My Darling Temeraire
...of Cadiz. The British fleet was waiting for them at a cape called Trafalgar. Admiral Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, followed closely by Captain Eliab Harvey’s 98-gun Temeraire, cut through the...
Rejection
...a commission, an audience, a fee. I have to tell them that I do not want to accept their proposal, develop their draft, publish their article — give their writing...
Toeing Plimsoll’s Line
...were also part of these festivities, complete with sea shanties and an amateur company belting out ‘My Old Man Said Follow the Van’. The grand finale of both was a...
Inspiration By Invitation
...spell it. It’s hard to imagine a non-fiction commission that could be both so reassuringly constrained and so inspiringly open-ended. Poetry commissions sometimes come with an additional twist: unlike a...
Bridge
...is Editor-in-Chief of Gitanjali and Beyond. Bashabi is Honorary Vice President of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies (ASLS), executive committee member of Scottish PEN, Writers at Risk Committee and...
Unseen But Not Unsung
...libretto Good Angel, Bad Angel, based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘Markheim’, had reached the fiddly back-and-forth-to-the-composer stage. Having worked with composer Lyell Cresswell on other operas since then,...
Based On A True Story
...companies have made big bucks by fictionalising history. Netflix’s The Crown is a sumptuous and credible account of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, enjoyed by millions worldwide. But how...
Anna Ralph
...his younger brother to plant a flag with disastrous consequences. Her second novel Before I Knew Him (Arrow, 2009) was also inspired by the landscapes of the North-east and in...
A. A. Milne And Me
...of the library, from which a bridge led to the Computer Building. (The computer was housed in its own building!) The path to the library was made of square paving...
Disturbing Authorship
...thought more about it, read various commentators’ comments, interacted with the system myself, my initial unease has started to come into clearer focus. I’m impressed – who wouldn’t be? –...