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As Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog are published by Wordsworth, Sally Minogue fills in the background. Dylan Thomas’s best-known and best-loved work, Under Milk Wood, is the principal text in this volume. Dylan Thomas’s self-styled ‘play for voices’ is the last mature work to come from… Read More

Stephen Carver takes a seasonal look at the many, many adaptations of Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic. Like James Bond and Doctor Who, everyone has their favourite version of Ebenezer Scrooge, the actor that defines the role for them, probably from whatever version of A Christmas Carol they first saw as a kid. I have seen… Read More

As Wordsworth prepares to publish Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog in January 2024, Sally Minogue gives us a foretaste of the pleasures they will afford for readers. Seventy years ago this November, Dylan Thomas died a deeply distressing and horribly early death in a New York… Read More

In the first of two blogs on Wilkie Collins, Stephen Carver looks at the novel the author considered to be his greatest achievement. The Woman in White Much as letters were carefully preserved in the 19th century, it was the custom of the children of eminent Victorians to dutifully produce a biography of their departed parent…. Read More

“It may be that the gulfs will wash us down: It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles” Many of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s most beloved poems are set on the water. In Crossing the Bar, the eighty-year-old poet, writing as he passed over the Solent to the Isle of Wight, hopes that his own… Read More

In the summer of 1960, American International Pictures released a little gothic number called The Fall of the House of Usher based on the strange and phantasmagoric short story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, first published in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839. AIP was a low-budget, independent outfit that banged out cheap… Read More

‘Whatever you do, sir, lock the door early on All Saints’ Eve, and make the blessed cross-sign over the doorstep and on the windows.’ Halloween season, in common with Christmas, is the time of year many an avid reader will reach for a ghostly tale. Whilst sitting comfortably by the fireside hopefully the story will… Read More

David Ellis finds fault with ‘The Swan of Avon’ Shakespeare’s Titles As anyone who has ever put pen to paper will know, finding titles for what you have written can be difficult.  Reading a book on Shakespeare’s treatment of old age I was struck recently by the felicity of its title.  The author had taken… Read More