Close Reading
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From the Archives: 27.07.18
‘you ought to be able to do this – and enjoy the process – for any text’. Challenge accepted!
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‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Rome in Julius Caesar
To Shakespeare’s audience, Rome was more than an idea – it was often an ideal. But what is this ‘Rome’? Who gets to define it? Or what it wants/needs?
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First 100 Words: ‘Rebecca’
in 100 WordsThe temperature’s dropped, storm clouds have suddenly covered the sun, and … oh my god, are those wolves I can hear in the background? Let’s look closely at how du Maurier does this in just 100 words.
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24.07 Madeline Miller
‘Who wants to live forever?’, as Queen sang in 1986. On her birthday, let’s explore that idea through Madeline MIller’s retellings (with a little help from Tennyson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Stephen King).
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Close Reading: the First 100 Words
in 100 Words‘First Page Fear’ doesn’t just apply to writers. Readers can feel an inch tall when approaching a canonical text. Can there by anything new to say? Yes!
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20.07 Cormac McCarthy
We probably all have a book or two we are frightened of reading. Exploring why makes me readier to hit ‘The Road’ with Cormac McCarthy.
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‘Busload of Faith’: Hope and Disappointment in Hamlet
Shakespeare almost inevitably influences the authors who come after him, but a four-hundred-year-old play can also change when we revisit it wearing Cold War glasses.
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18.07 Jane Austen
On Jane Austen’s anniversary, don’t begin by rereading Austen. Read something she could never have imagined. Then come back.
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10.07 John Wyndham
Wyndham’s distinctively British Science Fiction is about much, much more than just man-eating plants or weird children.
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From The Archives: 08.07.19
1 Henry IV has almost everything you could ask from a play – including warcrimes. Back in 2019, I put the dreadful news under the analytic news under the microscope.