Friday, March 29Royal Holloway's offical student publication, est. 1986

Culture & Literature

Wild Flowers: Frank Carter and Supporting the Artists that Do Matter
Culture & Literature, Literature

Wild Flowers: Frank Carter and Supporting the Artists that Do Matter

Frank Carter has become one of the main spearheads in the rock genre. He is sharp, ballsy and unstoppable. His new album Sticky, alongside his supporting band The Rattlesnakes, is a punchy, liberating, gut-blender of everything that is honest and impactful. This is the soundtrack to a group of underdog misfits who are unapologetically themselves. The album utilises their iconic British sound to piece together a drunken night out with your mates – it has the same warm welcome as a pub carpet.   After headlining Download Pilot Festival and smashing a killer secret set at Reading, he is out for blood with a fourteen-date tour across the UK this November and a further European tour in February. If you can't get tickets, you're missing out. As well as the brilliant music and bante...
How to Capture Stunning Cityscapes at Night
Culture & Literature, Music, Visual Arts

How to Capture Stunning Cityscapes at Night

There's something mesmerizing about cities at night. When the sun is replaced with a stream of fluorescent lights and neon signs, it’s completely different to anything you’ll see during the day. Capturing this on camera may seem hard, but shooting nightscapes can be very simple, and something that every budding photographer should try. Most smartphone cameras now have a long exposure mode, so you don’t even need a professional-level camera to get those Instagrammable photos after sunset. Equipment Most tutorials will tell you to buy both an expensive tripod and high-quality ND filters, but neither of these items are necessary. A tripod – which can be bought second hand for as little as £10 – is advisable for keeping the camera still, but you could always stabilize the camera by rest...
A Christmas Carol review: Does Christmas Actually Come from Books?
Culture & Literature, Literature

A Christmas Carol review: Does Christmas Actually Come from Books?

Every year, we belt it out to Mariah Carey and count down the days until we can justifiably put the tree up (November 1st, of course). But do we ever stop to consider when or how Christmas became Christmas? Of course, the holiday was originally a celebration of the birth of Christ, but Christmas as we know and love it has far more recent origins. You’ve most likely heard of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol – maybe you studied the book at school, maybe you’ve watched The Muppet Christmas Carol so many times that you know the script by heart – but did you know that its publication in 1843 established a whole new literary genre: the Christmas book? Dickens’ fame and the advance in mass printing during the Industrial Revolution made the book a fast hit. Its cultural impact is still being...
6 Cosy Books to Curl Up with this Winter
Culture & Literature, Literature

6 Cosy Books to Curl Up with this Winter

Sure, the Christmas break normally brings with it a whole host of terrifying deadlines, but as the weather gets colder and the nights draw in, might we all be tempted escape the uni work and curl up with a steaming mug of tea (or, more realistically, a quadruple-espresso) and a damn good book? Here are six to get you started:  Burial Rites by Hannah Kent  Set against the stark backdrop of 19th century Iceland, Burial Rites is definitely a novel fit for winter. The book tells the story of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be sentenced to death in Iceland. Tried and condemned for murder, Agnes is held in the house of a local family to await her execution, but as the months drag on and Agnes grows closer to the family, the truth about what really happened starts to be re...
Girls Don’t Cry Either: Mitski and the Female Experience
Culture & Literature, Literature

Girls Don’t Cry Either: Mitski and the Female Experience

There’s a shared feeling amongst women of having something in your chest ready to burst, a rage or emotion so strong and yet so strictly controlled. Often expressing anger, sadness, frustration and even happiness is frowned upon. Artists like indie-rock singer/songwriter Mitski Miyawaki put poetry to this feeling, this quiet desperation, so no wonder she has gained quite the following among women. Playlists on Spotify and YouTube entitled ‘In this life, it’s just you and Japanese-American singer Mitski against the world’ exist for a reason. As a woman, listening to Mitski is a self-reflective emotional experience that will devastate and console you at the same time. She approaches and explores all aspects of what it means to be a woman in the 21st century with a unique musical sound. ‘...
American War Review: Did Omar El Akkad Predict the Covid 19 Pandemic?
Culture & Literature, Literature

American War Review: Did Omar El Akkad Predict the Covid 19 Pandemic?

“This isn’t a story about war. It’s about ruin.” (American War, chapter 1) Omar Akkad’s 2017 American War is classified as a war science fiction novel. But is it science fiction? The international bestseller and winner of the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize is made up of fragments from real life events. From the first American Civil War, the Guantanamo Bay detention camps, to the more recent Afghanistan conflict in which Akkad was a journalist himself, readers are bombarded with the suffering of others.  The metafiction – set between 2075 and 2095 – follows the story of 6-year-old Sarat Chestnut after her father is killed in a homicide bombing. Taken to camp Patience with her siblings and mother, Sarat’s childhood is lived in a state of limbo: not dead, not alive, purely surviving t...
Are cinemas going extinct?  A Post-Covid Review
Film & TV, Theatre & Performance

Are cinemas going extinct? A Post-Covid Review

Stale popcorn and half-working escalators, overpriced, too-watery coke and the blue raspberry (what even is that?) slushy that comes with a funny shaped, reusable plastic cup that will sit on your windowsill for months, never to be used again -- there’s nothing quite like the cinema. The first public performance of a film was in 1896, but with the pandemic forcing us to stay at home and the growing popularity of binge-watching culture, the cinema don’t have the same grasp on society as it once did. Growing up, I just about lived in the theatre, taking every chance I could to watch the latest movies; it was my safe space and I enjoyed the shared experience of watching with other people. The final battle scene, where every person in the theatre gasped in shock during Twilight Breaking Da...
Back to Live, Back to Reality: Bloodstock Review
Features, Music

Back to Live, Back to Reality: Bloodstock Review

It took a long time to get to Bloodstock festival. There was a four hour train from Egham, but that was nothing compared to the two years I had been waiting for live music to return. The journey was long and arduous; there was so much at stake for the performance industry who had suffered greatly at the callous hands of the pandemic. Yet there was no greater joy than standing in a field in the Midlands for the UK's largest metal festival. Festivals were the glorious beginning of bringing live music back. The government introduced pilot events to test the spread of the virus, with festivals such as Latitude, Download Pilot (A downsized version of the Donnington giant) and Tramlines. Fortunately, there were only 28 positive cases of COVID-19 amongst the 58,000 people who attended these t...
The Mermaid of Black Conch Review: A Mermaid Love Story fused with Colonialism
Literature

The Mermaid of Black Conch Review: A Mermaid Love Story fused with Colonialism

Monique Roffey’s The Mermaid of Black Conch has recently gained a lot of publicity, having won Costa Book of the Year in 2020 and more recently, a BBC Sounds audio adaptation. Whether they’re sirens in Greek mythology luring sailors to their deaths, or tiny, doe-eyed Disney characters in colourful seashell bras, we’ve seen and read mermaids in all their forms. On the surface, the novel appears to be just another folk-lore tale, but below scratch beneath the water’s surface and it’s a deeply unique story. The Mermaid of Black Conch is not your typical white European Disney Princess, but an indigenous woman from long agow with a tribal tattoo covered torso. And, instead of a glamorous underwater paradise, the setting is a post-colonial Caribbean world. The novel takes place in April 1...
Beautiful World, Where Are You? review: Rooney’s best book yet?
Literature

Beautiful World, Where Are You? review: Rooney’s best book yet?

Whether you read a hundred books a year or struggle finishing just one, you’ve probably heard of Sally Rooney, or at least her second novel Normal People. In the four years since the release of her 2017 debut, Conversations with Friends, Rooney has made herself a household name, and her third novel is acutely aware of it. Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows university friends Alice and Eileen, both on the cusp of turning thirty and both navigating romances that form the basis of the novel’s plot. Famous author, Alice, has moved back to Ireland after the pressures of celebrity life in New York proved too much to handle. Despite their less-than-perfect Tinder date, she invites local warehouse worker, Felix, to join her on a work-trip to Rome. Eileen lives in Dublin, flitting betwe...