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Category: Author
Dylan Thomas, Taylor Swift, and ‘Tortured Poets’
On International Dylan Thomas Day, and as Taylor Swift name-checks Dylan Thomas on her new album, The Tortured Poets Department, Sally Minogue looks at Thomas’s cultural power and the long-standing relationship between poetry and song. ‘Swifties’ (my own fifteen-year-old great-niece numbered amongst them) adore Taylor Swift. It’s no ordinary liking for your average pop star;… Read More
Book of the Week: Sense and Sensibility
Sense and Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published but second written novel. Denis Hanrahan Wells takes up the story. She initially began writing it at the age of nineteen under the title ‘Elinor and Marianne’ as an epistolary novel, a form which was very popular at this time. She had begun the novel shortly after… Read More
‘Avay vith melincholly’: The Story Behind ‘The Pickwick Papers’
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
Elizabeth Gaskell and ‘Wives and Daughters’
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
The Japanese Macbeth
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
Book of the Week: The Brothers Karamazov
After an insomniac encounter with a radio adaptation of The Brothers Karamazov, Sally Minogue revisits Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel. I’ve always had trouble sleeping; it’s part of my life. I used to listen to the World Service which gave a non-Anglocentric corrective to the standard news, but eventually the reporting of everyday horrors there became… Read More
Book of the Week: Pride and Prejudice
When I first read Pride and Prejudice as a moody fourteen-year-old, I was far from impressed. I had little interest in the characters, even less enthusiasm for the society in which they lived, and as for the preoccupation with marriage, well that just left me cold. Some of you dear readers may gasp in horror… Read More
‘Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea’
As we publish Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems 1934-1952, Sally Minogue reflects on the riches to be found there. Most of you reading this blog will already know lines from or titles of some of Dylan Thomas’s poems. In the majority of his poems, the title is simply the first line of the poem, and he… Read More
When Poe Met Dickens
In the United States, one of the first – if not the first – critics to discover the talented new British author Charles Dickens was Edgar Allan Poe. Poe reviewed Dickens’ first book, Sketches by ‘Boz’ in the June 1836 number of the Southern Literary Messenger, the year it was published in London by John… Read More