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Stephen Carver rediscovers the pleasures of reading Dickens’ first novel. The Pickwick Papers Dickens had only just celebrated his 24th birthday when the publisher Willian Hall paid a call on him at his lodgings in Furnival’s Inn to offer him a writing contract. It was early February, 1836, and Dickens’ collected Sketches by ‘Boz’ had… Read More

Denise Hanrahan Wells looks at Elizabeth Gaskell’s final novel  Elizabeth Gaskell died in 1865 leaving behind a wide range of works – novels, novellas, short stories, poetry and non-fiction.  Her final novel, Wives and Daughters lay unfinished, just shy of the final chapter or so.  There is some common ground here between Elizabeth Gaskell and… Read More

Dr Stephen Carver looks at one of the most memorable adaptations of Macbeth, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 film Kumonosu-jō, best known as Throne of Blood. The Japanese Macbeth Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s shortest tragedies, over a thousand lines fewer than both King Lear and Othello, and about half the size of Hamlet. Some literary historians go as far as to argue, in fact, that we… Read More