#rory-townsend

#rory-townsend

Graham Greene announced that he was resigning from MI6. Kim Philby, his chief in Section V, MI6's counterespionage arm, blinked. Greene had played his part in tending the illusion.

Running out of a tiny kiosk in Clerkenwell, Exmouth Cultural Kiosk is a secondhand bookstore and self-publishing project that sells books for as little as £2. The selection rotates often and can include everything from Tennyson to its own guide to Clerkenwell pubs.

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.

Unlike the agents created by writers such as Ian Fleming, John le Carré and Graham Greene - characters who moved in the upper echelons of the intelligence field - the nameless protagonist of Mr. Deighton's early spy novels was a working-class man who indulged in insolence and wisecracks as he set out to pull defectors from behind the Iron Curtain, root out moles and thwart criminal madmen.

The Oxford Artisan Distillery (TOAD) produces its whiskey, gin, vodka and liqueur from heritage wheat and rye varieties rediscovered in the thatch of medieval roofs. It's an example of the extraordinary lengths the distillers go here to create their unique flavours while building a regenerative farming system along the way. Tour the distillery to find out all about the processes involved,

There has been progress in the diversity of texts on offer in the GCSE English literature curriculum, but uptake in schools is still low with just 1.9% of GCSE pupils in England studying books by authors of colour, up from 0.7% five years ago, according to a report. Compiled by the campaign group Lit in Colour, the report says progress is too slow and that

Thatcher rose to power on the back of a campaign to Make Britain Great Again-a promise to reverse the previous two decades of austerity, imperial contraction, and stagnating modernization. By 1979, the country was undeniably in decline-not just materially but on a more ineffable level, too. Divested of the unifying effect of global superpower status, the increasingly dis-United Kingdom's common identity was now an open, and anxious, question.

The SoA said the absence of any government measure to compel tech companies to label AI-generated output meant readers were struggling to distinguish between books written by a human, and machine-generated work based on AI models trained on copyrighted work without permission or payment.

Admittedly, this one came with a fair few red flags, from the casting of Margot Robbie (simply too old, Cathy is a teenager) and Jacob Elordi (simply too white, Heathcliff, while his origins are uncertain, is described as darker skinned) to the unhinged marketing and crass brand tie-ins. Nevertheless, I was still excited to see it. So why did I leave the cinema not only bored, but feeling a little bit sad?

I sat down at my computer really angry, she tells me. It was the 1990s, the time of the murder of Stephen Lawrence and the Macpherson report's finding of institutional racism within the Metropolitan police. It was my way of channelling that anger.

Daniyal Mueenuddin joins Deborah Treisman to discuss 'Two Pilgrims,' by Peter Taylor, which was published in The New Yorker in 1963.

cardiganed grandmothers eating roadside picnics beside Morris Minors, pale men sunbathing in shoes and socks on stripy deckchairs, Raleigh Choppers and caged budgerigars and faux leather pouffes I feel a wave of what can't properly be called nostalgia, because the last thing I'd want is to return to that age and those places where I was often profoundly unhappy and from which I'd have been desperate to escape if escape had been a possibility.

As the trophy takes the form of an elusive UFO, Corey Fah an outsider unfamiliar with the baffling inner workings of the system is unable to collect or even confirm the award. Waidner has said that the novel was partly inspired by the experience of winning the Goldsmiths prize for their previous work Sterling Karat Gold, and by the ephemeral nature of success, with its unfamiliar contexts of social power and opportunity.

When I came across the idea for this novel a few years ago, I knew it was bigger in scope than anything I'd done before and I accepted that the research alone would be more demanding than anything I'd tackled in the past. When I finally sat down to write Adam and Eve I also realised, by the end of the first draft, that this was going to be my final novel,

The extended footage of Welsh in conversation is certainly engaging, as he discusses his writing and the movies it created, and his own youth in Edinburgh. Some of the rest of the interviewees aren't quite so gripping, however, and the film is padded out with a fair bit of redundant anecdotage from people on the subject of getting hilariously wasted in Irvine's company or at least his approximate vicinity.

The ghost of a previous lover is always a challenge, particularly if you (mistakenly) believe that she's actually dead. This is the unenviable situation for Lily, the protagonist of O'Farrell's second novel, who is swept off her feet by dashing architect Marcus and in short order moves in with him. Lily takes his assurances that her predecessor Sinead is no longer with us to mark a more permanent absence;

Sophia Stewart poses a choice that many biographers struggle with: "what to do with the boring bits."

You are leaving work, your suit still damp from the morning's downpour, the skin on your palms peeling. You are clutching two supermarket bags, tins of cream soup and tuna knocking against one another. The rain is hard and your anorak is cheap. You are on your way to Stockbridge, to your parents' house, which only your father inhabits now that your mother is gone.

Best known as a memoirist, Morrison returns to poetry after 11 years with a masterclass of lyric distillation and charged observation, demonstrating that nothing is beneath poetic deliberation. His subjects range from social and political justice to meditations on poetic heroes such as Elizabeth Bishop and sonnet sequences elegising the writer's sister. The interwoven specificity and occasional nature of the poems is captivating:

We are initiated into a world in which historically accurate foodstuffs can be ordered online a half oyster shell, the exposed flesh shining as if with the freshest brine, is 31.25 for a single piece and begin to understand one of the most striking things about this novel: its insistence upon detail, its utter specificity, set against a deliberate lack of specificity regarding the larger details that the reader's mind naturally itches to fill in.