There are some topics of conversation that really are the death knell of any further frivolous conversation. Save to Buy ISAs, rent prices in London, tax breaks for the super-rich… Actually no, scratch that last one, I’m sure there’s comedy to be made out of that. But still, these are heavy subjects that are usually incongruous with the kind of atmosphere I  want to evoke at a dinner party I attend. To say the least. 

In the future, when historians inevitably take to memes to uncover the nuanced cultural histories behind seismic events that peppered the early twenty-first century, what they will happen upon are an excessive number of no-context Peep Show quotes. All hastily made by people with a less than rudimentary understanding of the Adobe creative suite, undoubtedly. The classic “Hitler promised not to invade Czechoslovakia Jeremy, welcome to the real world” will be this millennia’s Rosetta stone; “Oh my god, this has ...

If there’s one thing I’ve never completely understood, it’s being “boring”. This isn’t to say that I don’t understand people whom some would term “boring”. Rather, I don’t completely understand what boring is. No one has ever defined it, although people bandy the word around with alarming alacrity.

It is no secret that mental health has been thrust into the spotlight in the twenty-first century. As the generations have passed, more types of human experience have been normalised. The narrative that we tell ourselves in the UK is that, ever since the cultural revolution of the 1960s, we have become steadily more liberal, and steadily more conscious of the rights of those that don’t necessarily belong to the white cisgender community.

The scene is thus; Bill’s in Nottingham, precisely five minutes before they stop selling breakfast on a Sunday. Three friends (actually four if I include myself, and was teased enough in my teens that even I often forget to include myself) are hunched over a table in the sort of way you only can if you’ve been unwittingly repatriated by the maître’d from a pleasant four-person table outside in the sun, to an anxiety-inducing indoor bar stool table. Clearly, the ...

The amount of disposable income Carrie and her friends seem to possess – enough to buy $400 Manolo’s on a whim – is unfeasible. As they are all single and living alone in one of the most expensive cities on earth, even in the nineties… well, it makes no sense. The only way it would make sense was if their families were secret Russian oil oligarchs. Spoiler alert, they’re not. In fact, at multiple points in the show, Carries runs out ...

 “Literature had to become political because anything else would have entailed mental dishonesty” – George Orwell, ‘The Frontier of Art and Propaganda’.

If you were to Google the phrase “rags to riches”, it would return hundreds of inspirational articles about Ed Sheeran sofa surfing and Chris Pratt living in a van. When you read these articles, it feels as though you are supposed to compare yourselves to these stories of hardship and uplift. However, it isn’t just the stories we read online that appear keen to sustain this “rags to riches” cliché. Here´s the case of Marilyn Monroe. 

First thing’s first, I need to ask you something: please ignore the entirety of the 2001 film adaptation whilst reading this article. The views held in this article are not applicable to the film because the box office hit is so far removed from Fielding’s original text that it becomes a caricature of her original hero. That isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the film. For all its many faults, who could possibly resist Hugh Grant AND Colin Firth ...