Thinking AloudEnglish Blog

Question: Compare the ways both writers transform personal pain into public performance. There are few moments more alarming than flipping over an A Level paper and realising the exam board has gone rogue.  That’s exactly how it felt in my imaginary Paper 3 this morning, when the unseen comparative poem turned out to be Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’, paired without warning with Lily Allen’s ‘Pussy Palace’.

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.

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

While much of Hong Kong enjoys the serenity of Buddha’s Birthday, lotus lanterns, temple visits, maybe even a rare moment of peace, parents of exam-taking students are more likely lighting incense in the vague hope it will cleanse the air of teenage angst and essay-induced doom.

For parents navigating the GCSE Literature grind, this 'Macbeth' is pure gold: layered, unsettling, and packed with meaty analysis. Max...

The game at iGCSE/GCSE level is all about how they handle the question, develop an argument, and structure their essay.

Exam season - it’s just over for another year.  Thank goodness, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.