It’s one of history’s great absurdities that the Middle Ages believed human beings could fly — and one of modernity’s great dullnesses that we no longer permit them to. Carlos Eire, in his magnificent and quietly mischievous They Flew: A History of the Impossible, takes us by the hand and leads us into a world … Continue reading They Flew: A Short Sermon on the Impossible
Category: Literature
Ubu Roi: The Crown, the Curse, and the Colossal Belly of Human Folly
If Gogol showed us corruption, and Beckett showed us despair, then Alfred Jarry — bizarre, bicycle-riding prophet of the avant-garde — showed us what happens when civilisation finally gives up pretending to be civil. Ubu Roi isn’t a play; it’s a cultural detonation, a theatrical act of vandalism so gleefully grotesque that even today it … Continue reading Ubu Roi: The Crown, the Curse, and the Colossal Belly of Human Folly
The Government Inspector: A Farce in Which Humanity Trips Over Its Own Shadow
Been a while since I looked at a play. So.. There are moments in literature when I realise the human race isn’t merely flawed but gloriously, catastrophically absurd. Gogol understood this long before Beckett ever let Vladimir and Estragon wander out onto a dusty road to wait for a man who’d never come. If Waiting … Continue reading The Government Inspector: A Farce in Which Humanity Trips Over Its Own Shadow
The Scarlet Letter – Sin, Society, and the Theatre of Virtue
The Scarlet Letter is a work so suffused with moral intensity that even the commas seem to blush. Hawthorne’s Puritan New England is a place where daylight feels like cross-examination, and every whisper sounds like scripture. Sin, here, isn't merely an act — it’s a neighbourhood watch. The story begins, quite literally, with a symbol … Continue reading The Scarlet Letter – Sin, Society, and the Theatre of Virtue
The Naked Civil Servant: A Gospel According to Outrage
This book didn’t slip quietly into the world like a well-behaved parishioner. The Naked Civil Servant — Quentin Crisp’s scandalous act of cultural streaking, his autobiographical confession written with the dignity of a saint and the insolence of a man determined to rattle the tea trays of middle England. It’s a work so defiantly honest, … Continue reading The Naked Civil Servant: A Gospel According to Outrage
Wording 