I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray aged 18 and found it to be life-changing. Not for the witticisms which Wilde is so famous for, but for the philosophy of art and morality which it expressed. When I got to university I enlarged the preface and put it up on the wall of my …
Better known these days for his artistic contributions to the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris was also a prolific author and prominent socialist thinker. News From Nowhere is a glimpse at a utopian future – or rather it is a novel-length thesis on how things should be, presented in novel format, with the convenient …
“”The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story”… …Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?” – Harry Quilter “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror …
Hunger is a novel about a man, not fully in charge of his faculties or decisions, attempting to survive on the most basic of levels in a city that has nothing but contempt for his entire existence. With a psychologically complex and highly unreliable protagonist, a proto-Kafkaesque city full of unknown unknowns and a complete …
This is the best documentary I can find online about the life of Vincent van Gogh. It’s still not great, but it will do.
The second Sherlock Holmes novel, and one of the most well-known stories now, The Sign of Four was still only moderately successful in its day, the more well-known short stories yet to be written, but it still holds an important place in Holmes folklore as it introduces Dr Watson’s wife and frames his later, more …
At Wounded Knee, the U.S. 7th Cavalry Regiment massacres 153 Lakota Sioux. Elsewhere, Hunkpapa Lakota leader Sitting Bull is killed by police on Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Vincent van Gogh moves to Auvers-sur-Oise on the edge of Paris in the care of Dr Paul Gachet where he will produce around seventy paintings in as many …
MP3 download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | RSS We’re a bit stuck in between ages here. The experiments are now fading into the background, phonographs are being introduced into the world, but the nascent music business still hasn’t really taken off. 1890 sees our last recordings from …
“The river – with the sunlight flashing from its dancing wavelets, gilding gold the grey-green beech-trunks, glinting through the dark, cool wood paths, chasing shadows o’er the shallows, flinging diamonds from the mill-wheels, throwing kisses to the lilies, wantoning with the weirs’ white waters, silvering moss-grown walls and bridges, brightening every tiny townlet, making sweet …
Chekhov’s early farces were written as simple money-spinners, and have been held in fairly low regard by critics. Even Chekov himself called A Marriage Proposal a “wretched, boring, vulgar little skit.” and advised its director to “roll cigarettes out of it for all I care.” So I’m probably going to be on my own in …
Anton Chekhov — A Marriage Proposal (Предложение) Read More »
