Reviews on The Review

Manchester Sermon – Ali Smith
18th of October 2012
Reviewed by Rachel Heaton.

I approach Manchester Cathedral with a certain amount of trepidation; I have never been inside and only know it as ‘that great big ‘churchy’ thing behind M&S’. Inside it is suitably cathedral-like (I nervously pull my too-short skirt down) and, despite my early arrival, is [...]

The Manchester Sermon – Ali Smith
18th October 2012
Having never been to Manchester Cathedral before, the first thing that struck me on arrival was the incredible beauty of the venue. The acoustics, the holy, hushed atmosphere and the high arches which are all typical of Christian places of worship, seemed an odd and foreboding place to [...]

“Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange” – Reviewed by Elizabeth Stancombe
This year Anthony Burgess’s self-dismissed novel “A Clockwork Orange” celebrated its fiftieth birthday with a special edition and a host of events in Manchester, his birth town. On the 18th of October   “Fifty Years of A Clockwork Orange” was held part of the Manchester [...]

Blog North Awards –Reviewed by Joanna Byrne

Arriving early for the first ever ‘Blog North Awards’, I couldn’t help but feel slightly thrown by my surroundings. Like most students, the Deaf Institute for me is a place I usually visit much later on in a night, and normally when I’m not in a condition to fully [...]

Deryn Rees-Jones and Paul Farley by Flora Anderson
As part of Literature Live, I went to see Paul Farley and Deryn Rees-Jones reading from their new collections The Dark Film and Burying the Wren respectively. It was run as a University of Manchester event in the John Thaw Studio on Oxford road, and was a real [...]

Blog North Awards, reviewed by Charlie Boorman
With previous visits in mind, I associate The Deaf Institute with fly-paper dance floors and minor tinnitus, so my initial reservations concerning the venue for The Blog North Awards may have been justified. However, the moment I walked through the Gothic front-door (sober, for once) I realised my doubts [...]

The Blog North Awards - Review by Christina Hirst
As I walk towards the Deaf Institute I wonder what the first ever Blog North Awards will be like. I shuffle my way through the dimly lit room to the bar observing the abundance of people around me holding up their phones, taking pictures of the unusual [...]

James Kelman, Saturday 13th October 2012, 7.30pm, International Anthony Burgess Foundation
 
I had not entirely known what to expect when I set off to spend my Saturday evening at a reading of James Kelman’s new novel Mo Said She Was Quirky. I knew the work of Irvine Welsh who has been compared with Kelman, but little [...]

A Review of Bio Punk with Jane Feaver, Gregory Norminton and geneticist Neil Roberts, MadLab, 13th October 2012
By Beckie Stewart
 
 
MadLab, on the edge of Manchester’s Northern Quarter, is a modest venue resembling a rundown exhibition space, made haphazard with mismatched chairs, crates and sofas. If it weren’t for the clinical whiteness, the lack of background [...]

The chill of the current seasonal change rushes in with me as I enter The International Anthony Burgess Foundation; the setting in which I have come on Saturday 13th October to understand more about the mind, musings, political positions and fictional creations of one of Scotland’s most controversial modern day writers.

Upon winning the Booker prize [...]