Stories, reviews, articles
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“Why don’t her eyes close?”
Pat Barker’s Blow Your House Down, violence against women and Reclaiming the night When I was in my mid-teens, I visited Leeds with my parents for some forgotten reason. What I remember was the detour we took to a block of flats in a student-dominated area. To the majority of the population, it is an…
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The Vietnam War, Heart of Darkness and King Kong
I suppose no man comes home from war. Not really. Kong: Skull Island Fifty years ago, the city of Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese and the Vietnam War ended. The country of Vietnam was reunified following a conflict that had lasted for decades, killed up to two million civilians and resulted in the…
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The Trails of Wild Things: Costa Rica, Virago and Mora Books
It was March 2020 and although I was merrily unaware of it, the world was about to change irrevocably. But before words like Covid, lockdown, quarantine, isolation, sanitiser became part of our everyday lexicon, before the UK government finally stirred its stumps and took reluctant action, and before society underwent its greatest upheaval in a…
DeMonsterAting 