The third instalment of John Boyne’s Elements quartet, Fire, brings us the story of Freya, a character who played a minor role in Earth, now centre stage in a short novel that feels both more dramatic and more heightened than the previous two entries in the series—Water and Earth—both great. This isn’t a book grounded in gritty realism so much as one that leans into the operatic tone that Boyne often favours. And that’s not a complaint.

Freya is a plastic surgeon who treats burns victims. She also has a traumatic childhood and some very dark secrets in her adult life—though perhaps ‘secrets’ is too gentle a word for what unfolds. I didn’t find her especially believable as a character: she seemed more like a caricature of a cold-hearted young female surgeon than a person I could imagine meeting in the real world. If she was meant to be morally ambiguous, then that nuance didn’t land for me.

That might sound like a deal-breaker, but oddly, it wasn’t. Boyne’s writing is so propulsive and absorbing that I found myself tearing through the book regardless. It fits so neatly into the world established in Water and Earth that I didn’t mind the unreality of it.

The other two books felt like realistic explorations of the long-term effects of abuse; Fire felt like an exploration of that same topic, albeit filtered—at times—through Hollywood rather than reality.

I particularly enjoyed that characters from both earlier books turn up, which gives the whole project a pleasingly cohesive feel. It really feels like one novel in four parts, rather than four loosely connected short stories.

One character who stood out to me was Aaron, a medical student undertaking a three-month elective under Freya’s supervision. Unlike Freya, Aaron felt like a believable and relatable character. Despite Freya’s coldness and occasional cruelty, Aaron remains diligent and focused on his patients. His resilience and empathy provided a grounding presence in the narrative, and I ended up more invested in his journey than Freya’s. Interestingly, Aaron is set to be the protagonist of Air, the final book in the series, which has only heightened my anticipation.

Freya’s medical work, especially her treatment of burns patients, takes a backseat to the drama. It didn’t add much psychological depth, nor did it feel especially explored, though this may simply be a limitation of the novel’s short form. I found myself wondering whether readers outside of medicine might see more virtue in her profession and read that as a redeeming aspect of her character, which might have made this feel more real and less Hollywood: a bit of moral ambiguity goes a long way to creating a sense of reality.

I enjoyed Fire every bit as much as the earlier books, if not more, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Air brings everything together.

Boyne’s quartet is turning out to be a rather interesting experiment. He’s always been a writer more interested in character than plausibility, and the emotional through-lines of these books—abuse, identity, the gap between surface and reality—feel increasingly well-woven. I’ll be fascinated to see where it all lands.

There’s a publication—I need not give them any more publicity by mentioning the name—that has billboards up at the moment bearing this slogan:

Since when did pride in your country become prejudice?

There are lots of definitions of pride: from morning mist to a group of lions, and from personal dignity to the height at which a falcon flies. But the billboard is clearly nodding toward the definition in Austen’s novel, so let’s answer the question on those terms.

In the novel, and particularly in Darcy, Austen draws a distinction between ‘sinful’ pride and ‘dignified’ pride. The former is a sense of arrogance and superiority—the kind of pride in wealth and social status that allows him to dismiss Elizabeth as ‘not handsome enough’ and give him the moral authority to ‘condescend’ to love her. This is pride as prejudice. As the Oxford English Dictionary would have it, ‘an excessively high opinion of one’s own worth or importance, which gives rise to an attitude of superiority over others.’ Not for nothing is it the first of the medieval deadly sins.

By the end of the novel, Darcy has learned some humility: his pride has become ‘dignified’. His pride is grounded in recognising his own innate self-worth and self-respect in a way that is shaped by moral insight, not social superiority. This is pride without prejudice, a recognition that one’s own personal dignity need not denigrate the worth of others. Or, as the Oxford English Dictionary puts it, ‘self-respect; self-esteem of a legitimate or healthy kind or degree.’

At heart, it’s a distinction between sinful, comparative pride—rooted in a sense of superiority over others—and dignified, inward pride, grounded in one’s moral character.

Since a ‘country’ is, by definition, built on borders—on who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, on who counts as ‘citizen’ and who as ‘foreigner’—’pride in one’s country’ almost always carries an undertone of superiority. It is a prejudice: a pre-judgement that one’s own country is better than others. Compare the tone of most national pride rallies with most gay pride events—one is about exclusion, the other inclusion. One is about prejudice, the other personal dignity.

So, the answer to the exam question is that pride has been interwoven with prejudice for as long as the word has been around. The earliest dated example in the OED is from 1200 CE, so we can confidently answer the question: ‘longer than you think.’

The central message of Austen’s novel is that pride and prejudice are interwoven in ways that don’t serve people well. It takes a special kind of irony to reference Pride and Prejudice while proving its thesis in real time. But then, manufacturers of dog whistles tend to favour volume over clarity… as, perhaps, does the advertised publication.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.

This is a short, sharp little book, often taught in schools in Germany, but which I read in Jamie Bulloch’s English translation.

I read it in a couple of days, though I think it would have been better approached in a single sitting. It’s a single, breathless, unbroken monologue delivered by the daughter of a family, whose mother is preparing a mussel dinner to welcome home their father. It’s a claustrophobic and propulsive read. I just wanted to keep going, partly to escape the suffocating domestic atmosphere and partly to find out where on earth it’s all heading. It’s a quietly brilliant piece of narrative control.

Originally published in 1990, the novella has often been described as a veiled allegory of political tyranny, with the father figure as a stand-in for the East German state, or authoritarianism more broadly. But for me, with a less-than-perfect grasp of German history and reading it in the present cultural moment, I was struck more by how contemporary it feels as a portrait of toxic masculinity within a domestic setting. Less regime, more patriarchy.

The father dominates the entire book through sheer force of absence. And yet it’s the daughter’s voice, childlike and unreliable, that gives the story its emotional weight. There’s a touch of humour throughout, with little turns of phrase, slightly skewed logic, a child’s earnest interpretation of adult dynamics. It lightens what is, in essence, quite a dark and disturbing tale — yet that levity makes the darkness more acute. Is this all as grim as it seems, or is it the impression of a child with a flair for drama?

I felt a good deal of sympathy for the narrator. Her unreliability made her more relatable. I wanted to protect her, seeing what she can’t. That dynamic gives the novella an oddly tender quality, even as the plot edges ever closer to its strangely satisfying conclusion.

It’s not a book I expect to return to, but I’m glad I read it. I’d recommend it as a short palate cleanser, something to read in an afternoon that will stick in the mind longer than you expect. A neat little curiosity, with much more going on under the surface than first appears.

This is Steetley Pier in Hartlepool. It was never a pleasure pier: it was constructed in the 1960s to pump saline seawater into the local magnesia works. Nevertheless, people—and particularly fishers—used to trespass on it. And so, when the works closed in 2005, the Council knocked down a section to prevent perambulation, leaving only an eye-catching, if slightly forlorn, landmark.

There’s a particular part of my brain that only ever lights up when I read Calvino. I don’t know quite how he does it. The stories are often absurd, abstract and utterly unmoored from reality—and yet they always end up saying something simple and profound about what it means to be human. I suppose that’s the trick, isn’t it?

I stumbled across Cosmicomics more or less by accident: I hadn’t even realised there was a Calvino I hadn’t read. Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics edition caught my eye, and I ended up reading it across a smattering of cafes, Metro journeys, and odd pockets of time. It’s a collection of short stories, each inspired by a scientific theory—most of which have since been disproven. But the facts are irrelevant. The stories are timeless.

In one, the moon is so close to Earth that people climb up to it on ladders and gather moon milk. In another, a generational culture clash is played out between an amphibian and his fishy uncle. In yet another, dinosaurs become mythical creatures whose presence haunts the collective imagination long after their actual threat has vanished. There’s even a story about a message that travels between planets over millions of years—a surprisingly prescient allegory for social media and the gnawing anxiety of being seen but not understood.

The stories sound bonkers. And they are. But they are also beautiful. There’s a real emotional clarity running through them—a sort of quiet, reflective core that anchors the whimsy. Calvino plays everything straight, and that’s part of what makes it work. If anyone else tried to write a story about a shy dinosaur feeling displaced in a post-dinosaur world, I’d probably scoff. But in Calvino’s hands, it becomes a meditation on trauma, resilience, and the shifting nature of memory. It reminded me of the way intense fears can linger long after the actual danger has passed. Over time, those feelings mellow and morph. Some traumas fade into something almost mythical: half-remembered, oddly unreal, occasionally even a little funny. Calvino captures that process perfectly.

The story Light Years, about delayed communication across space, struck a similar chord. It starts with a message—‘I saw you’—and unfolds into a deeply resonant exploration of guilt, miscommunication, and the irrelevance of context once enough time has passed. That gap between action and response, intention and perception, felt painfully familiar. It’s extraordinary how a story written in the 1960s can feel so bang on about our digital present.

If Calvino’s better-known work feels like fairy tales for grown-ups, Cosmicomics is something slightly different: more cosmological, more playfully abstract. And yet, it’s still unmistakably him. The whimsy. The philosophical undertow. The gentle humour and unshowy wisdom. It’s all there, just seen through the lens of space and time rather than gardens and cities.

The edition itself is a treat—a pocket-sized hardback in Penguin’s Little Clothbound Classics range, with the original William Weaver translation. It felt like an indulgent thing to hold and read, which added to the pleasure.

I’ve read too much Calvino to have any sensible opinion about whether this is a good place to start. But for me, it was a joy—amusing, moving, intellectually playful, and oddly comforting. Like all the best Calvino, it made me feel more human. And a little more okay with the fact that none of us really know what we’re doing.

There aren’t many areas of life where I agree with Kemi Badenoch—but, like her, I haven’t seen the Netflix series Adolescence. But I have seen, watched and listened to seemingly endless commentary about the dangers of boys being radicalised online by men with toxic views of masculinity… an issue which is hardly new, but which suddenly has a lot of cultural currency.

The tone has been broadly sympathetic: a chorus of concern, some hand-wringing, even a parliamentary debate. These boys, we’re told, are victims. Vulnerable. Impressionable. It could happen to anyone.

What’s striking is how rarely this is recognised as a familiar story.

Take the case of Shamima Begum. A British girl, groomed online as a teenager, who left the country at 15 to join ISIS. It’s the same story: a child radicalised online who goes on to take unwise actions. Yet her story is not seen as a cautionary tale, but as a scandal. Somehow, not a failure of safeguarding, but of loyalty. She wasn’t failed; she was treacherous. And so, she was stripped of citizenship and left stateless, as though none of this—her age, her vulnerability, the context—were relevant.

The contrast is hard to miss. When a fictional white boy is radicalised, it sparks a national conversation about prevention and empathy. When a real brown girl is radicalised, it becomes a question of punishment and blame. One is a victim; the other, a threat.

There is, of course, a racism to this. A gendered lens, too. But beyond that, there’s a practical cost to the inconsistency. Because when we fail to see the underlying similarities between different forms of radicalisation, we limit our ability to respond effectively to any of them.

The mechanisms—algorithmic echo chambers, the lure of certainty, the slow drip of ideology dressed up as empowerment—are the same for all forms of online radicalisation. It’s antivaxxers, it’s far-right conspiracists, it’s neighbourhood group chats convinced the local council has ‘gone woke’. It’s your parents claiming a local schoolchild identifies as a cat and is fed milk at school—it must be true, they saw it on Facebook.

The narratives may differ, but the structure is the same: beguiling lies which spread and manipulate people toward specific beliefs and actions.

Yet, our response too often focuses on the content rather than the common architecture. So much of the commentary around Adolescence has been focused myopically on online misogyny, and so many of the proposed solutions have been about building siloed strategies based on tackling that. We fail to see the core, underlying issues—not least because we insist on reducing some people to their ideology while elevating others above it.

In his particularly incisive podcast episode on Adolescence—the topic really is inescapable—Ryan Broderick suggests that the answer to all of this is love. If we’re really going to properly understand and tackle the problem of radicalisation, we need warmth, understanding and empathy, not just for certain groups of people who are affected by online radicalisation, but for all of them. If we can only muster empathy selectively—if we only see a radicalised child when they look like our own—we’ll never truly get to the root of the problem. We’ll just keep reacting to the symptoms that make the headlines, while the underlying conditions go untreated.

It’s not that the response to Adolescence is wrong. It’s that it reveals the limits of who we’re willing to care about. And when empathy is rationed, so is any real hope of solving the problem.

The image at the top was generated using GPT-4o.

I’ve read a few books from The School of Life recently, and when I spotted this one described as “a therapeutic novel”, I was curious. It’s not a phrase I’d come across before, and I wondered what exactly they meant. A novel that soothes? One with a diagnosis and a treatment plan? As it turns out, A Voice of One’s Own is a fictional story with an overtly therapeutic aim: it sets out to explore the emotional legacy of growing up without space to speak freely or feel heard.

The story centres on one woman’s life, and through her, the book explores some universal themes—particularly the long shadow cast by early parenting, and the difficulty of expressing oneself when that hasn’t been modelled or encouraged. The plot is relatable, though the tone of the omniscient narrator is more didactic than literary. It’s gentle and readable, but a little heavy-handed in parts, and I found that its simplification of messy, complex human experiences occasionally jarred. There’s insight here, but it often feels pre-digested.

Structurally, it’s an unusual book: each of the short chapters is accompanied by an illustrative photograph. These didn’t add much for me. They weren’t especially beautiful or evocative, nor did they feel meaningfully connected to the narrative. They were very literal and representative. If anything, they disrupted the flow. I found myself wishing the book would just get on with telling its story.

That said, there were moments that gave me pause. The book gently illustrated how lacking confidence in one’s own voice can manifest in small, ordinary moments—reluctance to correct a mistake, silence in a meeting, deferring to others without even realising it. These aren’t revolutionary insights, but they prompted a little personal reflection. I just think the same ground has been covered elsewhere with more subtlety and spark.

In the end, this didn’t land as strongly for me as other titles from The School of Life. It’s a short and well-intentioned read, and I suppose if someone wanted a very soft, undemanding introduction to this sort of emotional territory, it might be a good starting point. But for most readers, I think there are better, deeper options out there.

Back in March, James O’Malley wrote about the UK Government Digital Service’s (GDS) ‘One Login’ and the conceptually related Government ‘tell us once’ service. The thesis behind these services is that the Government should appear essentially monolithic from the perspective of a UK resident: information should be extensively shared across agencies, and if one updates one’s details with one agency, that update should propagate across the rest.

I agree with much of this: there is a lot to be said for simplifying interactions with Government. However, one underplayed cost is how linking data across services reduces individuals’ control over their own information. This can create murky trade-offs and unintended consequences.

To give one example: I know of a public sector organisation in the health field that went all-in on ‘one person, one record’. Superficially, this made a lot of sense, as it makes contextualisation much easier if you can see every interaction an individual has had with the organisation in a single list. _Except_… that’s not really how life works. If a journalist contacts that organisation, should that professional query really be stored alongside their personal medical data? The same applies to other professionals, say a headteacher contacting the service for advice about a pupil. Most people would have a reasonable expectation of a ‘firewall’ between personal and professional interactions, but that’s the antithesis of a ‘one person, one record’ approach. This led to a load of workarounds—appending people’s profession to their surname to create distinct ‘professional’ records, for example—that ultimately made the underlying data worse.

James cites Google as an example:

If you update your address on Gmail, you don’t need to then go and do the same thing separately on Google Maps, Google Drive and YouTube – all of those other services that are owned by the same company, and updating one will update the rest.

Yet, viewed from a different angle, this is a clear counter-example: many people have multiple Google accounts to keep their personal and professional lives separate, and they reasonably expect to update each one independently. When the Government ties all interactions to a single real-world identity, that separation becomes impossible.

‘Tell us once’ can quickly morph into ‘tell the entire state at once’—and this is often undesirable. For example, we offer free tuberculosis treatment to everyone, regardless of whether they are entitled to NHS care, because this is the best way to protect the public. This means that there will be people in the country illegally who are sharing personal information, like their address, with the NHS. If we link that data up with the Home Office, the net effect is to prevent people from accessing treatment for an infectious disease—thereby increasing risk to the public. We’ve been here before, and not that long ago.

Similarly, you might register a particular, private phone number for your interactions with services where you need a reasonable expectation of privacy—for example, if you’re reporting a safeguarding concern about a member of your family. Disaster might follow if all of your different phone numbers are thrown into a single identity—or, more likely, services find workarounds and store phone numbers in unexpected places, which exacerbates the very problem the data sharing is meant to solve. It becomes very difficult for anyone to reliably update all of their data, even within a single service.

James uses the word ‘citizens’ five times in his article. I feel a certain sense of trauma when I hear that word used in this way, borne from experience during COVID. This terminology seems to be the default within GDS. People who live in the UK but who are not citizens often have more frequent and complex contact with the Government than citizens, yet the service frequently defaults to terminology that excludes them. That feels revealing.

One would hope that the social contract is about Government giving the greatest support and most careful thought to the neediest, the most vulnerable, and the most marginalised. Yet, at least from my far-away vantage point, it often reads as though Government technology conversations begin with ‘let’s make this easier for people like me’.

So, while the direction of travel is probably right, it’s an area that needs careful thought and planning. We need to be open about the fact that ‘convenience’ often comes at the cost of personal control over data. This trade-off might sometimes be justified, but it deserves far more scrutiny than it currently receives. These kinds of changes often have unintended consequences—especially for the most vulnerable in society—and the first duty of any Government ought to be to put those very people first.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o.

I finished A Luminous Republic with a slight sense of unease—not because the novel had let me down, but because I wasn’t entirely sure what I had just read. That’s part of its brilliance. Andrés Barba’s short novel is one of the most unsettling and enigmatic books I’ve encountered for quite some time. I read the English edition translated by Lisa Dillman, whose crisp, controlled prose perfectly matched the unsettling restraint of Barba’s story.

Narrated by a civil servant with the sort of cool detachment that would be admirable in the minutes of a council meeting but feels almost surreal when describing mass hysteria, societal collapse, and the mysterious deaths of children, the novel recounts the extraordinary events that unfolded when thirty-two feral children appeared seemingly from nowhere in the fictional South American city of San Cristóbal. No one knew where they came from; no one knew how to handle them. The city, naturally, fell apart trying.

The dry, documentary style of narration is inspired. It doesn’t just describe the events — it actively withholds emotional clarity. The more inexplicable things become, the more the narrator recedes into procedural memory, reports, newspaper clippings, and bureaucratic euphemism. It’s a little like reading the minutes of the apocalypse.

What the novel is about is harder to pin down, and therein lies much of its power. Is it an allegory for how societies treat ‘outsiders’—a reflection on racism, xenophobia, classism, homophobia? Is it a parable about the viral spread of dangerous ideas, about how fear and misinformation can sweep through an ostensibly civilised population? Is it something else entirely? The novel doesn’t deign to offer answers. Different interpretations seem to fit neatly at different moments, and this slipperiness made the book linger in my mind long after I closed it. That one of the characters (the mayor of San Cristóbal) is named Victor Corbán surely must be an echo of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán— perhaps it is coincidence, but I could help thinking that it must be a clue to the sorts of unpleasant ideas Barba was targeting.

I suspect it’s a book that reveals more with each re-reading—and I’m looking forward to testing that theory.

Despite its potentially science fiction premise—feral children spontaneously appearing, a society crumbling in response—the book feels grounded and painfully plausible. There’s no sense of magic or fantasy here. Just human frailty, fear, and the haunting realisation that sometimes, there are no satisfying explanations.

I don’t often seek out science fiction, and I wouldn’t ordinarily be attracted to a novel that sounds this peculiar. Yet A Luminous Republic captured me completely. It didn’t change the way I view the world, but it certainly furnished me with some new metaphors for thinking about it. For a short book, it is luminous indeed.

I try not to be too judgy. Nothing good comes of it. But some things grind my gears—like seeing chocolate torsades described as chocolate twists. Or so I thought.

I wanted to write about how the word torsade has plummeted in use (it has). I wanted to rant about our waning connection to the original torsade aux chocolat (we’re losing it). I wanted to spiral into etymology—torsade, tort, the beautifully tortuous splenic artery—and not come up for breath.

But then I had a shattering realisation.

Retailers call them “chocolate twists” when they omit the traditional crème pâtissière. There is, if you will, a functional difference between the chocolate twist and the chocolate torsade.

This isn’t a dumbing-down of the language. It’s a dumbing-down of the pastry itself.

I’m not sure what’s worse.