At an obvious level, the distinction between fact and fiction is clear:  a story can be about factual truths or imaginative ones.      Sean Sheehan   Robert Lewis Stevenson’s “Treasure island” is a fictional story so there is no point in trying to get rich by searching through the […]

These two Dorling Kindersley books use a mixture of stunning photography, ancient lore, basic biology and practical knowledge to bring to life the importance and fascination of some of the planet’s plant life.    Sean Sheehan   The photographs do their job of draw  ing the reader in while the […]

Elizabeth Hardwick does not use clichés or write with condescension. She has her own style and if a supposed essay by Hardwick were to turn out to have been created by AI then literature will probably have reached a dead end.   Sean Sheehan   In “The art of the […]

James Kelman horrified the literary establishment when he won a major award for his fourth novel, “How late it was, how late” in 1994.   Sean Sheehan   A novel about an ex-con losing his sight as the result of a beating by the police and then coming up against […]

Spy movies evoke East Berlin as a sinister place from where people try to escape, a dystopian enclave with a dreaded security service, the Stasi.   Sean Sheehan   What tends to get forgotten is the German Democratic Republic (the GDR) the country born in 1949 and where close to […]