You’d be mistaken for thinking that Dawn O’Porter is some kind of superhero. Journalist, reporter, performer, documentary maker and novelist are but a few of the titles she’s achieved in under a decade. Yet she […]
Books | How should a person be?
“We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form. The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel” In How Should a Person Be? memoir, fiction […]
Books | Cheat's guide to Dune
LSi presents the abbreviated guide to Frank Herbert’s seminal sci-fi epic. Who? Paul Atreides – Teenage heir to the noble House Atreides. As opposed to yelling obscenities down his Xbox Live headset, his teenage life consists […]
Books |An astronaut’s guide to life on earth
It’s not often that you get an insight into a job so far removed from everyday life that it literally happens off planet. Chris Hadfield is a man who has done it all – alongside […]
Books | Butcher's Crossing
With the rediscovery of the 1965 novel, Stoner or “the greatest American novel you’ve never heard of” last year, the late John Williams has been propelled from relative obscurity to take his rightful place as […]
Books | Cheat's guide to Crime and Punishment
In honour of Penguin’s re-release of the Russian classic, we give the low down on Dostoyevsky’s magnum opus . Existentialism and axe murders. Need we say more? Who? Rodion Raskolnikov -A destitute former student, handsome but morally […]
Books | A song for the dying – As close to a perfect crime novel as you can get
When a book has a name like ‘A Song for the Dying’, it shouldn’t be hard to guess what it’s about: gruff detectives, gruesome murders and gallons of blood. In his new book for 2014, […]
Books | Longbourn – Austen would be proud, if not a little outdone
Joe Baker’s recently published Longbourn is a modern day rewriting of Pride and Prejudice from the perspective of the servants: quite right for a period currently besotted with the likes of the Crawleys. Baker’s novel can be […]
Books | Sex and the Citadel – Reconsidering attitudes towards sexuality in the Arab world
The Middle East is present in media outlets everyday yet, in the West, sexuality in Arab culture is still only tentatively discussed. The difficult subject matter is made accessible to all readers as Shereen El […]
Books | Cheat's guide to The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
Everyone loves a good bonnet, but if you’re weary of Wuthering Heights or feeling jaded by Jane Eyre, here’s an alternative from the ‘other’ Brontë: Anne. Who? Gilbert Markham:A young single farmer whose epistolary narrative provides […]
Books | The Last Days of Detroit – All is not lost in the land of Motor City
Detroit is a city that has always had its problems, as this book from Mark Binelli notes. Even during the years when Henry Ford turned Detroit into an industrial mega-giant, racial segregation caused major ruckus […]
Books | The Railway Man
As a society we have been overexposed to scenes of brutality and desensitised by television. However, the ease of Eric Lomax’s narration makes the untold horrors of the Burma-Siam railway and the conditions and torture […]