Sublime

In 2019 the Emilia Report (named after England’s first published female poet, Emilia Bassano) analysed coverage of male and female writers and found that women were twice as likely to have their ages referenced – or, in the case of Sally Rooney, her appearance, ‘like a startled deer with sensuous lips’, according to one Swiss critic.

‘Lyds,’ my mum said when I was leaving. She looked out of place in her new room, which was decorated with someone in their eighties or nineties in mind. Mum has for the last couple of centuries looked like she is in her early forties. She still has black hair, just with some streaks of grey here and there. Her eyes are still bright.

Here in Edinburgh, in the little Mazg neighborhood, when I go walking in the morning, through all the second-story windows I can hear the starters singing.

One of my favourite blurb descriptions of a character is of Count Fosco in The Woman in White: ‘who has a taste for white mice, vanilla bonbons and poison’. No need for a ‘sinister’ at all there. Another is on Patrick Hamilton’s The Slaves of Solitude, which tells us that a young woman in a boarding house ‘pecks at spam and mashed potato by night’,

With an opener by Graham Greene (‘One never knows when the blow may fall’ – The Third Man) or Robert Harris (‘The moment I heard how McAra died I should have walked away’ – The Ghost) there is reassurance that we are going to enjoy clear, smooth, swift writing