Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

AO5 (critical engagement) has a reputation.  It arrives in lessons and mark schemes like a spectral presence: vague, unsettling, prone to terrifying otherwise confident students into silence.  ‘Different interpretations’, it whispers. ‘Critical debate’ . ‘Alternative readings’.

The Faction’s The Talented Mr Ripley is currently in Brighton and touring across the UK in the coming weeks.  It’s definitely worth an evening of your time - slick, unsettling, and fiendishly clever theatre that lingers long after the lights go up.  I’ll be keeping an eye on whatever this company does next.

There’s something about a Renaissance man with a God complex that just won’t die.  Whether he’s summoning devils (Doctor Faustus), murdering kings (Macbeth), or designing a theocracy under the guise of morality (The Handmaid’s Tale’s Commander), you can practically hear the self-belief whirring.  The centuries change, the tights become trousers, but the hubris?  Eternal.

TV's The (Celeb) Traitors - a masterclass in the need to plan an essay. With no spoilers! There’s something almost indecently satisfying about pulling off a plan.  The clean click of cause and effect.  The sly grin of inevitability.  It’s why The A-Team and every child of the 70s loved it when a plan came together.  And why The Traitors, especially last night’s celebrity edition, is the most exquisite piece of clockwork on television.

Six - The hype machine tells us something is unmissable, revolutionary, the Next Big Thing.  Sometimes it is.  Often it isn’t.  Sometimes it’s just… fine.  And sometimes, whisper it, you might actually dislike the Very Important Cultural Moment everyone else is queueing for.

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is uncomfortably relevant. An intelligent man - a scholar, no less - trades his soul for limitless knowledge and twenty-four years of supremacy. In our world, the Mephistophelean pact isn’t written in blood but coded in algorithms.

You know the feeling, you’ve paid for the flights.  You’ve wrestled with SPF, exchange rates, suitcase weight limits, and the mysterious disappearance of all chargers.  And somewhere between the airport WHSmith and the sun lounger, your teenager did something unexpected: they started reading a book.

Somewhere between the fourth bramble and the fifth step, my golden retriever puppy decided that she had experienced quite enough of coastal walks, thank you very much.  With the quiet dignity of a small Victorian child in a Dickens novel, she stopped dead in her tracks, sat down and gazed at me with the expression of one forced to walk barefoot to the workhouse. Reader, I carried her.

Changing your surroundings can change your thinking - and never more so than for A Level and IB students getting ahead of the game with their NEAs, HLEs or EEs.  (And if those acronyms mean nothing to you, enjoy your summer.  Coursework-free!)

What do you get when you cross Beckett with pop culture’s most laid-back duo? Potentially, something powerful.

If you (or your teenager) are studying Edexcel A Level after the summer, you might be tackling the full Romantics selection - or just Keats.  For AQA, OCR, or IB, one or more of these revolutionary poets are likely to appear.  These long holidays offer the perfect opportunity to deepen understanding without cracking open another anthology... just yet.

You can always spot a Romantic.  They’re the heart-first thinkers who refused to believe that God or logic alone could explain the world.  The ones who turned away from convention and wrote about imagination like it mattered more than politics. Which, for many of them, it did.

Welcome to the strange twilight zone that is mid-May - the middle of exam season.  You may be starting to feel like you live with a ghost who only emerges for snacks, sighs a lot, and occasionally mutters something about "how many exams are left?".   Days are counted in exam papers.  Life is looking endlessly bleak.  Hurrah, it’s the mid-point moan: the bit where adrenaline has worn off, motivation is flagging, and no one’s quite sure what day it is (without looking at an exa

I was working with one of my lovely A Level students the other day, and we were deep into our discussion of Hamlet - when it happened.  I got it. I got Hamlet.

There are some decisions in life that require deep contemplation.  Applying for a job.  Choosing a partner.  Picking your Desert Island Discs.  And then, there’s naming a puppy. 

Easter is nearly upon us, hurrah, up to three weeks for your child to revise for their exams.  Are you ready?  Are they? 

Rejection: the gut-punch every writer faces.  History is full of books dismissed before becoming literary classics. 

For those of us in the business of literature, St Patrick's day is a chance to celebrate Ireland’s unrivalled literary legacy.

Fear not.  Be it GCSE, IB, or A Level English Language and/or Literature, here are a few survival strategies... chocolate is involved.

In a world where the news reads like a rejected Black Mirror script, it’s no wonder dystopian fiction is having a moment.