Close Readings

Narrative Poems: ‘Enoch Arden’ by Alfred Tennyson

In the early 1860s, Tennyson was at the height of his celebrity. His great elegy, In Memoriam (1850), seemed to have captured the spiritual unease of the age, and the fir

The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce

Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the

Nature in Crisis: ‘Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism’ by Thea Riofrancos

Lithium-ion batteries are at the heart of the transition away from fossil fuels. But lithium, like the copper, cobalt and rare earths that renewable technologies also req

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Shyness and Dignity’ by Dag Solstad

What happens when the techniques of realist literature become absorbed into our understanding of real life? And what would it mean to try to depict that experience in fic

London Revisited: The Monster

In 1737, Samuel Johnson and his student David Garrick decided to walk to London from Lichfield in search of opportunity. It worked out well for both of them, but for many

Narrative Poems: ‘Amours de Voyage’ by Arthur Hugh Clough

In 1848, Arthur Hugh Clough resigned his fellowship at Oxford after realising that he could no longer in good conscience teach the doctrines of the Anglican Church, as th

Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore

‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as the

Nature in Crisis: ‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ by Alex Roberts and Sam Moore

‘The Rise of Ecofascism: Climate Change and the Far Right’ is a different kind of book from the others Meehan and Peter have discussed so far in their series, even as the

Who’s afraid of realism?: ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark

When Muriel Spark describes the art teacher, Mr Lloyd, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, she writes that ‘most wonderful of all, he had only one arm, the right, with whic

London Revisited: Coffee, Satire and Bubbles

The coffee served in London in the 1690s was notoriously unappetising, likened at the time to ‘burnt shoes and charcoal’. Nonetheless it was extremely popular, not least

Narrative Poems: ‘Childe Roland’ and ‘The Pied Piper’ by Robert Browning

‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ has baffled readers and critics ever since it was published in Men and Women in 1855. It baffled its author, too. It ‘came upon me

Nature in Crisis: ‘Lessons for Survival’ by Emily Raboteau

Over the past twelve years, the walls and shop shutters of Upper Manhattan have been gradually filled by giant paintings of climate-threatened birds, inspired by the spec

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Pnin’ by Vladimir Nabokov

If Saul Bellow’s Seize the Day (1956) belongs firmly to postwar American realism, then Pnin (1957) certainly doesn’t. With its self-conscious fictionality and unreliable

London Revisited: Pepys, Plague and Fire

The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought a flurry of changes to London life. Women were allowed to appear on stage for the first time, the Royal Society was founde

Narrative Poems: ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ by John Keats

According to legend, a young woman who observes certain rites on 20 January, the Eve of St Agnes, will see in her dreams the man she is going to marry. When John Keats fo

The Man Behind the Curtain: ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot

In ‘Middlemarch’, Tom McCarthy argues, George Eliot uses her ‘study of provincial life’ as a Trojan Horse to smuggle the continental philosophy of Spinoza and Hegel into

Nature in Crisis: ‘Impasse’ by Roy Scranton

At Chaco Canyon in the New Mexico desert lie the ruins of a once vibrant and extensive Ancestral Puebloan civilisation. Sometime in the 12th century the society fell into

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Seize the Day’ by Saul Bellow

‘Seize the Day’ was published in 1956, but its grammar of realism was barely changed from that deployed in ‘Madame Bovary’ exactly a hundred years earlier. The precise de

London Revisited: The Road to Civil War

When James VI of Scotland arrived in London in 1603 to become the first ‘King of Great Britain’, expectations were high. They were soon disappointed, not least for the Ca

Narrative Poems: ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and ‘Michael’ by William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the first people to hear ‘The Ruined Cottage’, read aloud to him on a visit to the Wordsworths in 1797, and he later described it as ‘o