Four syllables that say everything that needs to be said. From the Queen of Pop...
Author: dhounam
Silas Marner: a short novel
Most novels are much longer than they need to be. George Eliot's Silas Marner, although unsatisfactory in the end, is a rare exception...
Four seagulls and a dove: a sad story
The first sign of trouble was when we got dive-bombed by an angry adult seagull...
The ship was lost, the crew perished: Charlotte Brontë’s Villette
No other novel in English ends with a punch like Charlotte Brontë's sublime last novel
He’s not a naughty boy, he’s the Messiah!
So here's the trope I'd like to eliminate from Young Adullt fiction: messianic main characters. Fuck 'em.
Avast there, ye swabs!
The whole point about the bad guy is that he thinks he's the good guy. For a great villain, go back to Treasure Island and Long John Silver...
The invisibility of Vincent Van Gogh
The paintings are there somewhere; you just can't see them. Art, sadly, has become almost invisible, eclipsed by the art lovers
Unpersuaded: a disappointing classic
Last year, on a whim, I decided to revisit Persuasion… and was genuinely taken by surprise: it seemed to me not merely disappointing but actively bad...
The People’s Crusade as an exercise in mass formation psychosis
When you have a society that has become decoupled from each other and has free-floating anxiety and a sense that things don’t make sense… and then their attention gets focussed by a leader or a series of events on one small point—just like hypnosis—they literally become hypnotised and can be led anywhere.
Beatle Bones
As Peter Jackson’s new documentary series, The Beatles: Get Back is released, my own two cents’ worth on the loveable mop-tops.I remember the first time I heard their second single, Please Please Me, in January 1963. I was fourteen, in the dining room, listening to Pick of the Pops on what was then the BBC … Continue reading Beatle Bones