“We’ll all be free and we’ll all think alike, as a free people does; and them that don’t won’t be allowed to think different.” What an epigram of our age - though spurious in origin, it speaks truer of our times than many a sanctioned sermon. We needn’t trouble ourselves with the dull bibliographies of … Continue reading On the Tyranny of Sameness
Tag: oscar-wilde
Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost: A Ghost Story that Refuses to be Gothic
Ghosts, we are told, ought to terrify. They ought to shuffle about in winding sheets, rattle chains, and mutter warnings about imminent doom. In the long Gothic tradition - from Horace Walpole’s Otranto to the shadowy corridors of Mrs Radcliffe - apparitions exist to unsettle our digestion and our theology in equal measure. Yet Oscar … Continue reading Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost: A Ghost Story that Refuses to be Gothic
Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
It’s almost too neat that Salomé should have been written in French. The language of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and decadence itself lent Wilde the perfect tongue for blasphemy dressed in silks. The Victorians expected their theatre to teach morality, to improve the soul, to extol duty. Wilde offered them instead a necrophilic waltz in candlelight, where … Continue reading Wilde’s Salomé: A Decadent Dance with Death
You’ve Got Red On You
King Charles III by Jonathan Yeo "You've got red on you." This line becomes a running gag throughout the film, Shaun of the Dead (2004). Now we all know someone else with red on him. The King's new portrait, a masterpiece of controversy! Painted by the renowned Jonathan Yeo, it's the talk of the town. … Continue reading You’ve Got Red On You
Wording 