They say dogs are a man’s best friend, and writer Fatima Bhutto has plenty, both in her writing and in her home. When we speak, she glances off-camera at her two dogs Coco and Tokyo, and laughs, predicting that one of them will erupt into a bark at any moment.


On the contrary, they are silent, well-behaved throughout, calm in Bhutto’s presence. They run like a current through her latest memoir, The Hour of the Wolf, which was published by Daunt Books in February 2026. Bhutto was still a teena...

Labels make Grace Ives uneasy. “I’m a writer,” she says, and then immediately dismantles the certainty of it. “You don’t write one day and suddenly it’s like, fuck. I guess I’m not a writer.” She laughs, recognising the absurdity of it all. The same logic applies everywhere: girlfriend, musician, daughter, artist – roles that are expected to be tied up neatly, like a bow in your hair.


Talking to Ives means the conversation can pivot quickly from the mundane to the philosophical. Mid-interview...

Hearing the title Bitch Boxer, my first thought was linguistic rather than theatrical – what a satisfying pair of plosives. Bitch. Boxer. Both words land with a punch, which feels appropriate for a play about a boxer. My second thought, perhaps unfairly, was that I had already guessed the show’s angle. The title seemed to promise a familiar contemporary narrative: a reclamation of the word “bitch”, perhaps something about female rage being reframed as power. In other words, I thought I knew what...

The independent music venue is, it can seem, an endangered species. I won’t bore you with the details, which are seemingly better trodden than England’s dancefloors: the hundreds of pubs, clubs and music joints forced to shutter up under the long shadows of austerity, lockdowns and arts-industry cuts; Britain’s monastic youth who would rather buy a gym membership than grab a pint. The list goes on.


Maybe it’s also because artists don’t need venues anymore. Who does when fame’s freshest vector...