BLOG POSTS

Sally Minogue continues her ‘Empire’ series, looking at Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim and touching on some of his poetry. Rudyard Kipling has elements in common with my previous subject, Joseph Conrad, in spite of appearances to the contrary. ‘Rudyard’ was Kipling’s second given name (his first was Joseph), derived from Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire where… Read More

Dr Stephen Carver looks at the most famous vampire of them all. When Bram Stoker died after a series of strokes on April 20, 1912, his obituary in The Times made only a single and cursory reference to Dracula noting that ‘He was the master of a particularly lurid and creepy kind of fiction’. The… Read More

‘And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth’. As we all recalibrate our understanding of Empire, Sally Minogue reconsiders Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, in the first of a short series of blogs on literature and colonialism.  A few months ago, in the balmy Spring weather, I walked with friends… Read More

David Stuart Davies looks at one of Joseph Conrad’s later political novels.. The Secret Agent is a bleak novel, the gloom of which is alleviated by the subtle thread of humour which is woven into the story. The dark and often depressing mood of the book is said to have been influenced by Charles Dickens’… Read More