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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Sources: Achate, Bilder im Stein / Josef Arnoth, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel Buchverlag, Bild der Wissenschaft 12, Dezember 1971, DVA StuttgartBasler Zeitung, Birkhäuser AG , Rheinach 1986 Computers in Art , Design and Animation / John Lansdown, Rae A Earnshaw / Springer Verlag New Der Weltraum, Die Originalfotografien der NASA / Deutsches Architekturmuseum Frankfurt am Main 1988 Elseviers Grote Antiek Encyclopedie / Uitgeversmaatschappij Elsevier, Amsterdam – Brussel 1978 Focus, 36e jaargang 1951, Bloemendaal Het Water, Kleine Wetenschapserie / Luna B Leopold, Kenneth S Davis / Perscombinatie, Amsterdam 1970 Jane’s Fighting Ships 19 63-64 / Netherwood Dalton & Co Ltd, Huddersfield, England La Terra / Arthur Beiser / Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, Milano 1964, York 1989 Les Tremblements de Terre / Oliver E Allen / Éditions Time-Life, Amsterdam 1982 Loyalty and Betrayal, The Story of the American Mob / Sidney Zion / Collins Publishers San Francisco 1994 Natuur en Techniek / 44e jaargang / Veen-magazines Amsterdam 1976 Nieuwe Winkler Prins 3 / Elsevier Amsterdam-Brussel 1977 Molekulen / PW Atkins / Natuur en Techniek, Maastricht-Brussel 1990 Onze Koninklijke Marine / FGA Woudstra / Uigeverij de Alk, Alkmaar 1982 Röntgenonderzoek / Dr ME Houtzager, Dr M Meier-Siem, Drs H Stark, Drs HJ de Smedt / Centraal Museum, Utrecht 1967 Ruimtevaart / Fred Appel / Lecturama, Rotterdam 1971 The Last Whole Earth Catalog / Portola Institute 1971, Random House US Camera World Annual 1967 / Nizo International Corp, New York Wonderwereld onder de zeespiegel / Uitgeversmaatschapij The Reader’s Digest, Amsterdam Brussel 1976 Zwanzig Jahre Weltgeschichte in 700 Bildern / Transmare Verlag Berlin 1931

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


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Art

November 2015

None of this is Real

Anna Coatman

Art

November 2015

Rachel Maclean’s films are startlingly new and disturbingly familiar. Splicing fairy tales with reality television shows, tabloid stories, Disney...

Interview

November 2014

Interview with Juan Goytisolo

J. S. Tennant

Interview

November 2014

Juan Goytisolo is one of Spain’s leading writers, but one with a fraught relationship with his home country, to put it...

poetry

December 2012

Off-Season

Miles Klee

poetry

December 2012

As a boy I went on a strange vacation with a friend. His parents took us, I can’t remember why,...

 

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