On Writing, The Litro Blog

A Sense of Place

Many a creative writing professor has lectured me on the pivotal role a “sense of place” plays in fiction. Writers work hard at creating credible worlds in which to set ...

by Vineetha Mokkil • September 28, 2015September 28, 2015

Travel&Lifestyle

Willing Exile

“For all its many drawbacks, America has been good to me.” A Brit contemplates life abroad.

by Dan Shewan • May 9, 2015May 27, 2015

Litro: Arts & Culture, Travel&Lifestyle

Literary London: A Recommended Reading List

For your next trip to this cosmopolitan labyrinth, pack your bags (or load your e-reader) with this quintessential London reading list from Jamie Leigh.

by Jamie Leigh • March 2, 2015March 27, 2015

Interviews, The Litro Blog

Q & A: Danny Wallace on Who is Tom Ditto?

I wondered what might happen to people who don’t feel like they’ve found themselves; they don’t know who they are so they don’t know where they fit in. Was there ...

by Litro • February 13, 2015February 27, 2015

Litro: Arts & Culture

Camden Fringe: Window at the Tristan Bates Theatre

While Britain’s arts journalists have decamped to Edinburgh, London’s Camden Fringe remains an intriguing alternative. In the first of Litro‘s two reviews from the Camden Fringe, Lochlan Bloom samples Window, ...

by Lochlan Bloom • August 22, 2013August 23, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture

To The Grime Born: The Arcola Theatre Brings Opera To The Streets

Grimeborn Festival, a season of unorthodox operas at London’s Arcola Theatre, may take its name from Glyndebourne, but Lochlan Bloom will be surprised if it shares many of its visitors…

by Lochlan Bloom • August 15, 2013August 15, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture

The Three Horsemen: Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Sir Salman Rushdie at 92Y, New York

Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie were figureheads of late twentieth-century literary London – the last great era of British fiction. So what happened when the three of them ...

by Luke Maxted • July 25, 2013July 26, 2013

Fiction

The Pickpocket

They have pickpockets on stage now. Maybe they always did but anyway he’s only just heard of them. Last night, through a quasi-instructional video on YouTube. Today, in the bus ...

by Dan Micklethwaite • June 9, 2013June 9, 2013

Literature

Litro London Walk: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in Camden

Explore the London haunts the great German thinkers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on our London walk, designed by Marx expert Heiko Khoo.

by Emily Cleaver • May 27, 2013June 18, 2013

Travel&Lifestyle

Heading South: My Big Trip to Plumstead

Would you brave south London in a new car? Sno Flo takes a drive, discovering cultural divides and the joys of being a tourist in her home town.

by Sno Flo • May 25, 2013June 3, 2013

Literature

Book Review: King of the Jungle by KS Silkwood

KS Silkwood’s King of the Jungle is an acerbic, energetic polemic of a novel, that revels in the hilarity and dilettantism of London’s art scene.

by Inder Sidhu • May 20, 2013June 4, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture

Review: The Great Gatsby Pop-Up bar, Harrods

Liz Cookman samples cocktails and all that jazz at a Harrods pop-up bar, and asks if the marketing machine behind the Gatsby film is obscuring the message of the book ...

by Liz Cookman • May 18, 2013June 4, 2013

Fiction

One Thing and Then Another

He was waiting for something, anything really, to happen. London owed him that much. But anything, like something, is usually more specific than it at first seems. Experience was the ...

by Mira Mattar • March 31, 2013June 3, 2013

Interviews

Between Myth and History: An Interview with Travis Elborough

When we learnt the nursery rhyme about the bridge at school our teacher made a remark about it being sold to America, and my interest was piqued at a young ...

by Rob Fred Parker • February 27, 2013June 4, 2013

Fiction

Lily

We walked across the street to the park. Some of our number dropped back, heading to the pub. They claimed they were too manly to go any longer without beer, ...

by David Glass • February 22, 2013June 3, 2013

Literature

Novel: Clay by Melissa Harrison

What are the borders between the urban and the rural? Between consumerism and conservationism? Between innocence and experience? These are some of the ...

by Wes Brown • February 8, 2013June 4, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture, Projections: Going to the Cinema Alone

Other People

Of all the irritations of the cinema, other people are the worst. A modern cinema audience may chatter, eat, obscure the view, throw litter, snore and confidently make pronouncements on ...

by Philip Maughan • January 11, 2013June 4, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture

Homegrown and Full of Potential: The Most Incredible Nothing

I chanced upon the event listing while browsing the venue’s website and the narrative immediately roused my interest: an imagined future dystopia where stories are forbidden, and an underground movement ...

by Michael Reffold • January 8, 2013June 7, 2013

Litro: Arts & Culture

“Don’t you love farce?” The Magistrate as tragi-comic hero at the National Theatre

For an abject lesson in how to stage a classic farce, you could do a lot worse than the National Theatre’s current production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s The Magistrate. It ...

by Michael Reffold • December 28, 2012June 4, 2013

Literature

The Return of Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies and the Top Five Loose Women in Literature

Katy Darby is the author of The Unpierced Heart (originally titled The Whores’ Asylum), a historical novel featuring a home for ‘fallen women’ in 1880s Oxford. Here, she reviews ...

by Katy Darby • December 14, 2012June 4, 2013