Rosemary Goring

Desperation on the high street has never been so obvious. The reason? Need you ask. In an identity parade – Covid, mental health epidemic, poverty trap – the culprit stands out head and shoulders: Brexit. Its laws, regulations and restrictions have had a universally pernicious effect on businesses small and large.

Memorable occasions are vividly recalled, such as towing her baby on a sledge with the Sami in Arctic Sweden, or meeting a seal that popped its head through the lavatory in the Antarctic (“hot fishy breath!”)

In the hardscrabble outback town of Butte, Montana in 1891, men shift for themselves as best they can to scrape a living and snatch a morsel of pleasure. Built on the coal trade, where exhausted miners – many of them Irish – spend their days and nights below ground, Butte is rife with violence, criminality, and despair. There’s precious little love in these parts, and most of that is paid for by the hour.

Like children tormenting flies, these climate and Palestinian activists have managed to tear the wings off the book festival industry

In a café recently I got into conversation with a young man who had recently moved here from Hong Kong. Among his reasons for relocating was the difference between the Chinese and Scottish education systems. Back home, his five-year-old son would attend primary school from eight in the morning until mid-afternoon, after which there was a further compulsory two hours of instruction in subjects such as English. The relentless pressure put on children to be always learning and to excel was somethi

James Thurber, the great American humorist, had an original take on Macbeth: he treated it as a mystery to be solved. Inspired by an encounter with avid reader of whodunnits, who had accidentally bought Macbeth thinking it was a detective story, he reread it late into the night. By morning, he had uncovered who really had assassinated the king, and it wasn’t the Thane of Cawdor. Next, he was going to solve Hamlet too.

The phrase “long-awaited” is overused, but in the case of Long Island, the sequel to Colm Toibin’s Brooklyn, it is justified. On publication in 2009, Brooklyn sealed Toibin’s reputation as one of the UK’s finest novelists, and won the Costa Novel Award. Some years later it was chosen by The Observer as “One of the 10 best historical novels”.

While onlookers are led to believe that parties are ideologically separated by a chasm as deep as the Grand Canyon, the gulf between moderate Conservative, Labour, LibDem, Green and SNP politicians is – the issue of independence aside – far shallower than you might imagine.

The ferry fiasco could herald a new wave of Highland clearances

James Percival Everett Mantle, £20 Review by Rosemary Goring “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.” So begins Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which the eponymous hero is allowed to tell his own story. Huck Finn is perhaps the most famous and critically celebrated of all literary sequels.