A collection of 56 posts
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.
From the Iliad to Mission: Impossible, creators have wrestled with the question of how much universe-building is too much.
Twenty years after his death, what Hunter S. Thompson’s legacy—or lack of it—tells us about literature and manhood in our current moment.
‘Ragtime,’ E.L. Doctorow’s forgotten novel of Progressive Era New York, is a reminder of how much American politics have changed over the past century.
The discipline of English literature seems unlikely to survive the coming technological tsunami—and maybe it doesn’t deserve to. And I say this as a professor of English, who believes in the power of the written word.
Othello and Iago represent two enduring behaviours whose conflicts have shaped much of humanity’s theory of mind and moral emotions to the present day.
Our experience of the world is increasingly mediated by digital technology. This is stripping us of our sense that the physical landscape is infused with meaning.
Dostoevsky, Alice Munro, and the nature of fiction—what does our inability to forgive do to our ability to confess?
The history of utopian fiction proves that we can’t even imagine a better world.
Today, most of John Braine’s work is out of print and forgotten. But he was an underrated writer, unafraid to confront the complexities of masculine sexuality with terse precision, self-deprecation, and emotional candour.
Attending to Shakespeare on his own terms may allow us to reclaim the erotic warmth that is latent in our human condition.
1900–1950 was a golden age of literary eccentricity.