Literature has long imagined other worlds but now space travel and planetary colonisation look to become scientific fact.
- Lecturer of English, University of Liverpool
The magi, as you know, were wise men – wonderfully wise men – who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. So O Henry tells us in his classic Christmas…
Apparently, Jane Austen needs updating. Yet again. She’s a stranger to the 21st-century world. Her novels need rewriting for a modern readership, and this is what The Austen Project aims to do to get younger…
In this age of the rule of brute force, it is almost impossible for anyone to believe that anyone else could possibly reject the law of the final supremacy of brute force. So wrote Mohandas Karamchand…
We’ve become very accustomed to connecting World War I with its soldier-poets. And the centenary celebrations in Britain have very rightly reminded us how important key figures such as Wilfred Owen, Isaac…
So it’s Day 21 in Channel 5’s Big Brother household. It would also have been George Orwell’s 111th birthday. And this month marks 65 years since his landmark novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was first published…
Over the past few months children’s fiction has hardly been out of the news. Early March saw the launch of the “Let Books be Books” campaign, aimed at persuading publishers against titling or packaging…
The winners of the enormously respected Pulitzer Prizes have been announced, and of the 21 award categories for journalism and the arts, three caught my eye in particular. Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch won…
Drivers in parts of Southern England and Ireland have been finding fine red dust on their vehicles – sand blown all the way from the Sahara desert. There is now even a pollution warning because of the…
George Saunders has become the first to win the £40,000 Folio Prize for his collection of short stories, Tenth of December. A contentious prize, the Folio has raised questions about elitism in fiction…
Mavis Gallant, the Canadian doyenne of the short story, died aged 91 in Paris on February 18th. This marked the end of a writing career that spanned more that five decades and two continents. Gallant is…
Jane Austen never ceases to surprise and fascinate us. From Dr Paula Byrne’s claim to have discovered a new portrait in 2011 to Kelly Clarkson’s unsuccessful bid for Austen’s turquoise and gold ring last…
“I live a Cut & Paste kind of life”. So the narrator of Nathan Filer’s The Shock of the Fall tells us. But in terms of its daring exploration of a life little understood and left in shadow, there is…
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