To Kill a Mockingbird: racism, gun violence and coming of age in the 1930s South
Within a year of its publication in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird sold 2.5 million copies and has remained a much-loved classic by adults and children alike. What was it about this book tha...
24 Sep 202452min
Wolf Hall: is this the best historical novel ever written?
Hello Thomas Cromwell. And Hello Lev Grossman, best-selling author of The Magicians trilogy, the Silver Arrow children’s books, and now The Bright Sword, who joins Sophie and Jonty as THEIR FIRST EVER...
17 Sep 202448min
Dracula: vampires even weirder than you think. And they may have started WWI
Twenty-first century vampires are the brooding, sparkly anti-heroes of Twilight and Ann Rice— all pointy teeth and hair-product. But they used to be much weirder, scarier and sexier than that. Bram St...
8 Sep 202453min
Frankenstein: the ultimate monster; the first A.I story; Mary Shelly's multi-generational grief
Frankenstein is English literature’s great myth about Artificial Intelligence, 200 years before A.I. existed. But the world’s most famous monster is nothing like you imagine. Who knew that he chops wo...
2 Sep 202450min
Wuthering Heights: passionate love affairs and dysfunctional families go together
A ghostly face in the dark, a child’s hand through the window, a doleful cry: “I’d lost my way on the moor! - I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” Are we talking about Kate Bush’s 1978 hit single “Wuth...
26 Aug 202454min
Wide Sargasso Sea 1: tropical gothic in the West Indies and Jane Eyre disrupted
Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, published in 1966, is a bold riposte to Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, humanising the mad woman in Mr Rochester’s attic. It is less than 150 pages, but took Rhys 30 years ...
5 Jul 202453min
Wide Sargasso Sea 2: bohemianism, madess and celebrity back in England
It should have taken a year. It took thirty. In writing Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys endured several mental breakdowns, was arrested numerous times for verbal and physical violence, served time in pri...
5 Jul 202445min
Jane Eyre 2: the Brontes' real lives are even wilder than their fiction
When Charlotte Bronte arrived in Brussels at the age of 26 to attend finishing school, she had no idea she would fall desperately in love with the director: Constantine Heger. Heger - a strange, mercu...
2 Jul 202440min
