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Cover image. One part of my job involves me walking around other English teachers' classrooms and making sure that our younger students are getting the best from of our department. On one such ramble I saw a copy of The Ghost of Thomas Kempe by Penelope Lively (1973). The one and only time that I had previously come across the book was during Miss Appleby's Year 8 English class at Aylesford School, Warwick. It had been the focus of one half term's assessment, but now twenty years later, I thought it would make a good Hallowe'en book to read. The story is set in the early 1970s and centres around a young boy, James, and his family who have just moved into a small cottage in the fictional Oxfordshire village of Ledsham. The tale begins with workmen in the roof of the cottage converting the attic into a bedroom. As they are chipping away at the walls, a small green bottle, seemingly hidden behind the plaster, falls out and onto the ground, smashing in the

The setting of the sun can be the start of everything in Marrakech. The night time offers a wealth of opportunity and intrigue in almost any country, but when I'm somewhere where my understanding of the language extends to just a handful of phrases and disconnected words, I find it all the more enthralling. Marrakech genuinely quickens the pulse and widens the eyes by night, with the famous Jemaa El-Fnaa as its wildly arrhythmic beating heart. ❦ After a day of perfectly idle wandering and preparing for my journey to Essaouira, I sat up on the roof terrace, ordered atay , read the ending of Alex Garland’s The Beach and waited for sunset. During this time, a Dutch woman and a Belgian man sat near to me and started to talk about a range of subjects. Most of their discussion was centred around the regular banalities of two travellers who don’t know each other well and clearly don’t have a great deal in common. Shortly before sunset, the Belgian man caught my attentio