The claustrophobic story told by Victor Maskell — a gay, aristocratic Irishman, Cambridge Marxist, international Poussin expert, Russian spy and Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, nicknamed Boots by the Queen [...]
Andre Norton’s short 1962 novel Eye of the Monster is a disturbing story in which the native race of a world called Ishkur, pejoratively nicknamed Crocs, are brutal, foul-smelling and [...]
Much is not known about William Shakespeare, as Thomas Marc Parrott acknowledges in his agile, erudite and very helpful 1934 book William Shakespeare: A Handbook. But the man’s plays and [...]
William Shakespeare’s plays and poetry have been the touchstone of English and world literature for more than four centuries ago. But the man behind them, known in his time as [...]
As a title, An Angel in Sodom is evocative and a bit ambiguous. The subtitle of Jim Elledge’s book is much more direct: Henry Gerber and the Birth of the [...]
Near the end of Stewart Sterling’s 1946 novel Where There’s Smoke, Ben Pedley rips the dress off a sultry songstress named Leila Lownes and then throws his body on her. [...]
Terry Pratchett is writing about a particular kind of madness that can affect human beings, those of heightened sensitivities, such as artists. He’s embodied this mental aberration in a bodiless, [...]
Two images from The Missing of the Somme, the 1994 book by Geoff Dyer about memory and the Great War, now called World War I: Young men, lined up at [...]
In The Penelopiad, her 2005 revisualization of The Odyssey from the point of view of Penelope, Margaret Atwood uses the queen of Ithaca’s twelve maids as a Greek chorus to [...]
Grandma By Patrick T. Reardon . The showers have turned to drizzle. Drops fall heavily now from the black limbs of a bare tree in the glare of the street [...]
