John Baker’s Blog

For St Patrick’s Day MA Peel mused:
I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation by the British.
The post goes on to review the film Kings from Tom Collins, and the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson
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When The Cat Kin didn’t sell enough [...]

Fiona Shaw’s novel opens with a couple of flither-lasses, Harriet and Mary, arriving in York during the second half of the nineteenth century, on the run from their harsh lives on the coast.
The story unfolds through two alternating voices; that of Harriet, a young, displaced working-class girl trying to make her way in the world; [...]

“Her life, on the surface, was as grey and dreary as a prison exercise yard, her mind a prey to a daily succession of torments” is how Laura Thompson describes Christie’s reaction to her divorce.
Lindsay Duguid, in the TLS, is perhaps more objective:
“In the abstract, these novels can seem intriguing; their sameness tempts one to [...]

What phases are involved in the creation of a text?

I came back from vacation earlier this month, and the forest across the street from my grocery store had been chopped down to make way for a shopping center. It fascinated me, how completely that changed the look and feel of a street that I use [...]