From the moment we enter the pristine white interiors of the Winchesters’ home in The Housemaid, we are suffocated by perfection, or rather the façade of it.

Image courtesy of British Library Images Swayed by the motion of the Circle Line, I grip the overhead rail with one hand, an Oxford Classics paperback in the other. The modernist fragmentations of Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf become increasingly oblique as I read (without a hint of performativity), making me wish I had a hand free to scratch my head. My attention starts to wane. Opposite, a fellow commuter smiles warmly into a screen. A message from someone close, perhaps;

Riz Ahmed stars in a 2025, modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet directed by Aneil Karia, set in economically and politically corrupt London within a British-South Asian family.

Image courtesy of Iñaki del Olmo for Unsplash I know I’m a little late to the game for 2026 reading suggestions, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling a post-Goodreads challenge burnout in February, especially amidst the assessment period cram. Anyhow, I was inspired by this burnout to help curate Goodreads to-be-read-piles this year to fight the post-challenge blues.  The ‘new literary canon’ would seem like contradictory wording when the modern literary world has been so inte

Photo courtesy of Victoria Orozco  via the Unsplash license As we turn our calendars to February, I’m sure many of us have in mind the much-loved (pun intended) Valentine's Day. If you’re reading this article, I’m assuming that you are a like-minded soul who is also going to be single on the 14th, with no lover in sight. Don’t worry, I’m right there with you. As a former Valentine's Day hater, every time February would creep up on me, I used to think: great – for the next th