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Halloween column: The joy of horror

Halloween column: The joy of horror

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We have been telling stories about the things that terrify us since time immemorial. We have done it in every medium ever invented, from oral campfire stories to religious illuminated manuscripts to wood etchings to cinema. There is no shortage of examples, and the beauty of horror (let’s just class it all as “horror fiction”) is that it is endlessly adaptable to the circumstances. Like science fiction, it’s a fantastic vehicle for social commentary, because you can make grotesque analogies…

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Change through small simple steps

Change through small simple steps

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Rome wasn’t built in a day. It’s a well-trotted out phrase at this stage, used in all sorts of contexts to illustrate that anything and everything takes time. You could apply the phrase to Rome the city or Rome the empire, it makes no difference. In a world where we constantly need to have instant results it’s easy to forget the power of small changes and how they add up. It’s something I came across during lockdown, and it’s how…

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History repeating

History repeating

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The humanities seem to always be under attack somewhere, whether through swingeing staff cutbacks in the UK or most emphatically now with Governor DeSantis’s “war on education” to enforce conformity of thinking across Florida universities that would actually reduce diversity and undermine academic freedoms. It would be easy to simply state that both projects are driven by conservative authorities. It would be easy too to highlight that arts and humanities teach critical analytical and thinking skills that make for good…

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Column: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

Column: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451

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As those who follow me on Twitter may know, for the past year or so I have set myself an annual reading challenge. This was originally an attempt to read 20 pages every day, but it sort of morphed into trying to read the equivalent of 20 pages a day over the course of a year, which works out at 7,300. Last year I managed to beat it, this year I’m slightly behind schedule. Such is life. That preamble out…

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Editing Roald Dahl’s books is wrong

Editing Roald Dahl’s books is wrong

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To say the decision by Puffin Books to edit Roald Dahl’s books is perplexing to say the least. The intention is to make the language more inclusive, and to remove or replace more problematic words. As an intention this is actually meant well, but in practice it makes little sense. Some changes are baffling. Making the Oompa-Loompas gender neutral is one, because it’s completely unnecessary (how was their previous description problematic?). Now, let’s be clear: Language matters and inclusive language…

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