Together Alone
American individualism and the western, from Fred Zinnemann and John Ford to Larry McMurtry and Taylor Sheridan.
Craig Clifford
· 8 min read
Literature
A collection of 69 posts
Billy Bunter and the Man from Animal Farm
A look back at the 20th century’s most entertaining literary spat—one of the few such encounters that Orwell emphatically lost.
David Cohen
· 15 min read
Capturing the ‘Odyssey’
Homer’s epic provides a window on to a strange, paradoxical, fascinating, beautiful, and terrifying world that is at once familiar and unfamiliar.
Mallory Young
· 8 min read
Strong Opinions
When critics start issuing dictates, they end up excluding broad swathes of art and culture as well as whole areas of human experience.
Stephen Akey
· 10 min read
Reading Orwell in the Age of AI
Prescient about the possibility of machine-generated writing, George Orwell’s life and work offer a deeper warning about the LLM era.
Matt Johnson
· 24 min read
On Truth and Beauty
Why art and science serve different ends.
Megan Gafford
· 10 min read
Out on the Wily, Windy Moors...
Emerald Fennell’s misbegotten adaptation of ‘Wuthering Heights’ destroys the very structure of Emily Brontë’s classic story.
Charlotte Allen
· 20 min read
Shakespeare in Love and Grief
It appears that people now find comfort in the idea that the life of even the greatest of writers is no more satisfying than their own.
Mallory Young
· 10 min read
A History of Morality Clauses
The century-old moral panics and persecutions by Anthony Comstock and the Society for the Suppression of Vice are echoed today by cancellation campaigns from the moralistic Left and Right.
E. Lily Yu
· 14 min read
A Different Kind of Palaver
What the Adelaide Writers’ Week fiasco reveals about the moral economy of cultural elites.
Juliet Moses
· 8 min read
The Line Dividing Good and Evil
What we can learn from the moral and literary failings of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and James Baldwin.
Megan Gafford
· 8 min read
Where Have All the Cultures Gone?
The homogenisation of culture begins with the loss of language.
Tristan S. Rapp
· 10 min read
Making Fiction Boring
The ideological capture of college writing programs has ushered in an age of didactic, anodyne, and tedious books.
Adam Szetela
· 14 min read
The Geopolitical Thriller: A Right-Wing Genre
Other plots may attract both right and left-wing authors, but successful geopolitical thrillers are always informed by a conservative view of the world.
Stewart Slater
· 10 min read
The Sensitivity Era
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.
Robert Huddleston
· 8 min read