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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...

20 November marks the fortieth anniversary of the death of General Franco And while the insurrectionist’s victory in the Spanish Civil War paved the way for a 36-year dictatorship – as resilient as it was anachronistic – the country’s Transition to democracy is traditionally seen as exemplary The attempted coup of 1981 was a potentially lethal threat to Europeanisation, averted through the fortitude and quick thinking of King Juan Carlos, who steered the country towards a stable monarchical democracy, built on the bedrock of barring memories of the past from dictating the future At least that is what young Spaniards were brought up to believe The general elections to be held on 20 December are the most unpredictable and politically volatile since 1979; this is both a symptom and cause of the crisis in a once widely accepted narrative   Conflicting accounts of what actually happened during the Civil War and the dictatorship are increasingly compounded through bitter debates over the ethics and pragmatism of what predicated the 1978 Constitution That is, collective amnesty (some would say amnesia) coupled with market capitalism The architects of the new state now stand accused of privileging politics over justice and equality, not only silencing the crimes of the past but preserving the interests of pre-existing elites who many believe must be held accountable for Spain’s current crises   Javier Cercas, arguably Spain’s greatest living novelist, is the subject of both critical veneration and opprobrium for his work, best-selling ruminations on this very history, a meld of fact and fiction – the Civil War in Soldiers of Salamis (2001), the coup attempt in The Anatomy of a Moment (2009) Amongst his many accolades figure Spain’s National Book Award, the Independent’s Foreign Literature Prize, and taking up the Weidenfeld Visiting Professorship at Oxford this year, a post previously held by George Steiner, Umberto Eco and Mario Vargas Llosa For his admirers, Cercas combines the talents of a historian with that of a writer, producing works whose broad formal, socio-historical and linguistic canvases bear comparison with Vargas Llosa’s The Time of the Hero (1963) and The Feast of the Goat

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


READ NEXT

Art

Issue No. 12

After After

Johanna Drucker

Art

Issue No. 12

So many things are ‘over’ now that all the post- and neo- prefixes are themselves suffering from fatigue. Even...

feature

November 2012

Life outside the Manet Paradise Resort : On the paintings of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Orlando Reade

feature

November 2012

*   A person is represented, sitting in what appears to be the banal and conventional pose of a...

fiction

February 2016

The Reactive

Masande Ntshanga

fiction

February 2016

My back cramps on the toilet bowl. I stretch it. Then I take two more painkillers and look down...

 

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