In The Life & Times of Moll Flanders, Sian Rees retraces the story of one of fiction’s most infamous, intriguing and oft-misrepresented heroines to reveal how thin the line between fiction and reality can really be. It’s 20 years (eek) since I read Moll Flanders during the summer holiday between GCSEs and A-levels. It has…
Month: June 2017
The Life and Death of Emily Wilding Davison by Ann Morley with Liz Stanley (1988), with Gertrude Colmore’s The Life of Emily Davison (1913)
Us Brits go to the polls today to choose who can f*ck things up the least for the next five years. It’s easy to feel despondent about the state of democracy on our fair isle right now – what with the impact of misleading media spin, the assumption that in ‘safe’ boroughs one’s vote makes…
Titanic Lives: Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew by Richard Davenport-Hines
As a seven-year-old I was obsessed with the story of the Titanic, prompted, I’m told, by the publicity surrounding the opening of a safe recovered from the wreck in 1987. My dad bought me a (still) great book by Dr Robert D. Ballard, the professor of oceanography who located the wreck in 1985, and I repeatedly…
