Category Archives: Home

November 2018 Reviews

Posted on 20/11/2018 by Bobby Seal

Books Crudo – Olivia Laing (Picador, 2018) Kathy Acker did not die in 1997. She, or someone very much like her, lives on to witness the recent rise of right-leaning populism in Europe and the United States and, when we … Continue reading →

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October 2018 Reviews

Posted on 22/10/2018 by Bobby Seal

Books Low Country: Brexit on the Essex Coast – Tom Bolton (Penned in the Margins, 2018) Think of Essex and what comes to mind? For many it will be Norman Tebbit, Teddy Taylor and that peculiarly Essex-led brand of working-class … Continue reading →

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Fieldgate Street

Posted on 01/09/2018 by Bobby Seal

Why can’t I write something that would awake the dead? That pursuit is what burns most deeply. Patti Smith Just Kids       The streets haunt you, just as echoes of you haunt them.  You walk past the bell … Continue reading →

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Adventures at the End of the World: A Review of The Stone Tide by Gareth E. Rees

Posted on 18/02/2018 by Bobby Seal

I have to confess that when I first heard that Gareth Rees was moving from his home in East London to the Sussex coastal resort of Hastings it seemed to me odd for a relatively young writer to be forsaking … Continue reading →

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Winter 2017/18 Reviews

Posted on 07/12/2017 by Bobby Seal

A collection of seasonal reading loosely connected by the themes of landscape, time and memory… The Last London: True Fictions from an Unreal City – Iain Sinclair This is the eighteenth and supposedly final chapter of Iain Sinclair’s London novel. … Continue reading →

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A Bridge That Divides

Posted on 30/11/2017 by Bobby Seal

A bridge that links and divides. Two nations, border country, and in my mind I’m so close to the edge. But fly-strewn water fills my mouth, and drowns all possible words. The water is warm and viscous, its whole surface … Continue reading →

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The X-Site: Mendelssohn, Mustard Gas and Memory

Posted on 14/11/2017 by Bobby Seal

The most wonderful and the strongest things in the world, you know, are just the things which no one can see. Charles Kingsley – The Water-Babies   We follow the river upstream, pressing on further than we’d ever walked before.  … Continue reading →

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Terence Davies’s Liverpool

Posted on 01/11/2017 by Bobby Seal

Cinema creates a loop that preserves memory, and through the artful use of music and unexpected juxtaposition, Davies communicates the intensity that belongs to those memories. The re-enactments of Children are transcended. Death And Transfiguration is a powerful and deeply … Continue reading →

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Straight Lines: Watling Street and Chester

Posted on 29/06/2017 by Bobby Seal

Chester is situated on an elbow of Watling Street, one of Britain’s major Roman roads.  One branch issues south towards London and the other runs east across the Pennines to York.  Chester’s importance to the Romans was determined by its … Continue reading →

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Washington Irving and the Headless Horseman

Posted on 22/06/2017 by Bobby Seal

Washington Irving was an American writer who spent much of his early literary career living in England.  But I only discovered recently, while doing some research for a piece on the Old Dee Bridge, that he was also a frequent … Continue reading →

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