What we're reading: writers and readers on the books they enjoyed in January
Everyone else got there a long time ago but I've only recently read Adrian Tchaikovsky's sci-fi masterpiece Children of Time. Cautionary, richly imaginative and deeply, unexpectedly humane, it was both utterly unputdownable and a welcome relief from the current resignation to dystopia.
I've also been taking delight in Edward Carey's glorious novel Edith Holler. Set in a Norwich that is at once fictional, historical and fantastical, he transports the reader into the world of brilliant 12-year-old Edith who is cursed to never leave her family's tumbledown theatre … until fate decides otherwise. Filled with the author's witty, curious observations and alive with his own illustrations, it's a novel like no other.
I've been a Simon Russell Beale fan ever since, as a teenager, I first saw him in The Duchess of Malfi back in the 90s. So imagine my excitement when his memoir, A Piece of Work, appeared in the bookshops. It threads around every Shakespearean role he's performed – from Desdemona at school to his famous Richard III, his unforgettable Hamlet and beyond. It's a fascinating, hands-on view.
The City Changes Its Face by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
I am always drawn to books that offer in-depth character studies. The List of Suspicious Things by Jennie Godfrey left me eager to learn more about each character, with each section of the book drawing me further into their world.
Meanwhile Caledonian Road by Andrew O'Hagan was a slow burn. I felt as if I was being guided in one direction, only to be sent off on a detour, as O'Hagan unveiled the different layers of his central character's life. At times, I felt like I was being drawn into an unsettling dystopian world.
Sign up to Bookmarks
Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you
after newsletter promotion
For many months I've been reading novels for the Women's prize for fiction, which is celebrating its 30th year, and for which I'm on the judging panel. In between those books I've been reading poetry, and two of the best British collections I've discovered recently are Caleb Femi's Poor and Victoria Adukwei Bulley's Quiet. The latter is a wholly unique, beautifully muscled contemplation on the prism of silence and black interiority which really resonated with me. I also found Femi's collection very moving, with its acute, truthful and loving observation of the lives of black boys on the North Peckham Estate in London.
I Want to Talk to You by Diana Evans is published by Chatto & Windus (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
I've just finished two great books, both of which I definitely rate five out of five. The first was The Outrun by Amy Liptrot, a beautiful and emotional memoir that tells the story of the author's childhood on Orkney, her move to London, and her return to Orkney aged 30 as a recovering alcoholic. Returning to the Scottish island, she reconnects with the power of the land and sea, and Orkney's history, culture and people. An immersive personal journey that reminds the reader of the healing and magical power of nature.
The second book I loved lately was The New Life by Tom Crewe, a fictional account of the lives of John Addington Symonds and Henry Havelock Ellis, who wrote the first English medical textbook about homosexuality, Sexual Inversion. As well as being a brilliant and gripping story, the history behind it is fascinating.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New Statesman
4 days ago
- New Statesman
Brian Cox: 'Starmer? I just can't take the man!'
From the top floor of a flat in Primrose Hill, Brian Cox can be seen picking his way along the edge of the park. This flat belongs to a PR boss in charge of Cox's new project, but Cox lives nearby. He disappears from view, and somewhere far below, a door slams. When he arrives at the top of the house, a bit out of breath, he points out his new place: the one with scaffolding. Cox, married to the actor Nicole Ansari-Cox with whom he's performed on stage, has long spoken of separate rooms as the secret to a happy marriage, but now there are separate flats too. 'She's heading towards minimalism. So I said, 'Good luck!'' Ansari-Cox lives across the park, which is an uphill walk. 'So she'll be visiting me – occasionally! Ha ha ha!' Famous for playing the raging and the blustering, Cox has, since his Golden Globe for his role as the media monster Logan Roy in Succession, been involved in a strange blurring of life and art in the cafés of Primrose Hill. He has been seen pouring soup down a sink when it didn't meet his expectations ('This is shit!'). Was this the real Cox, or the method acting he regularly decries? 'I used to swear a bit, but now I swear all the time.' Like Ian McKellen after he played Gandalf the Grey, Cox is a serious Shakespearean thesp who shot from the I-know-your-face-but-I'm-not-sure-where-from level of fame to getting mobbed in the street in his seventies: quite a psychological transition. But unlike McKellen, Cox gets asked not for selfies but to shout 'fuck off' (like Logan Roy) into strangers' phones. In 2019, he found himself at a reading of Ronan Farrow's Harvey Weinstein book, Catch and Kill, in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles. 'So there I am, watching this extraordinary investigative journalism, this #MeToo thing, unfolding, and it finishes and we give him a round of applause. A lot of Hollywood ladies are there, and they turn round and see me, and they take out their phones and they go, 'Can you tell us to fuck off?' I go, 'You're asking a white dinosaur to tell you to fuck off? This is why we're unevolved, because we don't know what the fuck we want!' Yet there is a moral code behind Cox's choice of raging bastards. He wouldn't play Donald Trump. 'Never. It's a bad part. You look for characters who have some redeeming qualities. Well, I can't be arsed in somebody I have no respect for whatsoever.' He wouldn't play Nigel Farage either: 'Can't stand the man… Can't bear the sound of his voice, and that mouth!' Is there a danger in digging for virtue in the lives of the bad? What use is deep character work when those characters do disastrous work in the outside world? 'My great thing is I love babies,' Cox says. 'I love toddlers, toddling about. I look at them and I go, 'What happens? What do we do to these creatures? How do they become Adolf Hitler?' If you went into one of those baby things where they're all in different slots [he means a maternity ward with babies in different beds], you couldn't say, 'That baby's Donald Trump and that one's Marilyn Monroe.' I find it extraordinary, what we do to children. You should be looking after them, showing them positive nature. We're not evolved as human beings… We're so stupid, and that's when we see our stupidity at work – this shift towards the right.' Cox and his family lived seven to a two-bed flat in Dundee. His beloved father died when Brian was eight: his mother, a jute spinner, had a series of nervous breakdowns afterwards, receiving electroshock therapy, and he was raised by his three sisters. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe 'I had the worst fucking childhood of anybody I know, and I turned out OK!' he says. Then he is back on the problem of humans. 'It's one of the tragedies of life that we come into this great world thinking the best of thoughts, and then we end up compromised beings. We have to be compromised, because we live in a world with other people. And I can be pretty misanthropic about other people – especially in Primrose Hill on a Sunday!' I'm interviewing Cox because he's playing the Scottish economist Adam Smith in a new James Graham play called Make It Happen, all about the 2008 financial crisis and Fred 'the Shred' Goodwin, whose extravagant tenure as CEO of RBS led to Gordon Brown's government bailing out the bank in 2008. He just got the script this morning. He decribes the banker he'll be playing as 'really quite a horrible character, an appalling man. Mind you, he was from Paisley, ha ha ha!' Cox suggested the part of Smith to Graham: that he would to appear as a ghost, Jacob Marley-style. Cox recently spoke at Gordon Brown's Adam Smith Centre in Kirkaldy, a global foundation set up, Brown told me, 'in an attempt to rescue Smith from being co-opted by neoliberal zealots'. 'He gets a bad rap for stuff,' agrees Cox. 'He was an extraordinary man. I said to James, it would be interesting if Adam Smith suddenly came back in 2008 and said, 'What the fuck is going on here?'' So my first line is, 'What the fuck is going on?' And then I say, 'What is this word, 'fuck'? I don't understand this word. Why am I saying it?' Gordon Brown features in the play. 'He's a very upright man, the best kind of Protestant,' Cox says. Cox's transatlantic burr was the voice of New Labour in the 1997 election. 'Well, I did a lot of voiceovers,' he says. 'And I am – still am – a socialist.' He never thought Corbyn was fit for leader, and as for Starmer, 'I just can't take the man at all! I was on a panel with him – Question Time, with Mary Robinson, the [former] president of Ireland, and that MP, Christopher Grayling, who was a bit of an idiot and got in trouble over expenses but was actually rather sweet. Starmer was there with some lackey, and he never exchanged a word with any of us! It was all about presentation. And he talks about England all the time! 'English, the English football'. You're the Prime Minister of Great Britain!' Cox was known to have pledged his allegiance to the Scottish National Party, and was friends with Alex Salmond, but he feels differently now. 'My view now is that I hate the word nationalist. I don't like the idea of the Scottish National Party, the connotations of that – but I liked the party itself. It used to be a ridiculous party about socks and kilts, and that's all gone out the window, thank God. I used to mock Sean Connery: 'You cannae be President Sir Sean Connery, it's not gonna work!' 'Now, I believe that we should have federal representation. Look at the British Isles – you can't really break them up, they're such a cluster, there in the Atlantic, away from everything else. You've got to accept that we have to get on together. We need a federal society where everybody is responsible to the British Isles. That's my new thing now. I'm not into parties that want to separate off. We need to find a way to make Wales and Scotland and Northern Ireland part of a federal Britain. Wales gets the tap end of the bath every time.' Eve Matheson as Cordelia and Brian Cox as King Lear, with Derek Hutchinson and Ian McKellen at the National Theatre, 1990 Cox loves stitching. Not tapestries and needlework but darning his own stuff. He recently found that his Scottish ancestors came from Burntisland, a town in Fife known for its weavers. But a DNA test showed that only 12 per cent of him is Scottish, and all the rest Irish: 'So I'm 100 per cent Celt. I'm pure in that way.' He was not turned on to acting by the thrill of being on stage, but by the enormous sense of 'calm' he felt at being pulled, as a young boy, out of bed to perform for his dad's friends on Hogmanay. 'I remember the atmosphere in the room: this sort of focus. Human beings are so extraordinary when they're in a congregation.' When his father died, the family fell into debt, partly because Charles Cox, a shopkeeper, had served so many of the local community on credit. 'I had to be independent from the age of nine, which I actually loved. I don't depend on anything: if it happens, it happens, if it doesn't, it doesn't. When you have that kind of loss and subsequent poverty, you go, 'Oh, well, that's it.'' Now, like many who began in poverty, he enjoys his money. Unlike his wife, he is maximalist. He has a big Japanese art collection: 'There's not a part of the wall that's not covered in paintings.' And he loves the vibrant American painter Bob Kane ('not the Bob Kane who wrote Superman'). He raises the subject of method acting, which is interesting as he has already generated a lot of headlines slagging off Jeremy Strong, his co-star in Succession, who adheres to the process, and fractured his foot running in the wrong shoes for his art. Cox's objection is that people can go off into their own little world when they do it, and damage the ensemble: 'It's really an act of selfishness.' He is steeped in theatre theory, and delivers a long anecdote about Strasberg and Stanislavski. If it's not method acting Cox does, then what is it? 'I just try to learn my lines and not bump into the furniture.' In fact, his approach comes in part from the influence of his personal guru at Lamda, the director Vivian Matalon, who was a student of the Meisner technique. Sanford Meisner was all about intention. 'That's what feeds me as an actor. Why are you on the stage? What are you doing? Why does he react to that? What is it that makes him go that way as opposed to that way? Those are the important questions. Not about 'What am I feeling?'. It's not about what you're feeling. It's what you do that creates what you feel.' So how has he applied the Meisner technique to the life of the great economist Adam Smith? 'Well, I haven't done it yet.' Brian Cox will appear in 'Make It Happen' at the Dundee Rep Theatre, 18-26 July 2025 [See also: Gen-Z is afraid of porn, and Sabrina Carpenter] Related This article appears in the 18 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Warlord
South Wales Guardian
06-06-2025
- South Wales Guardian
‘Unsung' pioneering actress and director Esme Church honoured with blue plaque
The recognition in Bradford, where she ran the Northern Theatre School, will allow Esme Church to take her 'rightful place in the cultural memory of this country', Historic England said. Born on 11 February 1893 in Marylebone, London, she trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Rada before making her stage debut in the 1920s, and later joining the Old Vic Company. She performed major Shakespearean roles such as Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and led the Old Vic's drama school from 1936. Her career as a director began in the 1930s when she became artistic director of the Greyhound Theatre in Croydon, before moving on to Bradford Civic Playhouse where she took up the same role during the 1940s and 1950s. There, she championed regional theatre, established the Northern Theatre School, and mentored The Omen actress Whitelaw, who won a film Bafta in 1969 for best supporting actress for her roles in thriller Twisted Nerve and comedy Charlie Bubbles, along with two Bafta TV gongs. Other actors such as Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey star Edward Petherbridge, Secret Army actor Bernard Hepton and theatre actor Sir Robert Stephens, Dame Maggie Smith's former husband, were also among those mentored by Church. Lord Neil Mendoza, chairman of Historic England, called Church a 'formidable force in British theatre' who was among the 'trailblazing women' who have 'not received the national recognition (they) deserve'. He added: 'It is time that Esme Church takes her rightful place in the cultural memory of this country.' The plaque, which will be unveiled on Friday at 26 Chapel Street, Little Germany, reads: 'Esme Church, 1893-1972, actress and director ran the Northern Theatre School here.' Bruce Durham, the great-nephew of Church, said it is 'giving her the recognition that she deserves for all her contributions to the arts'. He said: 'Growing up with Esme around, it was always wonderful to see and hear about her work – whether it was entertaining troops in France during the First World War, becoming the head of The Old Vic Theatre School, or travelling to and from New York. 'It's important that not only my great-aunt Esme is recognised but being able to use brilliant platforms such as Ancestry to uncover the many unsung women who made a significant impact during the early 20th century.' Church's contribution comes as Bradford celebrates its year as UK City of Culture in 2025. Si Cunningham, chairman of Bradford Civic Society, said: 'It's thrilling to see yet more national recognition for Bradford's pioneering, creative heritage. 'Esme Church is an incredibly deserving recipient of a national blue plaque, which perfectly complements the city's own growing blue plaque scheme. 'I hope this beautiful plaque, and Esme's fascinating story, inspires a new generation of creative Bradfordians to do great things for their city.' Historic England and genealogy site Ancestry are calling on the public to uncover further inspiring women or girls from the 20th century, who may have been forgotten and deserve their place in history. The eight-week public nomination period for the National Blue Plaque Scheme is open until July 10 2025.
Wales Online
06-06-2025
- Wales Online
‘Unsung' pioneering actress and director Esme Church honoured with blue plaque
'Unsung' pioneering actress and director Esme Church honoured with blue plaque The recognition in Bradford, where she ran the Northern Theatre School, will allow Esme Church to take her "rightful place in the cultural memory of this country", Historic England said An "unsung" actress and director who founded a theatre school that taught future stars including three-time Bafta winner Billie Whitelaw has been honoured with a blue plaque. The recognition in Bradford, where she ran the Northern Theatre School, will allow Esme Church to take her "rightful place in the cultural memory of this country", Historic England said. Born on 11 February 1893 in Marylebone, London, she trained at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and Rada before making her stage debut in the 1920s, and later joining the Old Vic Company. She performed major Shakespearean roles such as Lady Macbeth and Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, and led the Old Vic's drama school from 1936. Her career as a director began in the 1930s when she became artistic director of the Greyhound Theatre in Croydon, before moving on to Bradford Civic Playhouse where she took up the same role during the 1940s and 1950s. There, she championed regional theatre, established the Northern Theatre School, and mentored The Omen actress Whitelaw, who won a film Bafta in 1969 for best supporting actress for her roles in thriller Twisted Nerve and comedy Charlie Bubbles, along with two Bafta TV gongs. Article continues below Other actors such as Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey star Edward Petherbridge, Secret Army actor Bernard Hepton and theatre actor Sir Robert Stephens, Dame Maggie Smith's former husband, were also among those mentored by Church. Lord Neil Mendoza, chairman of Historic England, called Church a "formidable force in British theatre" who was among the "trailblazing women" who have "not received the national recognition (they) deserve". He added: "It is time that Esme Church takes her rightful place in the cultural memory of this country." The plaque, which will be unveiled on Friday at 26 Chapel Street, Little Germany, reads: "Esme Church, 1893-1972, actress and director ran the Northern Theatre School here." Bruce Durham, the great-nephew of Church, said it is "giving her the recognition that she deserves for all her contributions to the arts". He said: "Growing up with Esme around, it was always wonderful to see and hear about her work – whether it was entertaining troops in France during the First World War, becoming the head of The Old Vic Theatre School, or travelling to and from New York. "It's important that not only my great-aunt Esme is recognised but being able to use brilliant platforms such as Ancestry to uncover the many unsung women who made a significant impact during the early 20th century." Church's contribution comes as Bradford celebrates its year as UK City of Culture in 2025. Si Cunningham, chairman of Bradford Civic Society, said: "It's thrilling to see yet more national recognition for Bradford's pioneering, creative heritage. "Esme Church is an incredibly deserving recipient of a national blue plaque, which perfectly complements the city's own growing blue plaque scheme. "I hope this beautiful plaque, and Esme's fascinating story, inspires a new generation of creative Bradfordians to do great things for their city." Historic England and genealogy site Ancestry are calling on the public to uncover further inspiring women or girls from the 20th century, who may have been forgotten and deserve their place in history. Article continues below The eight-week public nomination period for the National Blue Plaque Scheme is open until July 10 2025.
