Tag: Literature

"In the end, the same heatwave can inspire lewd lyrics or thoughts of doom and global warming."

For the music obsessives among us, the pieces of literature that stick longest in our minds are overwhelming those which take music itself as a subject....

Somebody once told me there are a lot of bad song lyrics out there. Imagine, for every subtle, elegant song you hear, there’s bound...

Just as Helen possessed the face that launched a thousand ships, Orpheus, the legendary musician and poet, charmed a thousand hearts with his music....

Being "protected" from anything that resembled queerness did not manage to make me straight

I remember a time when I took for granted that I could eat at restaurants, lay around in the park, and visit my family. Weeks...

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...

The mere mention of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art can make us feel uneasy. Such distinctions are often branded as pretentious and as the work of the elitist in their desperate attempts to preserve tradition and exclude diversity within the literary canon.

As we’ve learnt more and more about the confusing grey splodge of the human mind, we’ve uncovered more and more of what makes sociopaths tick. As such, they’ve increasingly inhabited that attractive idiosyncratic loner role in our popular imagination.

Current twenty-year olds grew up watching adaptations of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth adventures on the Big Screen, reading Rowling’s Hogwarts shenanigans and dreaming of getting lost in Lewis’ Narnia.

Representations of violence and torture used to be an integral part of enforcing the social order - but in a world of uncensored live streams and graphic media content, has our attitude to atrocity really progressed - or does it remain an unacknowledged dark obsession of mankind?

It’s easy to be intimidated by poetry. Often it withholds as much as it gives, leaves obscure as much as it reveals. So why read poetry?

The narrative of resistance and domination in relationships has been the recourse of storytellers since pre-Christian times, with the same lurid, visceral quality evident in Greek myth as in the modern trend of disturbingly violent porn. Yet these primal, animalistic tropes of female subjugation now exist in a ‘civilised’ society, whose vernacular is one of #TimesUp, sex positivity and high-street feminism.

The four-day event will include a Hobbit bake-off