ESSAYS ON 19TH CENTURY LITERATURE & THE GOTHIC
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog It is not widely known nowadays that T.S. Eliot had a passion for detective stories. He held Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in particularly high regard, and kept up with the evolving contemporary genre, frequently reviewing new tales of mystery and detection in The Criterion, the… Continue reading The Moonstone: The First Modern Detective Story
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions blog Like James Bond and Doctor Who, everyone has their favourite version of Ebenezer Scrooge, the actor that defines the role for them, probably from whatever version of A Christmas Carol they first saw as a kid. I have seen many polls on social media inviting us to… Continue reading Filming A Christmas Carol
A new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… This year, the arrival of spring will be accompanied by what promises from the trailer to be a radical reimagining of Dicken’s immortal coming of age story Great Expectations, written by Peaky Blinders creator Stephen Knight. This will be Knight’s second Dickens screenplay, following A Christmas Carol (2019), a… Continue reading Filming Great Expectations
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… To read Frankenstein is to enter a realm of intersecting myths. It is there immediately in the novel’s original subtitle ‘The Modern Prometheus’, a comparison between the Faustian Victor Frankenstein and the Titan who stole fire from the gods and was punished horribly for gifting it to humanity.… Continue reading Frankenstein and the Romantic Hero
Extract from new post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… When Bram Stoker died after a series of strokes on April 20, 1912, his obituary in The Times made only a single and cursory reference to Dracula noting that ‘He was the master of a particularly lurid and creepy kind of fiction’. The book that we regard as… Continue reading The Real Count Dracula
This episode, Paul and I are delighted to welcome to the podcast Dr Stephen Carver, author, biographer and recipient of one of the ACD Society’s Inaugural Doylean Honours for his excellent Wordsworth Editions blog on the Professor Challenger stories. We talk with Stephen about the appeal of Professor Challenger to readers and to Conan Doyle, The Land of… Continue reading Conan Doyle and Professor Challenger (Podcast)
New post for the Wordsworth Editions Blog… When Voltaire’s Candide, ou l'Optimisme was (pseudonymously) published in February 1759, it was simultaneously released in the three great publishing centers of Continental Europe: Geneva, Amsterdam, and Paris. This was in part to shift as many copies as possible before it was pirated, but mostly to make it difficult for the… Continue reading Candide
Both the changing public perception and the style of post-war British motorcycle culture from the late-1950s to the mid-70s owed a tremendous debt to Hollywood, starting with László Benedek’s The Wild One in 1953. Motorcycling was now no longer viewed as the gentleman’s sporting hobby it had been in the early part of the century,… Continue reading The Geometry of Fear: Joseph Losey’s The Damned
If anyone was wondering, this is what I'm currently writing. This project grew out of a panel I spoke on at The Bradford Literature Festival in 2019... THE OPIUM EATERS: High Literature and the Art of Addiction (Morton Books) When the brilliant Oxford drop-out and freelance journalist Thomas De Quincey published his seminal article ‘Confessions of… Continue reading The Opium Eaters – A Work in Progress
Extract of a piece I wrote for Wordsworth Editions just before Christmas on The Picture of Dorian Gray... ...As a narcissist and living work of art, in Nietzschean terms Dorian is an ‘Apollonian’ figure and Hallward also paints him as Adonis, Narcissus, Paris, and Antinous. Against nature, he has the cold edge of the purely aesthetic;… Continue reading The Picture of Dorian Gray
Ainsworth & Friends 