The Hollow Sea tells the story of Scottie, a woman struggling to come to terms with her identity. Having been adopted as a child, she has no memories before the age of 8. Yet some ghosts from the past snag her attention, and she’s called to an island chain off the Scottish coast to find […]
book review
Book Review of ‘Bar Kokhba: The Jew Who Defied Hadrian and Challenged the Might of Rome’
To someone in my part of the world, the Roman Emperor Hadrian is something of an ever-present figure. After all, he gave us the wall that snakes across northern England. Newcastle upon Tyne, my hometown, was once called Pons Aelius. That can be traced to Hadrian’s family name, Aelius. Yet I know very little about […]
#BookReview – Paganism for Beginners
One of the problems with books about a religion as broad as Paganism is that authors can sometimes take a stance that their way is the ‘correct’ way, and alternative traditions are only included as a passing afterthought. As far as I’m concerned, this kind of gatekeeping should have no place in spirituality whatsoever, especially […]
[Book Review] The Pre-Raphaelite Language of Flowers
The general conceit of The Pre-Raphaelite Language of Flowers is that Debra N. Mancoff has collected a range of paintings by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and she’s decoded the paintings with a focus on what the flowers in the paintings mean. In some cases, the artists are only dimly associated with the 19th-century art movement. Her […]
[Book Review] Tudor Folk Tales
We can often think of the Tudor period as being one of strict class and gender boundaries. Or we look at the shenanigans of the ruling royal family and work backwards to assume what the era must have been like. Tudor Folk Tales by Dave Tonge aims to dispel some of these myths – and […]
[Book Review] A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe
It’s a testament to the growing interest in folklore as both an area of academic study and a topic worth further investigation by the general public that the National Trust would commission a collection of folklore. Written by #FolkloreThursday‘s own Dee Dee Chainey, A Treasury of British Folklore: Maypoles, Mandrakes and Mistletoe collects lore from the […]
