A collection of 758 posts
In his deliberately archaic new rendition of Homer’s epic, Jeffrey Duban takes a defiant stand against the modernisation of classical literature in defence of a disappearing tradition.
Van Morrison turns eighty.
The Beatles phenomenon is being mined for more meaning than the people at its centre ever intended to convey.
A new boxset edits out one of John Lennon’s most controversial songs.
Other plots may attract both right and left-wing authors, but successful geopolitical thrillers are always informed by a conservative view of the world.
Amid literary subcultures, competition has always been fierce and unrelenting and has become even more so in our age of elite overproduction. On social media, these embittered rivalries play out in public amid a chorus of backbiting worthy of Chekhov.
Love is transformative—and in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare is clear-sighted about the fact that that transformation can be for the worse.
The campaign to strip novelist John Boyne of his Polari Prize longlist honour shows that gender extremists still seek to control progressive arts subcultures—even as mainstream society rejects their illiberal movement.
A tribute to the man who helped to revolutionise modern rock music and reality TV.
If leading media critics don’t expect much, filmmakers won’t deliver much.
Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’ is fifty.
Disco Demolition Night was an early episode of culture and counterculture being saddled with far greater political significance than they deserved.
Ian Penman has published an eccentric new book about Erik Satie, a French surrealist composer and celebratory nuisance with a tiny oeuvre and massive influence.
How journalism exchanged the duty to inform for an ethic of customer satisfaction.
The assumption that once drove creative writing—that interior life deserves as much respect and interest as the latest bump in relations at the White House—no longer obtains.