Books

What I discovered when I started reading French books

My most hated subject at school was French. I mean, I hated every subject – the only thing I remember liking in all my years at school was the...

Books Ben O'Brien -

The lying life of authors: John le Carré and authorial double-lives

“I’m not a spy who writes novels, I am a writer who briefly worked...

Books Apaar Agarwal -

The caring individual: John le Carré at the Weston

At the back of the Weston Library, in a small room off to one...

Books Nancy Gittus -

Why we’re obsessed with Greek myth retellings

In every bookshop today, from Blackwell’s to Waterstones, an unmistakable pattern emerges: Greek myth...

Books Hannah Becker -

Latest

‘Little Women’: endlessly adaptable?

Another 20 or so years, another Little Women; this time brought to us by acclaimed director Greta Gerwig and starring some of the hottest young actors of...

Top 10 Transformations in Literature

New Year, new you? Let’s see how long this year’s resolutions last. As the festive cheer fades into oblivion and January rears its miserable...

‘Find Me’ Expands Romance and Falls Flat

Find Me is the October 2019 sequel to André Aciman’s 2007 novel Call Me By Your Name, which was popularised by the success of its 2017 movie adaptation. As a much anticipated...

Ten Politically Inspired Books to Read in 2020

The last three years of politics are enough to make a person want to do some Malcolm Tucker-esque screaming into the void. You can’t...

The Skywalker ‘Saga’

The following article is Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoiler-free. In the several weeks leading up to the release of the newest Star Wars...

Who’s afraid of Derrida?

This article is a complaint to my academic discipline, English literature. It is, not to overstate the matter, one of my great loves, but...

Metamorphosis, Money, and Moldovan ice cream

It’s probably unsurprising that while The Guardian hails Ian McEwan’s latest novella as a “comic triumph”, it is dismissed by The Telegraph as “an...

Whose Revolution? The winners, the losers and the left behind

Two clear streams run through Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing– a gut-wrenching tale of intersecting lives at the centre of the Troubles: that of revolution...

ATWOOD RETURNS TO GILEAD

It is difficult to sanitise Atwood’s new venture. In fact, it is difficult to put into words at all the violence of the novel....

Sex and Sensibility: Are ‘Spiced Up’ Adaptations really that progressive?

Pulses were sent racing in 1995 when Andrew Davies’ television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice saw Mr. Darcy, played by a fresh-faced Colin Firth, emerge sopping wet from a lake in a translucent white shirt that barely clung to his torso.

Review: Simon Armitage’s ‘Sandette Light Vessel Automatic’ (Faber, 2019).

Their physical manifestations seem so much a part of the poetic experience that seeing them on a page, relying only on written descriptions for their original context, is almost a tease – a promise of the possibility of an even fuller experience.

How to Read: the Long Vac

Besides the classic value of literature in allowing us to understand perspectives and experiences beyond our own, reading in some ways reminds us of the bigger picture.

‘The Lost Properties of Love’ by Sophie Ratcliffe

'treads a fine line between a deeply personal memoir [...] and an academic exploration'

‘Was it written by aliens, or is it about vampires?’: A Q&A with Daniel Wakelin

"Often important texts appear in humble form, and humble forms often tell us more about the humble people who made and used them." Daniel Wakelin talks to Cherwell about medieval manuscripts.