Daniel Soar

With its energetic cast and insistent street score, it still manages to be poignant without becoming bathetic, and violent without being exploitative. The movie ends as happily as it can, while being true to the statistics: ‘One out of every 21 black males will be murdered before he is 25 – most will die at the hands of other black men.’ Of course, realities hide behind...

Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to weaken his defence by advancing a pawn. There are further forces I can bring into play. I find it slightly frustrating that my mechanical opponent either knows what I mean to do or has taken standard...

At the end of the second chapter of Middlesex, the first chronologically, Lefty and Desdemona Stephanides, brother and sister, are dancing in the grape arbour outside their house in the village of Bithyinios, on the slopes of Mount Olympus, overlooking the town of Bursa. It’s 1922. ‘And in the middle of this, before anything had been said outright or any decisions made (before...

In an exam I once took we were presented with a passage that began: ‘To see the wind, with a man his eyes, it is impossible, the nature of it is so fine.’ I found that sentence so distractingly meaningless, and lovely, that it was hard to concentrate on the rest of the passage, which (much more comprehensibly) described a snowy field over which a light wind was blowing; tiny...

Bloodaxe, the independent poetry publishers, are excited. Their new anthology, Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times, is, they claim, set to topple The Nation’s Favourite Poems as the bestselling poetry book in the UK. This is good news for poetry publishing. The anthology of the nation’s soon-to-be second-favourite poems was brought to us by the BBC, who need no further...