Journalist, author and Star Wars fan.
It’s been about a year since becoming a father and in that time one thing has become abundantly clear to me – parenting is case of one step forward, two steps back. Sometimes it’s more like three steps back, but you get the general idea. After recently spending […]
“I must be allowed to speak,” Luke Skywalker demands of Jabba the Hutt in Return of the Jedi. Historically peacekeepers and diplomats, the voice and spoken word are as important to the function and philosophy of the Jedi as their lightsabers. Having already struck out in anger against […]
From its inception, Star Wars has always existed as political allegory, with its goodies-versus-baddies narrative also acting as the marginalised struggling against far-right supremacy. As a politically opinionated film student, George Lucas imbued his work with a social commentary that would transcend his early avant-garde efforts and supercharge […]
I’d long wanted to start a Star Wars blog, but every idea floundered in its early stages. But when Elisabeth fell pregnant, the idea for Raising a Rebel popped into my mind fully formed. About a week before our daughter Lorelei was born, we posted our first post […]
By all accounts Jake Lloyd should have been a superstar, ready to transition from his breakout role as the young Anakin Skywalker and into a regular cinematic presence. But that’s not the way things went. Aside from a role in the forgettable 2005 film Madison and reprising the […]
In The Last Jedi, Rey asks if Luke created Kylo Ren. But Ben Solo’s fall from grace is not so easily defined and certainly not so simple as having one catalyst alone. Of course, Luke’s brief failure as a mentor contributed significantly to Ben turning to the Dark […]
Having a baby is like being given a long scroll of milestone achievements, ready and waiting to be ticked off. Many of these you might expect, made up as they are of firsts – tooth, words and steps – but others are subtler, while some aren’t those you […]
If, as Churchill proclaimed, “history is written by the victors” then any account accepted by a cultural majority is a prescribed and biased narrative. Individual accounts of the same events rarely align, but on the national scale this becomes much more sinister. Taking charge of an information stream […]
When Elisabeth and I get married next month, we’ll have been together seven years. We met as teenagers at university, where we were both studying creative writing, and now our daughter is almost a year old. But, if I’m honest, we didn’t have all that much in common […]
It’s become a yearly tradition in the build up to the release of a new Star Wars movie that leaked snippets and set images will find their way online for fans to analyse, pick apart and otherwise salivate over. As we inch closer to Episode IX – and […]
