Words to That Effect

Season 5 officially launches next Tuesday, 10th November. The world may be a very different place since the end of season 4, but there’s plenty in store this season to distract, entertain, and enlighten you. In the meantime, here's a…

Words Dunnit: 200 years of detective fiction...in an hour Last year Caroline Crampton (of Shedunnit) and I teamed up to create a joint live show, called Words Dunnit: a 200-year history of detective fiction in under an hour. We performed…

There are countless great works of literature we have tantalising glimpses of, works we know exist but, as far as anyone can tell, have been lost to history. Huge swathes of ancient Greek literature, a vast Chinese encyclopedia, a lost…

The Hunt for the Missing Link Sasquatch. Bigfoot. The Abominable Snowman. Yeti, Yowie, Yeren, Almas... Ape-men, cave men, wild men... The Missing Link. Ape-human hybrids, mysterious creatures lurking in forests, and the blurred lines…

His head moved, his mouth glided up her neck with feather-light brushes to that hollow beneath her ear. Then something hot and wet… His tongue. A Mills & Boon romance novel. The style is pretty easy to recognize – and to imitate or…

Time travel fiction is a small subgenre of science fiction. Science fiction is a small subset of all the many genres and types of literature. Time machines and time travellers are a niche interest. And yet, in another way, all fiction is…

Edgar Rice Burroughs is not, it's fair to say, a hugely familiar name these days. Like many other authors, the fame of his greatest creation, in his case Tarzan, has long eclipsed his own. But Burroughs was far more than the creator of…

Unlike modernist poetry or Shakespearean drama, when it comes to children’s picture books, everyone has an opinion. Most of us are exposed to kids’ books in some shape or form and, crucially, 100% of us have been children. For an academic…

Pirates have been around for a very long time. In fact, as far we know, they have been around for as long as there have been property and boats. What is it that attracts us to pirates and why have we got such a well-developed set of pirate…

There is no pop culture monster more written about, more critiqued and analysed, more portrayed and adapted and reimagined, than the vampire. So this episode is not about most vampires. There are no discussions of Dracula or Nosferatu, no…