Love, Anger, Madness: Rebellious Haitian Literature almost Pushed off the Edge of History
CW: Sexual Assault After the suspicious death of three family members, Marie Vieux-Chauvet and her family halted the production of Love, Anger, Madness. They travelled across Haiti to destroy all published copies, and she left her underground literary society The Spiders of the Night in order
Giving Ukrainian Literature Its Due
As Ukraine faced renewed invasion by Russian forces in February 2022, the world’s gaze fixed on the nation with a new intensity. Swept into the spotlight amid a flood of battlefield reports, Ukrainian culture was recognised abroad in a way it had never been before. Exhibitions, concerts, bookshop
Fashioning Decline
“It is quite consummate, is it not!” cries the Aesthetic Bridegroom of his new teapot, in a Punch cartoon of 1880. “It is, indeed!” replies his Intense Bride. “Oh, Algernon, let us live up to it!” Let us surround ourselves with beautiful things, and let those selves live up to them. The
Finding my way back to the nightingale
The exalted song of the nightingale has long haunted the poetic imagination. Though I have never heard a nightingale sing, I have read its lamenting melodies in the lines of Ovid, Keats, and Coleridge. The real song remains elusive, yet somehow still a familiar refrain, and I wonder whether it is po
Frozen In Time: A Classicist’s Portrait of Interwar Oxford
In one of the more blatantly cliché moments of my life, I watched the 1981 TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s iconic Oxford interwar novel Brideshead Revisited. Notwithstanding the fact that Oxford only features in the first four episodes, it remains that for many of us, Brideshead played a part in
seven and serpentine
i’d recline on the green couch, on peeling patches of fabric held by white string. […]
The Changing Face of Poetry
Mukahang Limbu is explaining to me why he writes poetry. “It can make you feel like you’re being heard. Coming from a marginalised background, and not having much representation in the literary canon, that can make you feel invisible. But being able to write yourself into that canon is reall
