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1. Welcome everyone to our newsletter for January. Welcome, especially, to readers in Coventry, the Midlands city whose essence is in the air right now thanks to the Middlemarch theme of the new Happy Reader. George Eliot went to school in Coventry, published her first articles (including the brilliantly titled ‘Hints on Snubbing’) in…
Read more1. Truman Capote died 37 years ago but in terms of sheer media coverage, which often spills out of the books sections into ‘style’ or even ‘news’, still seems pretty much like a living celebrity. Could Gore Vidal have been right when he described the author’s death as a ‘good career move’? Two of…
Read more1. One of the most repeated thus influential maxims about reading is by the Baltimorean filmmaker, John Waters. ‘If you go home with somebody,’ it goes, ‘and they don’t have books, don’t fuck ’em’. This is a much-adopted rule, granting the reading tastes of the man who coined it a certain elevated status. So, when…
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