LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has been an artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
Devonshire
Staggering amidst a floodtide Heavitree
of happiness embalmed in memory sudden frost children
LAWRENCE FREIESLEBEN, Film & Television Editor of The Brazen Head, has beenan artist and writer as long as he can remember – cycling away at weekends from the council estate where he grew up, to paint the countryside as an escape from the restrictive tedium of the school week. Leaving home at 16, he has lived in 17 different areas of the UK – from Devonshire to Northumberland – painting and writing, always vigilantly questioning the interior light of landscape, cityscape and wider atmosphere. Living virtually off-grid with his large family, both remote locations and urban visits have formed the backscene to a passion for film which has intertwined with art and writing throughout his career. Films remain a key creative focus since childhood, resulting in encyclopaedic folders and clippings as well as a constant stream of home-made film festivals. He currently lives in a dilapidated Lancashire seaside town
ROSS COGAN studied philosophy, gaining a Ph.D. He has published three poetry collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012), with Oversteps, and Bragr (2018) with Seren. Ross received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple prizes, and been placed in others including second in the Troubadour. His poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto, Acumen, Stand, Orbis and other magazines. A writer and editor, he was Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival from 2010 to 2019
The world as will and idea
“L’histoire conte que le terrible Schopenhauer en était fort amateur de bière. Il jouait aussi de la clarinette, mais c’était peut-être pour embêter ses voisins.” (Jean Verdenal)
Schopenhauer, we’re told, had a great love
of beer. The man who let his mind
slip slyly under the stage curtain, behind
the painted backdrop of ideas,
to where the great undifferentiated ‘all’,
hungry and fierce and cruel,
pulls the levers and unties the ropes
from in the shadows that it also is;
the man who walked at night down certain half-
deserted streets to stand alone in
the blasted wasteland where the grim
indifferent wind whirls and one feels the frozen
hub of the world’s fever; this man
was not above
quenching his resulting thirst
in a long, cool glass of beer.
I like to picture him in a neat,
dark frockcoat, buttoned high,
a crisp, cambric shirt, a sumptuous tie,
surmounted by a simple pin,
reclining in a corner seat
in a favourite bierkeller, his face a lion’s, his thin
ROSS COGAN studied philosophy, gaining a Ph.D. He has published three poetry collections, Stalin’s Desk (2005) and The Book I Never Wrote (2012), with Oversteps, and Bragr (2018) with Seren. Ross received a Gregory Award in 1999, and has won the Exeter, Frogmore, Cannon Sonnet and Staple prizes, and been placed in others including second in the Troubadour. His poetry has been published in the Guardian, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Wales, Poetry London, PN Review, New Welsh Review, Rialto, Acumen, Stand, Orbis and other magazines. A writer and editor, he was Creative Director of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival from 2010 to 2019
LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod.
The poem numbers refer to Per K Sorensen’s critical edition: Divinity Secularized: An Inquiry into the Nature and Form of the Songs Ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama, Wien 1990. Translated from the Tibetan by Louis Hunt
The Love Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama is a collection of 65 poems popularly ascribed to the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso (1683-1706). The Sixth Dalai Lama was notorious for his indifference to the religious and political obligations of his office. He publicly renounced his monastic vows, preferring to spend his time in the taverns and brothels of Lhasa. He died at the age of 26, taken hostage and presumably killed by the Mongol forces contending for power in central Tibet. Despite his notoriously unconventional behavior, the Sixth Dalai Lama is a revered figure in Tibetan culture. Some have tried to interpret his lack of the conventional monastic virtues of celibacy and abstinence as an example of Tantric Buddhism in which the deliberate flaunting of moral norms is seen as a dangerous but potentially more efficacious route to Enlightenment. But the poems themselves suggest a simpler explanation – Tsangyang Gyatso was an ardent young man chafing at the restraints of familial, religious, and political authority.
The poems themselves are quite short – four lines of six syllables a piece, almost haiku like in their brevity. But the condensed style of classical Tibetan literature, the tendency, especially in poetry, to omit grammatical particles whenever possible, means that one can pack a lot of meaning into a very small compass. Despite their apparent simplicity, these poems can often be read as an indirect commentary on the difficulties of Tsangyang Gyatso’s precarious position in Lhasa. The “grey-yellow” wind that banishes “the blossom from the bee” is also an allusion to the color of the robes worn by Tibetan government officials. The poems touch as well on specific aspects of Tibetan Buddhism that may not be familiar to the uninitiated reader. For example, the image of the girl returning “again and again in my thoughts” uses the Tibetan expression for the Buddhist conception of cyclic existence. But I believe these poems work, or should work, even for someone completely unfamiliar with Tibetan history or Tibetan Buddhist practice. I have endeavored to translate these poems in a way that conveys the only thing that can be adequately represented in English – their lucid surface.
LOUIS HUNT is a retired professor of political theory. He has published poems and translations from Sanskrit and Classical Tibetan in a variety of online and print journals including Metamorphoses, The Brazen Head, Interpret, The High Window, New Verse Review and Nimrod
MATTHEW KIRBY’s poems have appeared in various periodicals, recently, Tar River Poetry,New Verse Review, Little Patuxent Review, Doubly Mad, and Literary Matters. He lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with his wife and kids.
The Property
Jay’d had a few when he’d decided, true.
A trip out to the property he owned
but never stood or laid eyes on. The title
noted a lien and other complications.
A former easement had been covered by
the snows of time. Now inaccessible
by road, the land lay feral, swallowed up
by taxes, eglantine, and pine. The real
draw was his dad was, maybe, buried there
beside a boat shed on the dried up pond.
He changed his filters, packed his saddle bags
with Enid’s sourdough bread and beer
and went, despite the ice that week, into
a kind of heaven, all brown and white and raw.
Cardinal Salute
Direct my spirit north, to mining towns,
cold air descending from the foot of heaven,
to hemlocks stunted by the breath of God,
mud springs, slate caves and state park dirt bike trails,
a peeling porch, a girl in a gray bandana,
descendent of all races, fathered by
a machinist, though he was ordained in Lviv,
keeps up a fleet of Belarusian bikes
and rents them to a few vacationers.
Of late, his daughter’s helping him expand
through marketing consisting of exquisite
daguerreotypes, hand-colored, of her boyfriend
riding a two-stroke Minsk enduro bike
through granite-flanked ravines, past bobbing ferns.
He Didn’t Understand the Reason Why
He didn’t understand the reason why
they fired his wife, but he was kind of glad
and welcomed her back home with soft-boiled eggs
and oat milk lattes on the patio.
He told her two could live as cheap as one
and sex was better in the afternoon.
She mourned her sense of purpose for a time.
She ran and lost ten pounds and planted hostas
in each square foot of shade. She talked to birds,
really conversed with them about their edgy,
cantankerous chirps and status-conscious preening.
MATTHEW KIRBY’s poems have appeared in various periodicals, recently, Tar River Poetry,New Verse Review, Little Patuxent Review, Doubly Mad, and Literary Matters. He lives in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley with his wife and kids.
LUKE GILFEDDER describes the characters and places of Eric Tucker, Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’
The best half-dozen artists of any nation, Wyndham Lewis remarked, are never dependent on the objective world for their success or stimulus; they can make a new thing of anything, however provincial the original. This proved particularly apt for Eric Tucker, who had not even Rembrandt’s country mills and Dutch canals to draw on, but instead the factories, pubs and angry red-brick streets of Warrington — officially Britain’s ‘worst town for culture’, according to the Royal Society of Arts.
Yet despite its lack of vibrant cycle paths, world-class heritage sites and inclusive street furniture, the old Wire Town still inspired Tucker to create a prodigious body of work. He left behind some five hundred paintings, concealed throughout his end-of-terrace home: stashed on top of and behind wardrobes, hidden in a stairwell cupboard and the garden shed, and even stuffed into empty compost bags in the remains of an old air-raid shelter. Shortly after he died in 2018, his family turned his home into a gallery for a weekend – dubbed a “terraced-house Tate” in his nephew Joe Tucker’s book, The Secret Painter – and more than two thousand locals attended. National press coverage, museum retrospectives and West End exhibitions followed, sealing Tucker’s reputation as Warrington’s ‘Secret Lowry’.
But does this comparison hold? Tucker was certainly a fan of Lowry, but among his art books, he apparently had only one on the Manchester painter. For the most part, his collection consisted of works on early Modern artists, predominantly Post-Impressionists: Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, and Van Gogh. But the Art World has an unfortunate habit, when it belatedly discovers Northern artists, of yoking them all to Lowry. See here: another Gulley Jimson of the North, dimly emerging from Lancashire’s mephitic glooms, a reclusive eccentric whose voice has been heard only too late…
Lowry spent eighty-eight years in Manchester polishing this fantasy about himself: the myth, as Brian Sewell put it, that he sprang fully formed from the brow of Minerva and painted more or less the same picture of urban dereliction eight hundred times after a Pauline revelation in a Pendleton park. His converting angel said, “Look,” and, looking, Lowry saw that grime was good. Yet compared with Tucker, Lowry was relatively middle-class. He grew up in the leafy suburb of Victoria Park. In photographs, he appears a formal, distant, clerkly figure. Tucker, while also a lifelong bachelor who lived with his mother, had been a boxer, labourer and gravedigger — by all accounts a private yet popular character who modelled his shtick more on Ken Dodd than the Douanier Rousseau. Where Lowry painted as an outsider looking in, Tucker painted as an insider looking out. “Eric is one of the people in the pictures,” his brother explained to art historian Ruth Millington. “He knows them all.”
This distinction is writ large on the walls of a recent Mayfair retrospective, Characters and Places. Tucker gives us industrial life up close: there are no long-shot vistas of market squares and factory gates, no matchstick men pouring from blackened mills — Lowry’s “undignified, pea-brained homunculi”, as Edwin Mullins termed them. Tucker’s characters are rounded in every sense: ruddy-cheeked, individual, full of vim and vigour. You wish you were having as good a time as his pubgoers. Each subject is rendered not in Lowry’s muted palette but in ham pinks, russets, ochres and blacks. Flat-capped pipe smokers and their grizzled ale-mates jostle with young couples and cabaret singers amid crisply defined bottles and glasses. There are no gloomy kitchen-sink shenanigans here: Tucker’s oils and watercolours transform Warrington’s nightlife into something as joyfully carnivalesque — though less coldly abstract — as Wyndham Lewis’s drawings of Breton peasant fêtes.
Lowry may have convinced Tucker that life in the industrial north was worthy of painting, but Tucker shows what Lowry missed in it. This is as true of Tucker’s ‘places’ as of his characters. Beyond the smoky pubs and clubs, Tucker depicts vignettes from Warrington’s backstreets and alleyways, peopled with half-spectral figures playing games, lighting bonfires, dealing scrap, or simply smoking a cigarette and staring at an egg-carton-grey sky. Elsewhere, we see pigeon fanciers, rag-and-bone men, circus ringmasters, confabbing housewives and brangling corner-boys. What leaps out from these canvases is not the Lowry influence, but Tucker’s admiration for Edward Burra — the English painter of surreal, vividly satirical urban scenes, and another maverick who, like Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, was “out of key with his time.” Indeed, Tucker’s scenes are strangely anachronistic. To a millennial eye, only the concrete bollards and streetlights distinguish them from the Edwardian era.
In truth, the same might be said of much of Warrington today. It certainly could of the street I grew up on, only a few streets away from Tucker, in the late 1990s. Yet the fact that Tucker rarely dated his pictures feels significant: it suggests they were never intended as nostalgia or mere social record, to be framed in glass-walled museums as exhibits of a world willingly forgotten. Like Burra, he paints with an unaffected affection for a world that is conventionally reckoned drab or ugly—a world which, in Tucker’s case, is now considered as lost to time as Woolworths or TheWheeltappers and Shunters Club. Yet so deeply immersed was Tucker in this forgotten North that one feels the artist is still there, in these pictures. So too, it seems, are his characters. I need only open the door and look.
LUKE GILFEDDER is a writer from Manchester, set to launch his debut novel, Die When I Say When, in 2025. Previously, he worked as a playwright, with scripts produced at The Royal Exchange Manchester, the Lyric Hammersmith, and in London’s West End. He has recently completed a PhD on the life and work of Wyndham Lewis
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Twin Peaks: The Return (2017)
RUPERT LOYDELL revisits David Lynch’s unforgettable dystopia
David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was the moment when the town of Twin Peaks was revealed to be a dark hellhole of occult mystery, sexual abuse, intrigue, murder and underhand business dealings as opposed to simply a cozy backdrop to a strange detective story involving demon possession and sexual intrigue.
Although the first two television series had some shocking episodes, particularly the reveal of the evil spirit Bob and Leland’s death, along with the final episode (produced at short notice under instruction from the TV company), viewers’ memories seemed mostly of a quirky and occasionally surreal soap opera whose characters were fuelled by coffee and doughnuts, had high libidos and were very good looking – not to mention a friendly visiting detective who was prone to visions and intuitive investigation.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light by any means, but the darkness was leavened by humour and friendship, not to mention the haunting soundtrack, but Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me was having none of it. Billed as a prequel, the film was also a kind of reveal of what was actually going on, ostensibly before the TV series started but allowing us to project several of the stories into that time frame as well.
Nobody, not even Agent Cooper and his fellow police force members, seemed to come out well. Everybody was conniving with somebody else, had a dodgy deal going on, and seemed complicit in prostitution, smuggling and drug running. There was a lot of looking the other way and a lot of non sequiturs and references to things we’d missed, not been shown or that Lynch felt we should know about. This included more dreams and a meet-up of demons in an upstairs room.
At the time, many of us felt cheated. My friends and I came out of the arts centre where we saw it in shocked silence. I don’t watch or like horror films, but we had just seen one that seemed to take away any pleasure we’d had whilst watching the two TV series. That seemed to be the general public and critical response, and although there was and still is a sustained discussion about Lynch’s work, and a recognition that he had done something amazing for TV, that was Twin Peaks done with.
Twenty-five years later, that turned out not to be the case. Twin Peaks: The Return was even more surreal and fragmented than the original two TV series, and although presented in 18 episodes, Lynch claimed he thought of it as one 18-hour film. Although a few storylines were continued from the 1990s, most weren’t, and the film was full of new character, including three versions of Agent Cooper, those present in one-off scenes, not to mention aliens and godlike beings and a complete blurring of reality and dream states.
In fact Twin Peaks: The Return seemed mostly a kind of return to Lynch’s Eraserhead, a disturbing and unfathomable monochrome nightmare with a deformed baby and a (literally) industrial soundtrack that highlighted Lynch’s love of photography and the fleshy paintings of Francis Bacon. It highlighted and picked up on occult connections and cultivated its own lines of influence and diversion. Whilst it offered a creation story for evil in our world (or at least, the Twin Peaks world), it also opened up an impossible number of possibilities of what was going on and why.
Interest in Twin Peaks had never really gone away, but the announcement of series 3 saw a renewed interest. Discussion forums sprang up online, a number of academic volumes were published (there would be more after The Return ended) and co-writer/director Mark Frost published two hardback volumes – The Secret History, labelled as a novel, and The Final Dossier – which sought to flesh out some of the loose ends but also act as bait for the forthcoming series.
Twin Peaks: The Return was not easy or lighthearted viewing. There were trips into space, out of time, to cities and gangland underworlds – visions, prophecies and dreams – a giant pepper-pot that was David Bowie’s character – and Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) seemingly trapped in a loveless marriage, or locked up in an asylum. There were doppelgängers, demons, a hybrid frog-insect alien, visiting bands and songwriters, and a new gang of young people forming their own romantic and sexual liaisons whilst taking new, contemporary drugs. Oh, and there was a slow-motion atomic explosion too.
And there was electricity, snaking through, by and over the land, sparking, hissing and humming. And the woodsman, an unwashed and obsessed tramp, who broadcast a poem over the radio once he had killed the DJ. No-one who hears it knows if the poem is a sacred text, a warning or a magical spell; it hypnotizes them and sends them to sleep. And there are mystical beings trying to balance and juggle good and evil, sending spirits and signs to earth to sort things out. One of the beings is the giant from Agent Cooper’s dreams in earlier series, now called the Fireman in the closing credits. And there is the Experiment, momentarily appearing in a glass box in New York City. And, and, and…
And hundreds of walk-on parts: passers-by or passers-through, and those confined to the background. But no sign of Agent Cooper, and only tantalising glances of the town of Twin Peaks itself. Versions of Cooper are busy out in the world whilst the good/original Cooper remains trapped in the Red Room or White Lodge. Another Cooper squeezes himself through an electrical socket as a doorway from space to Earth, and comes out as a simpleton. Evil Cooper is intent on amassing a fortune and facilitating evil on the world.
The Return seems to refer to Cooper himself, since he takes most of the 18 hours to find his way back, before leaving again. He tries to undo Laura Palmer’s murder, which kicked off the whole Twin Peaks series, by finding a version of Laura and travelling back in time, forgetting all his zen ideas of acceptance and living in the moment. The version of Laura he finds (or creates) does not seem to know him or her own history, is only shocked into realisation at the end of the series, indeed the whole show, which ends with a scream.
David Lynch. Image: Wikimedia Commons
There is no resolution, although fans, critics and film buffs have used up thousands of words trying to find one, contorting ideas and scenes into ridiculously tangled cats-cradles of even more impossible narratives, story lines and time loops. Some of it, of course, makes sense: there are repetitions, similarities and repeats in the plots and filming, there are what seems to be codes and signs on the likes of stray lamp posts and campsite notice boards, and the pylons do look like owls. Nothing is what it seems, but nobody is sure what they seem to be. And nobody seems sure who they are any more either, how to get where they want to be, or why things are happening the way they are.
This time round, however, the deaths and violence, the visitations from the spirit world, the hauntings and occult leanings, all the unexplained mysteries, are once again leavened with humour and wit. Twin Peaks: The Return may not be the return we expected, and is definitely not a return to the Twin Peaks we first enjoyed visiting, but its strangeness and unknowability, its twists and turns, surprises and senseless signposts, leaven it, along with a roster of musical visits to the Roadhouse, some come-uppances and happy endings. By embracing the surreal and the senselessness of our lives and juxtaposing it with chance and the unknown, Lynch reinvented television again, just as he had 25 years earlier, producing an extended film to sit alongside his other career highlights: Eraserhead, Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive.
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
RUPERT LOYDELL is a writer and visual artist currently living in Cornwall. His poems have been widely published, most recently in Abridged, International Times, Litter, M58, Melange, Noon, Osiris and The Soliloquist. His book of prose poems, The Weight of Air, is forthcoming from KFS Press, and Recuperative Theology, a collaboration with H.L. Hix, from Amethyst Press
DOWN THE LINE
All we can do is try to find others who see the world the same way we do, use lines and colour in a similar manner, trying to make sense of where we find ourselves and what is around us. How did we end up here, what are all these people saying, how come they have no interest in paint or words? Look at that sky, listen to the birds, the way the clouds spread out tonight as the sun fades again, pink then orange, blue and grey. We paint only for ourselves and hope others might be looking and listening down the line, believe in a moment where things make sense.
RUPERT LOYDELL is the editor of Stride magazine, contributing editor to International Times and a writer and abstract artist. He has many books of poetry and several collaborative publications in print and has edited anthologies for Shearsman, KFS and Salt. His critical writing has appeared in Punk & Post-Punk (he is a member of the journal’s editorial board), JournalofWriting and Creative Practice, New Writing, English, Text, Axon, Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, Musicology Research, Revenant, The Quint: an interdisciplinary journal from the north, and Journal of Visual Art Practice. He has also contributed chapters to Brian Eno. Oblique Music (Bloomsbury, 2016), Critical Essays on Twin Peaks: The Return (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Music in Twin Peaks: Listen to the Sounds (Routledge, 2021) and Bodies, Noise and Power in Industrial Music (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD anticipates some of this year’s likely literary successes
As I write this it’s the tail end of January, and I sit at home on the edge of a Pacific Northwest rainforest, which means that it’s one of those times when the miseries of the world threaten to engulf us and the precariousness of the human condition, far from appearing a worthwhile and even noble struggle, seems an infinite rebuke.
Meanwhile, we’ve collectively at least survived the traditional blizzard of Christmas review roundups, and no doubt – unless we’re all blown to smithereens in the meantime – we’ll soon have the inevitable Easter reading recommendations and summer beach-book lists in our sights, until before long the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness rolls around once more, and with it yet more critical effusions, and so on, ad infinitum.
If for no other reason than to get a head start on the whole craze, I offer here a brazenly subjective midwinter lineup of half-a-dozen worthy candidates culled from among the many thousands of our publishers’ new or forthcoming titles, any one of which is guaranteed to warm the reader’s heart in these otherwise unremittingly bleak days and nights.
Matt Haig, The Midnight Train
Like several million others around the world, you may know the basic outline of Haig’s breakthrough 2020 novel The Midnight Library. In short: the book’s protagonist, Nora Seed (even great writers sometimes struggle with names), in her mid-thirties, single and childless, feels useless. Her cat is dead, she’s alone, and she’s been fired. Late one night, she tries to kill herself. Unpromising, I know, but this is where Haig lifts the whole thing out of itself and into the sort of energetically sustained parallel universe that C.S. Lewis might not have disowned. Instead of death, what Nora finds is a library in which each volume represents a version of her life where she made different choices. All she has to do to step into that life is to open the book. You may possibly recognise some of the plot ingredients of the 1998 film Sliding Doors, itself a product of the so-called many-worlds theory in which a new universe beckons from our every choice and decision.
The whole enterprise possibly sounds a bit strained, but in Haig’s hands it delivers the goods as a serviceable get-away-from-it-all novel that works both on the level of a good yarn and a speculative rumination on what we’re really doing during our brief tenancy of the planet. What’s the best that can happen in your life, and what’s the worst? Those are the questions. Without spoiling the treat, The Midnight Train is broadly speaking in the same vein as its predecessor, only – as the title rather implies – translated from a library onto, well, a train. I’ve slightly furtively read about three-quarters of the new book in what publishers like to call uncorrected proof form, and I can confirm it’s well up to par with its distinguished prototype; both have interesting things to say about how hard it sometimes is for any of us to completely accept ourselves for what we are – and, like the eponymous train itself, it all rattles along at a brisk clip.
Canongate Books, April 2026, £20
Malcolm Galfe, Near Horizons
The author here knows his technology and he knows his psychology, and the two combine in seven wonderfully engrossing stories which themselves incorporate elements of horror, sci-fi, mystery, dystopia and good old-fashioned (it never seems to go out of style) human drama.
That said, I’m pleased to report that we’re not exactly in Stephen King, let alone Stranger Things country in Near Horizons. Without exception, Galfe’s tales have a rich, understated texture to them, weaving together a patchwork of tropes and allusions to create something that feels consistently exciting and new. He achieves his effects by tweaking our anxieties and using the suggestive power of good dialogue, not by the sudden arrival of a race of invading pod-people or their like. It’s the literary equivalent of the way in which the best Hitchcock films play with cinematic techniques to tease and torment us, and in its way just as delectable.
As a matter of fact, it’s not entirely illogical to review this title in close physical proximity to the aforementioned Matt Haig; both are neatly crafted, elegantly written, sharp, shocking and often mordantly funny. What raises Near Horizons above the pack of lesser tech-themed morality stories is Galfe’s wise and pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, his grasp of the elements of suspense, and the way he weaves fictional characters into recognisably true-to-life crises in consistently gripping ways.
But if Haig’s book stands as a just slightly over-manicured front lawn, complete with reassuringly familiar garden gnomes and even a fluffy household pet or two on hand, Galfe’s has an authentic touch of the jungle to it: it feels exotic and a little dangerous, often disarming the reader with a page or two of seemingly casual exposition before blindsiding them with a sudden plot twist. Or put another way: these are the sort of stories tailor-made for those of us who like to be both entertained and shocked, and perhaps also secretly comforted by the fact that it’s the characters in Near Horizons, not themselves, being manipulated in this way. There’s something inherently reassuring in the notion that nothing here could ever, surely, happen to us – an almost physically soothing sensation, like a welcome descent into a warm bath when the door is firmly locked and bolted against a storm raging outside. I confidently predict that we will be hearing much more of this supremely assured author in the future.
Woodbridge Publishers, November 2025, hardcover £16.12, paperback £13.05
Cheryl Hines. Image: David Torcivia, Wikimedia Commons
Cheryl Hines, Unscripted: A Memoir
This book shouldn’t work. A memoir written by a 60-year-old actress, who, frankly, has never threatened to become a major film star – you may know her best as Larry David’s foil on the TV series Curb Your Enthusiasm – hardly sounds promising. Then there’s the author’s personal baggage. Since 2014, Cheryl Hines has been married to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the raspy-voiced US cabinet minister who served as one of Donald Trump’s chief surrogates during his last presidential campaign. Rarely has a book been written that straddles the worlds of Hollywood and conservative politics, let alone those as embodied by the current administration in Washington DC. Yet, against the odds, Unscripted turns out to be an enthralling read.
Essentially, what’s on offer here is a well-told and often deftly comic account of a working-class Florida girl with dreams of doing something in life other than following in her father’s footsteps as the manager of a local Burger King outlet. In time, Hines goes on to catch the acting bug, makes her way to the Universal Studios in Orlando, and promptly finds herself staffing a sex chatline. Next she’s offered a part in a cable-TV show called Swamp Thing, where the script calls on her to do little more than emerge from a large manmade puddle on the studio floor and stand there for a while, topless. Another time she appears on an episode of American TV’s The Dating Game, but isn’t chosen to go on a date.
Life was a bit like that for Hines in the 1990s. This may have been her nadir as a working actress, but it’s the high point of her book, which passes over the serial rebuffs and setbacks in breezy, vernacular fashion, with none of the professional biographer’s tendency to choke the pages with a flat-footed account of names and dates. Things slow down a bit once we settle into the groove of Hines’s long and apparently blissfully untroubled run on Curb, and her equally happy marriage to RFK Jr., but the first act of the show is itself worth the price of admission.
Skyhorse, March 2026, £21.59
Sir Anthony Hopkins. Image: Elena Torre, Wikimedia Commons
Anthony Hopkins, We Did OK, Kid: A Memoir
According to its publisher, this book is a ‘raw, honest and moving account’ by one of our foremost living actors. It’s certainly raw. Hopkins lays out his early life in unsparing detail, as the son of a tough, hard-headed Port Talbot baker who didn’t have much time or sympathy for a son with an alarming tendency to slap on makeup and hang out with the local amateur dramatics society. ‘My mother and father were both prone to depression and black moods,’ we learn. ‘They fought and wept. My father drank heavily, which only fueled his heightened emotionality.’ Anthony Hopkins himself liked a drop in later life, to put it no stronger than that, and proved a less than stellar National Service recruit as a result, often brought up on charges of brawling with his fellow soldiers. The fractious reputation followed him back into civvy street, first in the world of semi-professional provincial theatre, and then the more refined halls of RADA in London.
Hopkins assesses his talent in these days modestly. ‘I could barely speak, and had the posture of a camel,’ he writes. But he worked hard, and never turned down a job. In time he came to the notice of Laurence Olivier, who made him his understudy in a production of Strindberg’s The Dance of Death. After standing in for the great man one night, Olivier complimented him for having ‘walked away with the part like a cat with a mouse between his teeth.’ Even so, the young Hopkins was soon bored by the repetition of the stage, one of those people who always seem to want to be elsewhere, doing something else. ‘I began to feel that acting was just a by-product,’ he writes. ‘I wanted to find value in the rest of my life.’
As with the aforementioned Cheryl Hines memoir, this book most comes alive when charting the uphill struggles of the author’s early career, and rather settles into a holding pattern once we come to see him triumph in The Silence of the Lambs and all the rest. Anyone hoping for rollicking Hollywood scandal à la Bette Davis or David Niven may be disappointed, although Hopkins does allow himself a few disobliging remarks on the late actor Paul Sorvino, with whom he worked unhappily on Oliver Stone’s Nixon. In the absence of gossip, there’s a good deal of what’s-it-all-about rumination on the author’s part, some bits of it more compelling than others. The takeaway message of the book is of the essential strangeness of the acting profession, which, like any intelligent observer, the author sometimes struggles to take entirely seriously. For all the money and awards, I grew to feel quite sorry for Anthony Hopkins as I finished We Did OK, Kid. But that’s because he knows how to tell a story.
Simon & Schuster, November 2025, £25
Bob Spitz, The Rolling Stones: The Biography
Ah, the Stones. By now there have been almost as many books on the old devils as records and concerts by the lads themselves over the course of their sixty-plus year career. In no particular order, we’ve had the late Stanley Booth’s fly-on-the-wall account of the band’s notorious 1969 tour of the United States, ending with their disastrous concert at Altamont; an enjoyably gossipy romp through the narcotic days of the 70s by their factotum and sometime heroin dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez; formidably brainy group biographies by the likes of the journalists Stephen Davis and Philip Norman; and, not least, the necessarily sanitised but still quite lively first-hand accounts by Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Ronnie Wood themselves, all of them estimable enough in their own right, if perhaps betraying the hand of a ghostwriter. Back in the dark ages, there were even biographies of both Richards and Mick Jagger, and a third book (a glutton for punishment, that author) on the band collectively by a character named Sandford, but we needn’t linger on them.
Now Bob Spitz, an American journalist known for his previous works on pop-cultural figures like the Beatles and several lesser groups, as well as his juvenile nonfiction books (in so far as there can truly be said to be a difference between the two genres), brings us this ‘definitive’ account of rock’s bad boys, which he stretches out to the gatefold triple-album length of 700-plus pages. Does it actually say anything new? Yes and no. The basic story is present and largely correct: an initial eighteen months of struggle, followed by ten years of inspired music and personal debauchery – and in turn by five decades of meticulous decline management – might sum it up. Spitz is at his most engaging when he abandons the weary chronological plod, and instead follows the template of Ian Leslie’s triumphant recent dual-biography John & Paul in putting the Jagger-Richards relationship under the microscope. The author takes on the tired polarities – Mick as the uptight details guy, Keith the agreeably wrecked one – by reframing the story as a volatile bromance: ‘passionate, tender and tempestuous, full of love, riven by jealousy.’ However much they were at odds, seems to be the message, Mick ’n Keef were, or are, still an indivisible twosome, the driving force of the Stones, with the others, even the band’s original wayward genius Brian Jones, mere talented add-ons. The cast and basic plot may be familiar, but Spitz has at least succeeded in giving a recognisably human face to the whole star-crossed saga.
Penguin Press, April 2026, £26.14
1918 – Children play on a captured German field artillery gun exhibited in the Mall, London. Image: Wikimedia Commons
Alwyn Turner, A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
It’s always good to find a readable and well-researched variant on the standard schoolroom account of events, which in this case would have had us see the UK of the years 1918-39 as a uniformly grim place, grey, soupily lit and generally austere, somewhere the Great Depression set in like a chill Channel fog and lifted again just in time for the arrival of the Luftwaffe. What’s most striking about Alwyn Turner’s new book, by contrast, are the similarities between those sepia-toned times, seemingly out of some vanished Jurassic social order, and our own. Consider that, in 1922-24, Britain managed to get through four prime ministers; that politicians as a class were said to be ‘uniquely unpopular’, occupying a place in the nation’s affections only slightly more elevated than that of child molesters; that London itself was a soiled, sad place whose inhabitants habitually murdered, stole, lied and cheated as they slithered around in a sea of immorality; that the UK was drowning in debt while simultaneously undergoing the Spanish Flu epidemic that killed an estimated 40-50 million people worldwide, roughly three times more than Covid; and that ‘tariff reform’ divided the nation much as Brexit did a century later.
For that matter, many of the products and institutions of our current daily lives entered service in the 1920s or early 30s. Among other goodies, Turner lovingly catalogues the new confectionery brands manufactured in Britain: ‘Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars Bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.’ That’s not to mention such establishments as the BBC, Butlin’s holiday camps, British Home Stores, NAAFIs, Wembley Stadium and London Transport, or the last’s iconic diagrammatic tube map and double-decker buses.
Maybe the book as a whole tends to be long on lists of this sort, as opposed to locating the human narrative that generally makes a social history come alive on the page, but, that minor cavil aside, A Shellshocked Nation is still a bracing and well-paced read, set against the ever-louder ticking clock of international events, which reminds us why the author’s devoted fans admiringly refer to him as ‘Page’ Turner. You could do much worse than to treat yourself to a copy this winter.
VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview,bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)
Seta and Sporophyte
If this were Ovid, Seta would have been
A slim bright girl, whose bead of blood
One day ran down her inner thigh, a seed
Threaded across the warp of veins
Vermilion on cream and blue. He took
Such pleasure in the colour that he slew
Her just to satisfy himself and draw the skein
Of red from her rotting body; a damp, fine
And part translucent sort of stem, though not
To bear a flower, but his tensed pouch, the Sporophyte.
(Seta and sporophyte are terms referring to parts of moss. I had in mind particularly a common moss in which the sporophyte – spore-bearing structure – is formed of a stem-like seta, bright red and standing straight up from the main body of the moss, bearing dark red capsules. None of the transformations in Ovid’s Metamorphoses refer to moss, but I was struck by the coincidence of the technical term Seta and the Sita of Indian mythology.)
Three poems from The Sanskrit
The Subhasitaratnakosha is a huge 11th century anthology of Sanskrit verse and verse quotations. It was compiled by a Buddhist monk but most of the contents are not (or not obviously) Buddhist, and date from several centuries earlier. It includes some poetry attributed to women.
Subhasitaratnakosha no. 999
As the grime and caustic iron
Of North Sea water, somehow laid
Precisely in the spotless scoop
Of shell is filtered by a cloud
And turns to pearl as sweet and clear
As April rain: so can you raise
The warm and grubby coins of envy
To the gold of praise.
no. 998
Your glory in this world and the next, it is
The ribcage of that royal bird, the soul:
The waters of the seven seas
Fill, like a skull, his little drinking bowl.
Lokāloka is the name of a mountain which is both in and out of the world (loka and aloka), marking the boundary between death and life. The Raghuvamsha by Kālidāsa is a long Sanskrit poem about the lineage of Raghu, and at this point in the poem it is concerned with a difficulty in conceiving a child. Kālidāsa is often considered to have been the greatest poet and playwright of ancient India.
Lokāloka (Raghuvamsha 1.68)
The clouds in Calvi steam on the mountain top:
From the pool we watch them teeter, stir, disperse.
My father has just died
But unbeknownst to me somewhere inside
Dividing cells will in a few months reassemble
His closed eyes.
Two versions of Horace
After Horace, Odes 1.30 O Venus, regina Cnidi Paphique
Mary, queen of Walsingham, forget
Your darling Norfolk; turn to hear
In Lowestoft and Dartmouth Park, the thrum
Of womens’ prayer.
Come with a child, the blazing boy, and bring
The Muses, skirts up to dance; allow
Also the elderly to attend your train;
And Christ your son.
After Horace, Odes 3.22
The only baby in all of Horace (Odes 3.22)
Lady of the hills and woods
Hear me when my time is come
Preserve me from all dangers and
Heed too your son.
Above my house a pine-tree looms
And every day that passes I
Pray that one day my baby shall
Stand as high.
Spare me then the staggered blows
Of a slow labour, or
A dead child. Bring us torn but
Safe to shore.
Two Translations of Casimir Sarbiewski
Casimir Sarbiewski (1595-1640) was a Polish Jesuit poet who wrote in Latin. His poetry was an enormous success across Europe in the seventeenth century, with a particularly enthusiastic readership in England.
After Sarbiewski – ‘De divino amore’
Last week I watched Love mending his nets
(Very dextrous he is too)
His gear was all gold: hooks and line
The bait, the flies, even the worm.
He was golden himself: but for all his gleam he could find
No waters to fish in. He asked
“Where then can I cast?”
Pass your nets, boy, to the fisher of men:
In his sea
Packed and wriggling you’ll catch
Men and women like me.
De puero Iesu nato
— Is anything more precious than this child of mine?
Whose mouth with running honey wells and fills again,
As balsam flows unstained in streams that do not fail,
And nectar runs in rivers, free and unconstrained.
In his still curls the stars themselves are bound and borne
And on his nape the locks of heaven turn in light.
Could any mother comb such dazzling weight by hand,
Of he who has been born from shiver of starlight?
— His birth is of the royal line, but royalty is obsolete;
And soonest born he’s lain in filth of foreign town,
His right hand grasps at straw, and clings to scraps of hay,
A baby swaddled only by the chill of snow.
Is anything worth less to us than such a child today?
VICTORIA MOUL is a critic, poet and translator living in Paris. Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in PNReview,bad lilies, Black Iris, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Dark Horse and Ancient Exchanges. She reviews regularly for The Friday Poem and the TLS. She writes a weekly substack on poetry and translation, Horace & friends (https://vamoul.substack.com/)
