Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

If I Am, I Am, I Am is about the individual’s fight for survival, Hamnet is about the collective weight of loss. 

There’s nothing quite like a Francis Bacon exhibition to remind you that life is equal parts grotesque, tragic, and utterly captivating. 

Here’s the secret: with a solid plan, your child will breeze through their English essay faster and with fewer bumps along the way. 

Is your child staring blankly at their English Lit essay, fear not - The LangLit Studio Literature tuition is here to help.

Shush, I know we shouldn’t have favourites.  But if I had to choose, go on then, it would undoubtedly be the IB’s Literature and Performance