The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The evidence is meticulously laid out here. Piketty is saying quite simply, prove me wrong. He asks for transparency of sources and is quite willing to give it for his own work. He is also saying that this trend which can be traced to the laissez-faire policies of Thatcher and Reaganites, in particular, have led to an increasing concentration of wealth that undermines any idea of...

The Ghosh family live in, I'm guessing here, a typical middle-class house in Calcuta, West Bengal. It's 1967. There are seventeen of them plus the servants who occasionally get involved in a good way, one kind soul risks the sack by giving Purba a sneaky stash of Vim. Purba, who is from a poor family and has become a widow with two small children after her husband, the youngest son of the clan, went to the country with his pals and raped a...

Think of the number of times you’ve said: I just can’t do that! Really, I can’t. You’d expect a Noel Edmonds-like figure to pop up on your shoulder, although perhaps not with a gingery beard, to tell you off for being negative. Give some advice about having the right mindset and some superbabble about if you want something enough the universe will provide it. I love that kinda crap. In the nineteen-century novel such dreams are anchored in...

Big congratulations this week to Linda Wigzell Cress for her three-part biography of her grandmother - a fascinating insight into early twentieth century Bermondsey, and again with London as a theme, but definitely another time and another place, john_silver's wonderfully bitter Poem in a Nice Suit: http://www.abctales.com/story/linda-wigzell-cress/bermondsey-girls-eliza... http://www.abctales.com/story/linda-wigzell-cress/bermondsey-girls-eliza...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-paedophile-next-door/on-demand/57601-001 Historian Steve Humphries narrates and produced this programme. Going back thirty years to a conversation I had with a girl named Joyce who had big tits, I was quite keen on that kind of thing in those days, long eyelashes which she batted at me when she spoke, and she was now I come to think of it, more and more, quite pretty, but we never actually did it, not that...

Anybody that knows me should by now know I’m under contract to UNITED AUTHORS PUBLISHING LIMITED trading as UNBOUND . I’ve agreed to deliver a novel currently entitled Lily Poole and it will be around 72 000 words (ahem, 84 000, but that’s word inflation for you). The Deliver Date will be 1st October 2014 or a later date agreed between the two parties, or in more simple terms – whenever. The production costs currently stand around £5 100 and I’m...

http://www.gofundme.com/hbgp1g #

The titles a bit dated; the story's timeless. Werther is a young man with an admin job who paints for a hobby. He's upperclass but not a twit,he cares about the local peasants and hangs out with them in friendly way as well as hanging out with the local snobs who snub him hurtfully when they happen to be posher than him, and he loves nature. Obsession is the problem, he falls uncontrollably in love with the attractive Lotte who is the fiance of...

Well what a wonderful week it's been on ABCtales, especially so because some members who have been suffering the dreaded 'block' have suddenly found a way to open the floodgates. Sid and blighters rock have both featured on the front page as picks of the day - well done you two! Poem of the week goes to Allen Johnson for a brilliant cameo of an impatient mole! http://www.abctales.com/story/allen-johnson-jr/bother-and-o-blow and the story of the...

I don’t mind admitting the concept of ‘poetry projects’ was something that I had only been vaguely aware of and up until last week I had not devoted much thought to what it might mean. I decided to investigate poetry projects and look at the process, production and the outcomes of them. So this last few days I have spent a little time looking into what it might mean. I found, predictably perhaps, that opinions on definition, benefit and worth in...