• Landscape view looking out across a large body of water. Land is just visible on the horizon, there is a line of trees on the shore, and in the immediate foreground there is a rough stone wall.

Ellroy and Me

By Nathan Ashman It was 2006 and James Ellroy was in the midst of penning the much anticipated third volume in his ‘Underworld USA Trilogy’, an epic criminal history of post-war America. I, meanwhile, was just about to begin my…

The comforts of mystery

By Thomas Leitch Mystery and detective stories have always been my comfort-food reading. From the time I was weaned away from Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in the eighth grade, I’ve never…

Was there a Catholic school architecture?

By Diane M Watters In 2018, Scotland commemorated 100 years of local authority-run Catholic schooling since the 1918 Education Act. Following the act, both the Catholic and Episcopalian churches transferred their own church-run schools, known as ‘voluntary’ schools, into public…

1751 Map of Asia

Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700-1900

Read the blog post to find out more about writing the newly published book Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700-1900 by Kevin L. Schwartz. Remembering Iran, Forgetting the Persianate There was a time – roughly from 1000 to 1850 – when…