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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...

For, and in memory of, Jules Wright   Approach   It is a pleasure too rarely realised to venture to the end of the line, and then beyond The midweek, early afternoon train out, north and east, towards the sea, of course Buses at Kings Lynn, but it is not hard to imagine older coaches, carts, a raggle taggle wander into fields Into England – the story of England; England’s imagining of itself, the green dream of the high season Through the lanes – a benign maze, and past open gates into the estate’s perimeter pastures, white deer threading the dapple, reclining in small groups beneath the huge and ancient trees, their great canopies cropped sharply on the grounding edge about a man’s height from the grass, so it seems they almost are suspended, trunks dissolved in the haze, vast sails of leaves above the landscaped reach of summer     Hall Ways   The measure and the spur: Houghton Hall is no default siting, rather a primary location, in ways far more endowed than its founding owner Robert Walpole (Britain’s first prime minister) could have imagined Laid out on an East / West axis, the building commits itself to time as much as it does to place; one eye on the past, the other for what might come; an alignment of the sun’s passage and of the history of art from west to east and back again   Now Lord Cholmondeley, the amicable current owner, has called down to art’s furthest coastal frontier, to the Golden State itself, to the very idea of frontiers, of the expansion west, the threshold reached – and crossed This is an undertaking driven by friendship – from earlier acquisition, through construction, alteration and on to years of planning, building a case for a landscape of light, terrain transformed     The Desert and the Garden   So, James Turrell, warm, approachable, a quiet but commanding presence – dressed in shades of working blue, the stitched word ‘light’ just visible on the shirt beneath his lapel, scripted over his heart, meets us in the dining area He speaks for a few minutes, priming us

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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Interview

June 2017

Interview with Elif Batuman

Yen Pham

Interview

June 2017

Elif Batuman never intended to become a non-fiction writer. She always planned to write novels, and it was only...

poetry

May 2014

Two Poems from Grun-tu-molani

Vidyan Ravinthiran

poetry

May 2014

The Sky there was a uniform inactive grey, except when stared at through a chainlink fence; those who could...

Interview

November 2012

Interview with Simon Critchley

John Douglas Millar

Interview

November 2012

Over the last twenty years Simon Critchley has produced a series of elegant works of political and cultural theory....

 

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