When Philip Larkin was asked if he might regret not being able to attach more significance to his childhood, the interviewer highlighting that there was no trauma – no villainous mother – that had led to his becoming a poet, he replied simply “Well, it would have been nice to have more technicolour, so to speak.”

As an editor, Toni Morrison resisted the dictum that one cannot “sell books on both sides of the street”. As a novelist, she attempts to write non-colourist literature, resisting the dehumanising effect of the fetishisation of race.

Off Duty, the most recent collection by Irish poet Katie Donovan, presents an uncensored look at the realities of living and caring for someone with a terminal illness.

Beryl Bainbridge approached storytelling much as one might set to work on a scrapbook. She fashioned, she borrowed, and she stole from magazines and newspapers; weaving together a narrative comprising events and characters, both real and imagined. She would treat the truth around her own beginnings as no less malleable than her art, and though she may have sometimes served as an unreliable narrator within her prose for literary effect, she was equally untrustworthy in telling the tale of her own life beyond the margins. Her biographer, Brendan King, is quick to propose evidence for such a claim in his recent book about the author, for whom he worked for twenty years. He has a ready stock of examples which perhaps betray some of his difficulty a

In an age in which reactionary, knee-jerk journalism regularly wields the weight of public opinion with it, it certainly feels as if our society could do with a little more space to think. As readers, we remain aware that well-researched, and well-reasoned arguments take time to formulate, and yet regularly settle for half-baked opinion pieces and rolling headlines for fear of delaying our own gratification. Yet content lacking form is, in Immanuel Kant’s book at the very least, wholly irrational, if not blind. Information without analysis loses meaning, particularly if that information is false, or unverifiable. It can be misleading, misinterpreted, and manipulated. In short, information alone, even in the vast swathes in which it is currently available to us, is no substitute for critical thought.

A personal essay on love and language, for the inaugural issue of Cheap Trick Zine

Despite Obama’s decision to open the lines of communication and begin to re-engage with Cuba late last year, there’s a sense that since, Cuba and the fate of the Cuban people has once again been reduced to little more than a plaything of the American political elite. Posed as the cultural antithesis of the United States, and regularly reinforced as something far more sinister mostly (though not exclusively) by Republican front-runners, Cuba has long since appealed as the dream holiday destination to would-be radicals the world over.

Tony Benn lived a life that was arguably the most documented in post-war British politics. Kite clearly uses this section to humanise Benn from the outset, deliberately depoliticising him perhaps in order that he be audience-ready and likeable even to those of differing political inclinations. The overall impression recreates something of Lars Von Trier’s Dogville – and this mesh of the historic, the present and the surreal leaves an altogether ethereal impression.

So remarked James Joyce’s wife, Nora, discussing June 16th 1904. She’d stood him up once before, but finally on that date, took him up on his offer, and the pair walked out along the beach near Sandymount. For Joyce, marking the June 16th began as a testament to his love for Nora, but since then it has emerged in a wealth of guises.

It’s ten o’clock on a Monday evening, and I’m about to tell a story to a large room full of strangers. The only guidelines I’ve been given are that it must be true, be about something that happened to me – and not to a friend of mine – and take about five minutes in the telling. I’ve already watched nine stories unfold on stage this evening.

When I earn enough money, I’m going to go to a little village, and I’m going to get me an Irish chick with a big ass.

My Cousin Rachel, often considered as the sister story to Du Maurier’s most prestigious work Rebecca, returned to the Gate last week, following a sell-out run earlier this year. Adapted for the Gate stage by Joseph O’Connor, the play centres around the life of Philip Ashley, on the death of his guardian Ambrose, and his tumultuous relationship with the ever-beguilling, and equally exotic Rachel. Rachel’s husbands, it transpires, keep dying myseriously, and Philip’s guardian Ambrose was the last one to bite the dust. Understandably perhaps, the pair’s first meeting is tangibly frosty, but Philip soon finds himself bewitched.