There are books that don’t so much entertain as they haunt. They don’t ask for your approval, or even your sympathy - they simply step into the quietest room of your mind and sit there, uninvited, until you are forced to acknowledge them. The End of the Affair by Graham Greene is one of those … Continue reading What Remains After Love: A Reflection on The End of the Affair
Tag: classic-literature
“People Ruin Beautiful Things”: On Gibran, Secrecy, and the Sacred Art of Keeping Quiet
“Travel and tell no one, Live a true love story and tell no one, Live happily and tell no one - People ruin beautiful things.” They say Kahlil Gibran wrote that, and perhaps he did. Then again, the internet says many things: that Einstein married Marilyn Monroe, that Churchill coined every popular meme, and that … Continue reading “People Ruin Beautiful Things”: On Gibran, Secrecy, and the Sacred Art of Keeping Quiet
The Hangover of Civility: Lucky Jim and the War on Pretension
I’ve always felt that the great war following the great war was not the one involving tanks or treaties, but the one fought in corridors of universities, offices, marriages, and pubs - against the dreary empire of pretension. Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim is not so much a novel as a snarl in prose; a bottle … Continue reading The Hangover of Civility: Lucky Jim and the War on Pretension
Auntie Christ: Evil in a Lace Collar – Seaton’s Aunt
Most of us have at some point been fed cake by a relative we didn’t entirely trust – the sort of woman who keeps porcelain dolls in glass cabinets and refers to you exclusively as “it.” But Walter de la Mare, that poetic custodian of the uncanny, raises the stakes considerably in this morbid little … Continue reading Auntie Christ: Evil in a Lace Collar – Seaton’s Aunt
Arthur Wing Pinero: The Magistrate of Mirth and Other Dastardly Dalliances – Part Two of Dandy Dick
Or, how one man in a cravat brought Victorian theatre out of its corset and into its knickers. Before Wilde minced in with cigarette cases and cucumber sandwiches, and long before Coward lit up the drawing room with his razor-sharp repartee and possibly questionable moustache, there was Pinero. Arthur Wing Pinero, to give him his … Continue reading Arthur Wing Pinero: The Magistrate of Mirth and Other Dastardly Dalliances – Part Two of Dandy Dick
Wording 