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Sophie Ellis-Bextor – Take Me Home I still love singing it. I’d been in a band that fizzled out by the time I was 20, so I was left feeling quite high and dry, and that maybe my music career was behind me. Once I decided to do Groovejet and that picked me up and twirled me around, and I was making a solo album, it just was incredibly overwhelming: suddenly I was doing the thing I love again. Experiencing what it felt like when it all went wrong it made me a lot more steady on my feet. … [Read more...] about Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s lockdown listening: ‘A child could understand it – stay at home’

In an essay written in 1982 to mark the centenary of Joyce’s birth, the Irish poet John Montague, who died earlier this month, a writer who had also mined his own childhood, wrote of the influence of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “No one could overestimate the effects of [the book] on later Irish writers … Or on the national psyche: many young Irishmen came to painful consciousness reading those corrosive pages. The Dublin of my student days was strewn with versions of Stephen Dedalus, including myself, though I wonder what the women thought of it!” … [Read more...] about Colm Tóibín​​: James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist​, 100 years on​

Since my nomination for the Literary Review’s bad sex in fiction award it’s a question that’s occupied my mind. For me, the truth lay in between. There are many reasons why your characters have sex and many more why you ought to try to describe it. Sometimes the author steps back: a curtain falls, a door closes and a row of dots makes the reader do the work, but mostly you need to get into the minds, and bodies, of the people you’ve invented and see what happens when they get together with the metaphorical lights on. … [Read more...] about Why I deserve a Blue Peter badge for my description of sex

The Literary Review has been a force for good in British public life, and I must sentimentally say that it was the first place I ever had anything published. But in 1993 its editor, Auberon Waugh, created a monster, soon to raise its ugly head again – the bad sex award, a prize for the most embarrassing description of sex in a new novel. … [Read more...] about The bad sex award needs a new sort of climax

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Yes. When they looked at each other in the mirror that time, all she saw for the first few seconds was a comic situation. But suddenly the comic became veiled by excitement: the bowler hat no longer signified a joke; it signified violence; violence against Sabina, against her dignity as a woman. She saw her bare legs and thin panties with her pubic triangle showing through. The lingerie enhanced the charm of her femininity, while the hard masculine hat denied it, violated and ridiculed it. The fact that Tomas stood beside her fully dressed meant that the essence of what they both saw was far from good clean fun (if it had been fun he was after, he, too, would have had to strip and don a bowler hat); it was humiliation. But instead of spurning it, she proudly, provocatively played it for all it was worth, as if submitting of her own will to public rape; and suddenly, unable to wait any longer, she pulled Tomas down to the floor. … [Read more...] about Forget Morrissey’s ‘bulbous salutation’, here are my good sex awards