What you didn’t know about William Shakespeare
Lydia Atkins shares some of the lesser-known and more unusual facts about Shakespeare, the world's most famous playwright.
Read More
Lydia Atkins
Stratford Literary Festival: Barry Cryer on JB Priestley
Lydia Atkins writes on the 'Barry Cryer on JB Priestley' event on Sunday 28th April as part of the Stratford Literary Festival.
Read More
The Lush life: why Lush’s social media detox disregards their customers
Lydia Atkins discusses the recent decision by Lush to remove their social media, arguing it shows a real lack of interest in their customers.
Read More
The best of: short story collections
Lydia Atkins recommends some of her favourite short story collections to help fit reading for pleasure into a busy schedule.
Read More
The worst characters in fiction
Name your least favourite character in any popular book series and they’re unlikely to also be the ‘worst’ character in the canon. As readers, we tend to reserve our dislike for characters we don’t identify with or who simply make choices we wouldn’t make. Meanwhile, conventionally bad characters can even...
Read More
Insta-jam: what the most recent social media outage means for our society
On the 13th March, Facebook Inc. suffered its biggest outage to date with millions losing access to their accounts across North America and Europe. The group includes multiple platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, with many users suffering severe disruption to these services. I was posting an “Insta”...
Read More
“The hope behind the grief”: a review of ‘The Knife Angel’
Lydia Atkins reviews 'The Knife Angel' sculpture at Coventry cathedral as part of our new 'Catch up with Coventry' series
Read More
Unconventional places to read
On an unforgivingly hot day in July 2016, I sat on the central reservation barrier on the A20, five miles outside Dover, and read almost all of Go Set A Watchman by Harper Lee. Heightened security checks at the border had led to standstill traffic. The car hadn’t moved in...
Read More
There are no wrong impressions of a book
Is it possible to have a ‘wrong’ impression of a book? Does it matter if my interpretation is different to that which the author intended? What happens if I don’t like a book universally hailed as a ‘classic’? These are the sorts of unhelpful questions readers tend to ask themselves....
Read More