“Yesterday, upon the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there.” Thus begins one of the most famous fragments of verse ever to slip through the cracks of English literature - part nursery rhyme, part ghost story, part psychological confession. Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish (1899) was written in the playful spirit of nonsense, yet like all … Continue reading The Ghost That Wasn’t There: On Hughes Mearns’ Antigonish
Month: September 2025
A Ghost in the Glass: Charlotte Brontë and the Churchyard Photograph
Haworth Churchyard photograph, John Stewart, c.1856–57. © Brontë Society. Sourced via annebronte.org. There’s a photograph - albumen print, sepia-toned, crisp with the shadows of headstones - that has set imaginations aflame for more than a century. It shows Haworth churchyard, with its lichen-bitten tombs and overhanging sky, a place where the dead vastly outnumber the … Continue reading A Ghost in the Glass: Charlotte Brontë and the Churchyard Photograph
‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
There are phrases that ring through history like bells tolling in fog: ‘Et tu, Brute?’, ‘I have a dream,’ ‘Father, forgive them.’ Yesterday another such phrase was spoken - not in marble halls nor on the steps of Washington, but from a widow’s lips at her husband’s memorial service. Erika Kirk stood before the world, … Continue reading ‘I Forgive’: A Widow at the Crossroads of Rage and Grace
Death on the Installment Plan: A Comedy of Filth and Futility
Life, says Céline, isn’t a banquet but a butcher’s stall, and each of us is the meat on the hook, dripping away one grey day at a time. Death on the Installment Plan isn’t a novel so much as a splatter of bile, a confession delivered in hysterics, punctuated with ellipses… ellipses… until the very … Continue reading Death on the Installment Plan: A Comedy of Filth and Futility
How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Tolstoy was always the moralist disguised as a storyteller. He couldn’t so much as describe a hayfield without planting in it a parable, and How Much Land Does a Man Need? is among his most ruthless little lessons. At its heart, it’s an absurdly simple tale: a peasant named Pahom believes that with just a … Continue reading How Much Land Does a Man Need? – Tolstoy’s Six-Foot Sermon
Wording 