Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

I’ve just cracked open The Vegetarian. And then I stopped writing and carried on reading. That was my day yesterday.

Every so often, the internet gifts us a reminder that studying English isn’t just about dusty novels and poetry anthologies.  Exhibit A: the scam email that landed in my inbox.

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.

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.

This isn’t a reading list disguised as revision. It’s a summer-friendly mix of films, podcasts, and context boosters designed to help students feel confident come September and give parents a way into the texts that will dominate the conversation by mock season.

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.

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. 

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

Reading a book or watching a film and a dog appears, steel yourself. It is most likely about to be devastating shorthand for human despair.

And that’s the power of reading, isn’t it?  Stories settle differently in the mind when they pass through the eyes rather than the ears. 

Yes, World Book Day is upon us once again: that annual festival of hurriedly Amazon-Primed costumes and polyester-fuelled meltdowns.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an English student in possession of a novel must be in want of the right answer.

While Western culture often casts snakes in a sinister light (looking at you, Bible), the Chinese interpretation is far more nuanced...

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

Shakespeare is nothing if not a crackingly good storyteller.  That he stole most of his plot lines is neither here nor there, just don’t ask

There's an unmatched thrill in perusing the dusty shelves of a second-hand bookshop, where the scent of old paper and the promise of...

The Paris Olympics, the city of light, love, and endless traffic jams, and it is already SO EXCITING.

Remember, reading is something that draws you into other worlds.  Listening does that too… So let me introduce you to Radio 4.