At the conclusion of the recent three‑part Channel 4 documentary ‘The Tony Blair Story’, its subject stares into the camera for several awkward seconds before delivering a peculiar afterthought: “Also… very important to understand about me: I’m not into psychoanalysis. Right? I think there’s far too much of it, I think people spend far too […]
Tony Blair and the Subject of Psychoanalysis
Here’s another post from The Paris Corespondent, Shirley Riley. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. Take it away Shirley! While there is no question Paris is an incredibly special place, the quality of being special is not the context to this commentary. My focus is on the interesting, creative, and sometimes confounding use of space […]
Paris is a ‘Spatial’ Place….
Born on March 1, 1913, Ralph Ellison reshaped the American novel through symbolic layering, jazz-inflected rhythm, and philosophical depth. In Invisible Man, he fused political urgency with introspective narration, expanding the language of identity and redefining who could stand at the center of American literary expression.
Birth of Ralph Ellison (1913–1994) – The Voice That Made America Confront Its Invisible Self
Classic satire by Ismail Kadare
Book Review: The Successor by Ismail Kadare (Albania)
I saw this group of Mediterranean-style buildings on a long peregrination around East London. I went back to have a closer look. This is the “Donnybrook Quarter” which stands on a corner of Parnell Road, in Tower Hamlets. I arrived just as the sun was setting. The Donnybrook Quarter was completed ready for occupation in […]
Donnybrook Quarter, Old Ford, Tower Hamlets, London E3
Within the Salon community we count many devotees of the writing of Virginia Woolf and every year we offer a number of studies focusing on her work, some online and others based in some of the places she loved. This autumn we will run the seventh in our series of Virginia Woolf travel studies in […]
Campaign to protect views immortalised in Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’
Today is the 106th anniversary of the Redruth butter riot of 1920. Let’s disinter it from the graveyard of history. During the first World War, the price of various foodstuffs was controlled by the Government. By 1920, it had been decided to end this control, with milk and butter prices being left to the open […]
Cornwall’s last food riot: the Redruth butter riot of 1920
Born in 1802, Victor Hugo carried French Romanticism into English prose through translation, expanding the novel’s scale, emotional intensity, and moral ambition. His historical vision, melodramatic ethics, and sympathy for outcasts reshaped Victorian narrative, teaching English fiction to unite social critique, grandeur, and epic structure into a morally charged form.
Birth of Victor Hugo (1802–1885) – The Romantic Who Enlarged English Narrative
Born on February 25, 1917, Anthony Burgess transformed fiction into a laboratory for language. Through Nadsat and rhythmic prose experimentation, he showed that English could be stretched, hybridized, and morally reframed. His work proved that invented dialects, musical syntax, and linguistic play can reshape narrative perception and expand the expressive limits of modern literature.
Birth of Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) – The Novelist Who Reinvented English from the Inside
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