Zamira Rahim
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zamirarahim.bsky.social
Zamira Rahim
@zamirarahim.bsky.social
7.2K followers 2.4K following 1.3K posts
Staff editor for The New York Times (in London). Previously writing for CNN and Time Magazine. One of those Brits who ended up in American media.
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zamirarahim.bsky.social
'Spring and Fall' by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Márgarét, áre you gríeving Over Goldengrove unleaving? Leáves like the things of man, you With your fresh thoughts care for, can you? Ah! ás the heart grows older It will come to such sights colder By and by, nor spare a sigh Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie; And yet you wíll weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name: Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same. Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed What heart heard of, ghost guessed: It ís the blight man was born for, It is Margaret you mourn for.
November 15, 2025 at 10:38 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I decided to finally read Middlemarch on my month off work - it's filled with sublime, carefully written passages like this, where Dorothea visits her marital home for the first time.
It had a small park, with a fine old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures, which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun.
November 15, 2025 at 11:05 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I'd forgotten how much I love a deservedly scathing review www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...
I did not know it was still possible to make television this bad. I assumed that there was some sort of baseline, some inescapable bedrock knowledge of how to do it that now prevented any entry into the art form from falling below a certain standard. But I was wrong. The new series from Ryan Murphy, All’s Fair – starring Kim Kardashian, Naomi Watts and Niecy Nash as the founders of an all-female law firm delivering divorce-y justice to incredibly rich but slightly unlucky women under the azure skies of California – is terrible. Fascinatingly, incomprehensibly, existentially terrible. While I try to get my thoughts in order after bearing witness to the first episode, I’m going to give you a few direct quotes, so you can see why I’m struggling.
November 4, 2025 at 2:02 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
A gorgeous new Simon Armitage poem (Beaded Chestnut) in The New Statesman www.newstatesman.com/culture/poet...
We blundered onto a country lane by a NO TRESPASSING sign, bare legs buttoned with nettle stings and raked by thorns, the green shield bug a prefect badge on your white blouse, the moon an ironic smile in the afternoon sky. Somewhere behind us: a flattened nest in a cereal crop where a pair of otters had topped and tailed. Had not. The summer of couldn’t-care-less, didn’t know our oats from our barley,
October 29, 2025 at 10:04 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
A more mismatched couple in terms of (public facing) demeanour I could not have dreamt up. This is really a superb piece, particularly for how evenly it talks about McNally despite everything else his book reveals www.ft.com/content/d75a...
It is, however, very much worth reading, not least for the opening third as he describes his escape into theatre work from a poverty-stricken childhood in London’s Bethnal Green. A part in the original 1968 production of Alan Bennett’s play 40 Years On results in a previously undisclosed relationship with the writer, who seems to make McNally his project. He becomes friends with Bennett’s neighbour, the opera director Jonathan Miller, and draws a chair up at a groaning buffet of art and literature, like a starving man. He’s involved with the original production of the Rocky Horror Show and has a fling with “Little” Nell Campbell.
October 29, 2025 at 10:50 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
'The main thing is to write for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that imagines its haven like your hands at night dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here.' (Heaney, Station Island)
The main thing is to write/for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust that/imagines its haven like your hands at night/dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast. You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous. Take off from here. And don't be so earnest,/so ready for the sackcloth and the ashes. Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.'
October 28, 2025 at 7:04 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
My main takeaway reading this is how lonely and inhumane these Hollywood lives can become
There was a standing ovation, and Lawrence was hurried out into a small black-walled room. Her publicist told her quietly how to navigate the last screaming crowd of the night: walk alone down the stairs of the building, stop on the white mark, then continue to her car. “Do you need a moment?” a festival handler asked. “Are you scared?” Lawrence, surprised by the question, said no.
October 27, 2025 at 2:08 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
'Do you still hang your words in air, ten years
unfinished, glued to your notice board with gaps...' (from Robert Lowell's 'Four poems for Elizabeth Bishop')
Have you seen an inchworm crawl on a leaf, cling to the very end, revolve in air, feeling for something to reach to something? Do you still hang your words in air, ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase– unerring Muse who makes the casual perfect?
October 6, 2025 at 1:12 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I love Melissa Scott-Miller's London paintings. She's so good at capturing the residential corners of the city, especially those little back gardens, parks, canals and the endless rows of terraces
November Back Garden View 2023, Islington by Melissa Scott-Miller Start of Autumn, Vincent Terrace Gardens, Islington by Melissa Scott-Miller View of Selfridges from Balderton Street Melissa Scott-Miller (born 1959) A painting of a back garden in Hampstead by Melissa Scott-Miller
October 5, 2025 at 7:59 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Sophie Turner has lots of positive things to say about her time on Game of Thrones but her advice to the new Harry Potter cast (and her own kids) is striking. I forgot she was only 13 when it first came out. www.flaunt.com/post/sophie-...
Turner adds that she worries for the young stars of today with social media now more toxic than ever. “I look at the kids who are about to be in the new Harry Potter and I just want to give them a hug and say, ‘Look, it’s going to be okay but don’t go anywhere near [social media],’” she advises. “Stay friends with your home friends, keep living at home with your family, make sure your parents are your chaperones—it’s so important to have that grounding adjacent to the big, crazy stuff that you do.’” What would she do if her own children wanted to follow in her footsteps into acting? “Oh God, they’re not acting!” she bellows, without missing a beat. “Not until they’re at least 25!”
August 28, 2025 at 3:28 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Quite tickled by something that's a signifier of lower class households across south Asia being included in the FT's HTSI section
August 24, 2025 at 8:39 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
'tis the season for Seamus Heaney's 'Blackberry Picking' www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50981/...
Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
August 24, 2025 at 6:54 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Here's the original interview with the casting director. Her tongue-in-cheek point is that she doesn't need to be so rigid given that it's fiction. I don't read the quote as 'Wuthering Heights is just a nonsense book, why do you care' deadline.com/2025/04/khar...
“There was one Instagram comment that said the casting director should be shot,” Cochrane said. “But just wait till you see it, and then you can decide whether you want to shoot me or not. But you really don’t need to be accurate. It’s just a book. That is not based on real life. It’s all art.”
August 7, 2025 at 2:50 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I've been working my way through some Auden poems lately and it's been more of a struggle than, say, Heaney or Larkin, both of whom I love. But then occasionally I get to lines like this and am bowled over
For who is ever quite without his landscape, The straggling village street, the house in trees, All near the church, or else the gloomy town house, The one with the Corinthian pillars, or The tiny workmanlike flat: in any case A home, the centre where the three or four things that happen to a man do happen? Yes, Who cannot draw the map of his life, shade in The little station where he meets his loves And says good-bye continually, and mark the spot Where the body of his happiness was first discovered?
August 3, 2025 at 9:50 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I have missed most of the Pittard/Ewell mess mainly because this kind of fiction sounds a bit dull to me atm
We are on the familiar terrain of writers’ retreats, writing classes, wordplay and self-reflection in a house of mirrors full of writers, writers, writers.
July 21, 2025 at 9:08 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
The NYT book reviewers are tired.
He Cheated With Her Best Friend. This Is the Third Book About It.
July 21, 2025 at 9:06 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Inevitable. (From The Sunday Times Bestseller page) www.thetimes.com/culture/book...
• We were waiting with anticipation to see how the allegations about The Salt Path would affect its sales. And while it has been dethroned from its No 1 spot after seven consecutive weeks at the top, perhaps the most surprising thing is how little difference the scandal has made. Print sales have dropped by only 9 per cent compared to last week. Perhaps some of the lost sales were made up by people keen to see what all the fuss was about.
July 20, 2025 at 11:42 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Last year I thought I should try some Martin Amis and picked up 'The Rachel Papers', which was funny and competent but left me a bit underwhelmed. It was published when he was 24. Now I'm reading 'Money' and every paragraph is a construction of brute genius
Can I? Where has the weather gone, where? Where? You get April, blossom blizzards and sudden sunshafts and swift bruised clouds. You get May and its chilly light, the sky still writhing with change. Then June, summer, rain as thin and sour as motorway wheel-squirt, and no sky at all, just no sky at all. In summer, London is an old man with bad breath. If you listen, you can hear the sob of weariness catching in his lungs. Unlovely London. Even the name holds heavy stress.
July 20, 2025 at 9:43 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I popped back to Croydon, where I grew up this week and love. I found myself wandering around the town centre for the first time in years. There are 400,000 people living here but it's an absolute ghost town and I don't see how it'll ever recover.
An empty fountain in an old shopping centre 'Thank you for shopping with us Croydon. This store is now closed.' A closed store in a shopping centre A closed store in a shopping centre
July 19, 2025 at 8:27 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Absolutely correct piece on why Persuasion is Austen's 'novel of adulthood' (and IMO her best one) time.com/7302901/jane...
Persuasion is the last novel that Austen completed in her lifetime. She wrote it in a phase of failing health and dwindling material security as her extended family’s fortunes (never very robust) imploded in a failed financial venture. It is sometimes considered tacky or distasteful to think of art and commerce, or to think of how money might have shaped the lives and art of those artists who mean the most to us. It would be a very pretty picture indeed to imagine that money never once entered Austen’s mind as she composed her novels. But that would require ignoring so much of her genius because in their way, all Austen’s novels turn on questions of money, fortune, property, and prosperity—one finds in her characters’ harmonious and happy endings a fusion of material and emotional fulfillment.
July 17, 2025 at 2:47 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
'You left North Haven, anchored in its rock/afloat in mystic blue...'
You left North Haven, anchored in its rock, afloat in mystic blue…And now—you've left for good. You can't derange, or rearrange, your poems again. (But the sparrows can their song.) The words won't change again. Sad friend, you cannot change.
July 1, 2025 at 7:21 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
One of my favourite summer poems is actually an elegy, Elizabeth Bishop's 'North Haven' written in memory of Robert Lowell allpoetry.com/North-Haven
can make out the rigging of a schooner a mile off; I can count the new cones on the spruce. It is so still the pale bay wears a milky skin; the sky no clouds except for one long, carded horse¹s tail. The islands haven't shifted since last summer, even if I like to pretend they have— drifting, in a dreamy sort of way, a little north, a little south, or sidewise— and that they¹re free within the blue frontiers of bay.
July 1, 2025 at 7:20 AM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Hello from Istanbul, which is a bigger and lovelier city than I'd realised
The waters of the Golden Horn Interior of the Blue Mosque The Bhosphorus as seen from çengelköy The Suleymaniye Mosque
June 30, 2025 at 1:08 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
I love Amna Saleem's writing and was really struck here by what she says about the pressures of performing a writing career online and what happened when she logged off
open.substack.com/pub/aglasgow...
I’ve been writing more than ever, chasing commissions, pitching producers, working on projects I genuinely care about. I chose to stop performing my career online after Twitter turned into an insufferable cesspit under Elon Musk. I'd convinced myself this was noble. That real work happened quietly, away from the performative circus of social media. Michaela Coel’s 2021 Emmy speech about working in silence became a familiar mantra, forgetting perhaps one key fact: I am not Michaela Coel.
June 29, 2025 at 9:33 PM
zamirarahim.bsky.social
Reading Mrs Dalloway for the first time and am immediately entranced by the pace and genius of the opening pages
For having lived in Westminster--how many years now? over twenty,--one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall) do the same; can't be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that very reason: they love life. In people's eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment in June.
June 19, 2025 at 3:59 PM