Amber Medland

No​ colonial education is complete if you haven’t been forced to memorise a poem about daffodils. ‘Do you want to know what we all think of Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”?’ Maryam mumbles into her desk in Kamila Shamsie’s eighth novel, Best of Friends. ‘Off with their sprightly heads!’ It’s Karachi in the summer of 1988. Maryam Khan and...

In​ 1765, at the age of eight, William Blake had a vision while walking on Peckham Rye. He saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough’. If Blake had kept going, he would have crossed the site which in 1969 became the North Peckham Estate. In postwar Britain, this forty-acre ‘mega-estate’, comprising 1444 homes in 65 multi-storey...

In Passing, Nella Larsen’s dialogue is so tight, and the emotional undertow so forceful, that the prose becomes almost dissociative. Trapped within earshot, we hear the way racists talk when they don’t know there’s a Black person in the room.