Comfort readingBooksFun Home, by Alison Bechdel: tragic scenes from a comic familyBechdel's graphic novel, focused on family relationships, sexual orientation and grief, resonates with a comforting honesty Read more from our Comfort reading series
The concept of a comforting read takes me straight back to times of childhood illness; cuddled up with a duvet and a dog on the sofa with a pile of Asterix or Tintins within easy reach; probably next to the saucepan my parents had sacrificed as a sick bucket. Read More...
A life in ...Music booksInterviewGreil Marcus: a life in writingSimon Reynolds'I had an overwhelming urge to express the joy, the delirium, I felt listening to the radio and going to shows by the Stones and Dylan'Greil Marcus lives in a newly built, cedar-shingled house on the border between Oakland and Berkeley. Inside, the living room has the bare, impersonal look of a university's temporary accommodation for visiting academics. But Marcus and his wife Jenny aren't passing through: they've lived in Berkeley since the early 1960s. Read More...
Photograph: Getty/ Getty ImagesTo mark the end of her poet laureateship, Duffy introduces new poems celebrating the beauty and variety of an insect world facing extinction by Alice Oswald, Daljit Nagra, Paul Muldoon and more
Which is lovelier and more true: “Brexit means Brexit” or “Where the bee sucks, there suck I”? The ugly meaninglessness of Theresa May’s dire mantra, wailed as David Cameron fled to the shed, is a prime cause of our current political chaos, just as surely as Ariel’s sweet song continues to remind us of our vital connection to the natural world. Read More...