John Baker’s Blog

This is a deconstruction of Homer’s Odyssey from the wife’s point of view. Margaret Atwood lends Penelope a twenty-first-century voice and allows her to retell the story of her marriage and life with (and without) the hero of Greek myth, Odysseus.
. . . he took a cable which had seen service on a blue-bowed [...]

Novelists do not write into a void. They require an answering response, an audience of readers outside their family circle, and they also need the approval that professional publication brings. Next week, next year; surely she would hear soon. This hope must have remained with her, but the impulse to produce more novels withered.
It might [...]

On the Banksy website there is a section called Manifesto which quotes an extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO, who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The extract is rather lengthy and much of it fairly tough-going, but Willett Gonin notes, eventually, the arrival [...]