There aren’t many sassy, sexually-ambiguous, ten year-old, Irish first-person narrators in fiction. So thank heavens for Mickey Donnelly. From the moment we ...

In the ’60s, her name was synonymous with all things hip and swinging. Her fashion sense was imitated by millions. And on the day President Kennedy was assas A former actress and model who favoured Pucci stretch tops, enormous black wigs and false eyelashes, Susann turned to writing in a desperate bid for fame. Diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 44, she wrote in her diary on Christmas Day 1962: “I can’t die without leaving something. Something big. I think I can writ

My last post about EM Forster and Maurice got me thinking about another much-loved, more recent read. Published in 2015 and shortlisted for the Costa Award, Shortly afterwards, we meet Harry Cane as a younger man – orphaned but comfortably off, with a nervous disposition and a speech impediment. His closest companion is his younger brother, though the two aren’t remotely alike. For gregarious Jack, life is one big boy’s own adventure. For stammering Harry, it’s a minefield

As an isolated gay teenager growing up in South Wales, my introductions to gay literature came largely via the medium of queer pop. I listened to Jean Genie ...

‘I never thought I’d need so many people’ - Five Years I’m writing this during the third week of lockdown and the fourth week since we decided to self-isolat ‘It is difficult to find a bright moment in 1972,’ the historian Christopher Lee wrote in This Sceptred Isle. History tells us that it was a year of mass unemployment, strikes, blackouts and the declaration of a state of emergency. A bit like the year we’re living through now. Still, Lee was wrong. There was a bright mom

Subtitled ‘A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde’, Neil Bartlett’s first book is both a testament to the legacy of Wilde and an insight into the author’s love-hate re...