In my callow youth, after first leaving home, I owned several garlic presses in succession. I thought they, and garlic itself, sophisticated. Growing up in 1980s rural Lincolnshire cooking suspicious foreign food was something that might land you in a burning Wicker Man, screaming for mercy from jeering, turnip-faced yokels. Now, at the risk of having a contract taken out on me by Alessi or Oxo Good Grips, I would urge anyone in possession of one of these nefarious devices to

An in depth-look at Gary Indian's trilogy of crime novels, Resentment, Three Month Fever, and Depraved Indifference.

"Energy is Eternal Delight" William Blake I Oblomov, the eponymous anti-hero of Ivan Goncharov’s 1859 satirical novel, is the living embodiment of inertia. He's widely considered to be the epitome of the ‘superfluous man’ of Russian literature of the 1840s and 1850s, but has none of the Byronism, glamour, or elegance of Turgenev’s Bazarov or Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin . A man in his thirties living in rooms in Petersburg with his manservant Zhakar and cook A

Pepe le Pew, a member of the marginalised skunk community, about to experience olfactory prejudice When Ally Louks created a Twitter storm after announcing that she’d passed her PhD with her thesis Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, it gave outsiders a rare glimpse into postgraduate English studies in the UK. Based on the title alone, any criticism was unwarranted: it sounded innocuous enough, and potentially interesting, though not ori

Polish film poster for Rosemary's Baby   Rosemarys’ Baby  (1968), the first of Polanski’s ‘trilogy of evil’ that continued with Macbeth...

Philosopher Thomas Nagel The arguments in philosopher Thomas Nagel’s seminal 1974 essay, What is it Like to be Bat? can help us answer the question of whether a human born with XY chromosomes and a male body can be, can become, or can know what it is like to be a woman, or can know what inhabiting the world is like for a woman. Nagel — who randomly chose bats from the list of mammals — began from the premise that if an organism has consciousness, then there is something that

“To represent terrible and questionable things is, in and of itself, an expression of the artist’s instinctive desire for power and...