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Category: Book
Book of the Week: The Scarlet Letter
The Scarlet Letter: Mia Rocquemore looks at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel set in the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1700s A novel that combines spectacle with secret, the supernatural with bitter reality, and editorial authority with subjective narration, Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter demands a psychological reading. Its characters are so complex, their motivations and… Read More
A Blog for Burns Night
Mia Rocquemore has a timely look the poetry of Robert Burns. in a A Blog for Burns Night Guests at a traditional Burns Night supper are greeted by the blare of the bagpipe, its fierce notes unmistakable and unignorable. It would be hard to conceive of a more suitable opening for a celebration of Scotland’s… Read More
The Moonstone: The first modern detective story
It is not widely known nowadays that T.S. Eliot had a passion for detective stories. He held Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in particularly high regard, and kept up with the evolving contemporary genre, frequently reviewing new tales of mystery and detection in The Criterion, the literary magazine he both created and edited…. Read More
The Life and Works of Dylan Thomas
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
Filming ‘A Christmas Carol’.
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
Sally Minogue looks at Under Milk Wood
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
Book of the Week: The Woman in White
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
W.B. Yeats and the Nobel Prize
This week marks the centenary of W. B. Yeats being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – the first Irishman to be granted that honour. Sally Minogue looks at Yeats’s achievement and suggests some of his poems to enjoy. W.B. Yeats was 58 when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature – a good… Read More
Mia Rocquemore looks at the works of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
“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