’d be paying out good money on insurance with an expensive garment, whereas a concreted yard requires no insurance whatsoever. Once it’s down it’s in place for ever. A concreted yard is an improvement to any property.’ He would go on until it was time for the News and when the News was over he would continue. She might ask him if he’d mind not sitting by the fire in his socks in case anyone came to the door, but he usually didn’t hear when she referred to his personal habits. He never appeared to notice her anger, or her sarcasm. He went his way, but somehow she found it difficult to go hers.

O’Neil’s Hotel in Dublin has seen better days. Now there is still O’Shea, the hall porter, attended by his faithful greyhound, but he is the only remaining member of staff. The hotel’s ninety-one year old owner, Mrs Sinnott lives in an upper room, sitting by the window year after year in absolute silence. An assortment of part-time prostitutes, their pimp and various relatives and neighbours use the place for one purpose or another, each of them big on self-deception and hopelessness, but there are never any real guests.

The hotel is a closed community, a fictional window on the world, and William Trevor shows us enough of its inhabitants for us to want more, and we are privy to their failings as well as their victories, their vulnerabilities as well as their strengths.

By chance, Mrs Eckdorf, a twice divorced middle-aged woman, a photographer of sorts, hears of O’Neill’s and decides to visit. We then become witnesses as Mrs Eckdorf’s own personality disintegrates and she simultaneously internalizes and fictionalizes the inhabitants of the hotel.

This novel is a bleak statement on the human condition, concerned as it is with an alienating and alienated society. I was reminded on more than one occasion of the work of William Faulkner, and particularly of Joyce’s Dubliners.

William Trevor is a rare and skillful writer. He manages to leave you with the impression that you’ve seen and come to know, not only Dublin, or the whole of Ireland, but that you’ve met and seen the workings of humanity itself.

I’ve made a great discovery. . . and I’ll tell you what it is: the strongest person in the world is the one who stands alone
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

Henrik Ibsen’s opening play at the newly refurbished Sheffield Crucible, is An Enemy of the People, with Anthony Sher in the role of Dr Stockmann.

It’s a disturbing drama, constituting an attack on democracy and the theory of majority rule, a position with which Ibsen himself had some sympathy.

Stockman, a scientist and an idealist, quite unworldly in this production, almost a natural innocent, discovers that the waters of his Spa town are polluted and poisonous. He immediately wants to go public with this news, shut the Spa down and, at whatever expense, cleanse and reroute the water. But his brother, the Mayor, suppresses the report. The bureaucrats, the local small businessmen’s association, the town newspaper and eventually the workers of the town, turn on Stockman, his family and his friends, and reduce them to penury.

The play works as a forum for ideas. For a modern audience to empathize with Stockmann entirely is almost impossible. He does, of course, stand for truth against the suppression and lies of his brother and the other organs of the democratic process, but he does not understand the need to educate his audience and become instead self-righteous and arrogant and a chilling and contemptuous social darwinist in his remarks about “disgusting, mangy, vulgar mongrels” whose brains don’t develop in the same manner as gently reared pedigree dogs.

On the other hand his sense that truth, any truth, has a limited lifetime, and that time always brings us round to the realisation that what was once true has now become untrue, is never less than fascinating.

And his fear that the suppression of material facts and the acceptance of political lies will lead, inevitably, to a kind of spiritual corruption and decay of society, is a companion to each of us in the twenty-first century.

A disturbing play, then; one that still, in our own time, offers an audience no place to hide.

This production, directed by Daniel Evans, with Antony Sher as Dr Stockmann, in a new version by Christopher Hampton, runs until the 20th March.

If you go out and fight for freedom you should never do so in your best trousers.
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

Grace was over-weight and all her parts were subject to more than a fair share of gravity. There had been an attempt to dye her hair, but the scalp was ever-visible beneath it. A suite of bags had formed a colony under her eyes and her arms hung like broken branches from her shoulders. She had not attended to herself since waking that morning, or for a longer period before that. Like Margaret, she was well-shod, in shoes that did not look English, perhaps German or Italian, also in leather with tiny studs in the soles, laced-up flatties.

The walls of the waiting room were festooned with notices and charts showing how simple exercises could keep a body active and alive.

“How’s Marjorie,” Grace asked.

“She’s OK,” Margaret said. “She keeps going, but it’s not easy for her.”

“Once she married him,” Grace said, “it was never going to be a walk in the park. What’s the daughter called?”

“Celia. She’s living with a man, used to be married to someone else and his wife and kids live in the same street, few doors away. Marjorie says there’s days he comes home from work and walks right past Celia’s door and goes to his old house. And Celia, she gets upset but she makes excuses for him, says he’s tired after a days work, not thinking.”

“Not capable of thinking, more like. Sounds like that.”

“And Celia, she suffers from vaginal dryness, has to use a gel made from kiwi fruit, extract of kiwi fruit. Marjorie says it makes life possible but she’s still dry, you know what I mean? Creamy but dry.”

“I can’t stand them,” Grace said. “Kiwi fruit. All those black seeds, get lodged under your teeth.” She moved her feet to allow a man with a belly to squeeze past. “Give me a banana any day.”

Margaret let it drift for a moment before saying. “I love fruit. It’s my favourite.”

And the son?” Grace asked. “Is he married? Or living with someone?”

“Oh, no,” Margaret said. “He’s the other way. Might have a partner, I suppose. Though Marjorie’s never mentioned it.”

Grace shook her head. “That whole family,” she said, “it’s only held together by a piece of string.”

Proposed cover image for the audio version of Winged with Death

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The full cover will look something like this: Winged with Death Cover.

Unabridged audiobook by Isis Audio Books, read by Michael Tudor Barnes, who, after reading Classics at London University, trained at RADA and for five years was a member of the National Theatre Company. He also worked with the RSC, played leading roles both home and abroad and has over 600 radio broadcasts to his credit. Television work includes The Bill and Softly, Softly and he played Willy Roper in EastEnders.

Publication details when available.

He woke up soaked with sweat, breathing stale and fetid air. A naked light bulb shone in his eyes and he found he was in a steel-framed bunk slung by chains from the wall, like a bunk in a troopship or a jail.

“. . . Everybody out,” a voice called, and there were other sounds: groans and curses, wretched coughing and hawking, a loud fart, the creak and bang of bunks being folded back and clamped against the wall. “Let’s go, let’s go. Everybody out.”

When he sat up a hand closed around his shoulder and rolled him onto the floor. He was wearing grey cotton pajamas that were much too big for him: the pants tripped his stumbling bare feet and the sleeves hung to his fingertips. Swaying and squinting under the lights, he rolled up the sleeves first, disclosing a loose plastic bracelet that read Wilder John C. He bent over to roll up the pants but was kicked from behind and fell to his hands, and he looked up frightened into the angry face of a Negro in pajamas like his own.

“Watch your ass, man. This here’s the corridor. You got no business hunkerin’ down playin’ with yourself; get up and walk.”

And he did. Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other, the dismaying variety of their faces moving into the glare of lights and then into shadows and then into the lights again. Some were talking one another and some talked to themselves, but most were silent. He felt warm grit under his feet until he stepped on something slick; then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm. A few of the walking men wore dirty paper slippers, and he envied them; a few were smoking, with packs of cigarettes in their pajama-top pockets, which puckered the roof of his mouth. Then he saw that some weren’t wearing pajama tops but straightjackets, and he wanted to whimper like a child.

There were closed windows at both ends of the corridor, covered with steel mesh: the light outside was drab – either an early grey morning or a late grey afternoon – and there was nothing to see but air shafts and windowless walls.

Near the middle of the corridor stood a Negro orderly in hospital greens, and he hurried toward him with a mouthful of questions – Look: where’s my clothes? Where’s my money? Where’s a phone: What’s the deal here? – but when he confronted the man he felt small and shy and all he knew was that his bladder was about to burst.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Where’s the bathroom?”

“Over there.”

And he followed the pointed finger into a bright stinking latrine where men squatted on toilet bowls or stood jockeying for position at a long urinal trough.

John Wilder is going on forty with a successful career in sales and a stable family; and he’s increasingly irrational, paranoid, and monstrously self-obsessed.

Yates, who is remembered for writing about the mundane sadness of domestic life in a flat emotionless prose, tackles new territory here, and the result is probably the weakest of his novels.

The novel is disappointing but not without its peaks, and Yates reminds us from time to time that he speaks “for weakness, for neurasthenic darkness, for struggle without hope and for the self-defeating passions of ignorance.”

He concentrates on alcoholism and insanity in this unrelentingly realist novel, but I could only empathize with the main character in flashes and was left wondering if the story would have been better narrated through the eyes of John Wilder’s wife. Yates gives her the first and last chapters, but she has little to do with the main part of the narrative, which leaves us trapped in the disintegrating mind of her husband.

I was quite unprepared for the bizarre practices that persist in the selling of a book. Apparently, I must set a price for our books (that must end with 99p, obviously) and then offer a whacking discount to the trade. They then order a couple of hundred copies, hide them at the back of the shop for six months, sell two and send the rest back to me. This is regarded as so commonplace that no-one bats an eyelid, and the returned books are pulped and form the hardcore of motorways. Tell this to an ordinary reader in a Waterstone’s Costa outlet, and they will be utterly amazed. I was too, and also entirely out of pocket.

Helen Miles is the proprietor of Solidus, a small, independent, Stroud-based publishing house using print on demand technology to get up-and-coming writers into print.