Close Readings

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

Nature in Crisis: ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Through folktales, memoir and hard science, Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass argues for the intertwining of Indigenous knowledge systems and empirical science, t

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Voyage in the Dark’ by Jean Rhys

In ‘A Room of One’s Own’, Virginia Woolf writes about how radical it feels to read the sentences: ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’. Woolf probably

London Revisited: Shakespeare’s City

When Thomas Platter, a Swiss tourist, went to see ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Globe Theatre in 1599, it wasn’t Shakespeare’s language that attracted his attention but the read

Narrative Poems: ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In her diary entry for 20 November 1797, Dorothy Wordsworth describes a late afternoon walk with her brother William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. ‘ We went eight miles in

Nature in Crisis: ‘Is a River Alive?’ by Robert Macfarlane

The idea that a river is a living being has important legal consequences. But it also has imaginative consequences, which can, in George Eliot’s words, ‘enlarge the imagi

Who’s afraid of realism? ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

In August 1923, halfway through writing ‘Mrs Dalloway’, Virginia Woolf recorded a new idea in her diary: she would ‘dig out beautiful caves’ behind her characters, and ‘t

London Revisited: The Protestant Capital

At the start of the 16th century London was still recognisably medieval, crowded within its walls, dominated by churches and monasteries and deeply tied to Catholic Europ

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