Author: Desmond Bullen
Common People: Breaking the Class Ceiling in UK Publishing
If there’s one thing the pandemic has brought home, it’s the importance of the uncelebrated.
Read the full story..Review: Utopias, The Whitworth, Manchester
For a time it seemed that Utopia had lost its currency.
Read the full story..Review: Eimear McBride, Martin Harris Centre, Manchester
The novels of Eimear McBride, you might say, begin where she once was – enduring the loss of a brother to a brain tumour, studying drama in London.
Read the full story..Theatre Review: Quality Street, The Lowry, Salford
For most people these days, J.M. Barrie’s name is linked entirely with his brainchild, a figure ambiguous enough to change with the shifting emphases of popular culture – Peter Pan, the child who never grew up.
Read the full story..Book Review: Melting Point by Baret Magarian
In the normal course of things, the brevity of the short story can ensure that even the most elegant of constructions, the most cathartic of conclusions, can fade from the memory.
Read the full story..Review: The Scholar Stones Project, Yelena Popova, Holden Gallery, MMU
In order to leave its mark, art need not explode with the ferocity of the fission that catalyses both nuclear reactor and bomb.
Read the full story..Exhibition Review: 100 Years of Council Housing, Manchester Central Library
Manchester, a city which likes to tell itself it has always led the laggards elsewhere, was building municipal housing long before the introduction of the Addison Act in 1919.
Read the full story..Book Review: The Complex by Michael Walters
It was Philip K. Dick, burning amphetamines and racing for deadlines, who first staked out the paranoiac territory of fiction where rabbit holes lead to competing realities, a frontier colonised further by the likes of Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror. Dick, however, had a parallel career, one more down to earth in all senses of that phrase, in which the dramas were firmly rooted in the incontestable every day.
Read the full story..Review: Understated – Celebrating the Creativity of Pete Shelley, The Turnpike, Leigh
It does him proud.
Read the full story..Music Review: Shakespears Sister, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
There’s always been something of the magpie about Siobhan Fahey, a pop star with a fan’s fascination for pop.
Read the full story..Editor's Picks
- Brute Strength: Why Our Northern Concrete is Worth Keeping
- Writing a novel in 2021? Tips and guidance from a successful 2020 debut author
- Book Review: Lairies by Steve Hollyman
- “We’re a resource for the whole of the North of England.” Kenn Taylor, Lead Cultural Producer North at The British Library North
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