DAVID RENTON is puzzled by an ambitious attempt to look back on world culture from the future without engaging with or understanding it
Latest editorial
Shine on Silver Moon
JAMIE BRITTON is spurred by the memoir of a feminist bookshop to remember streets once filled with radical literature and activism
[LGBTarchive.uk/Ross Burgess] 
MICHAEL STEWART applauds a fun send-up of the substandard Agatha Christie whodunnit
LEO BOIX reviews a novella by Brazilian Ana Paula Maia, and poetry by Peruvian Giancarlo Huapaya, and Chilean Elvira Hernandez
BRENT CUTLER unpicks the cryptic clues of a book within a book within a murder mystery
Reviews of the Neil Charles Quartet, the Freddie Hubbard Quintet, and the Olie Brice Quartet
GLENN BURGESS suggests that, despite his record in Spain, Orwell’s enduring commitment to socialist revolution underpins his late novels
A Bookshop of One’s Own
Jane Cholmeley, Mudlark, £16.99
CHARING CROSS ROAD in London has changed. Back in the 1980s I had made the foolhardy decision to move to London. Foolhardy in that I was in my twenties and had no idea of “city life” and secondly, I had no work to go to. So I ended up working at Foyles bookshop.
I hated it.
During my lunch break (I had to “clock off”) I would walk miserably down Charing Cross Road dreaming of all those other bookshops that so nicer to work for. Film, crime, art, second hand; this was a place of wonder for a bibliophile. And then I would end up at 68 Silver Moon, whose window displays were always eye-catching, at times humorous, but always welcoming.
Similar stories
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
SARAH TROTT explores short fictional slices of life in the American midwest from a middle-aged and mostly female perspective
RON JACOBS recommends an exhaustive demonstration that colonialism is insidious, pervasive, positive and negative
MARTIN GRAHAM recommends an excellent starting point for unions and the wider movement for discussion of the housing crisis