The ‘Tyger’ of my title cannot be unfamiliar to the readers of the Literary Review. Prof. Miner, however, needs a brief introduction. He is Professor Paul Miner, a literary scholar, who is reported to have ‘studied at the Universities of California, Kansas and Wichita . . . and published a number of articles on.Blake in […]
Dr. Rizzuto’s book is a study of the formation of the God representation and its modification and uses during the entire course of life. She differs from Freud in that she finds this representation is affected by the child’s relationship not only with his real father but also with his mother and other significant early […]
‘Well!’ wrote the 27-year-old Charles Dodgson at the end of a particularly long letter to one of his cousins, ‘you ought to be very much obliged to me for writing so long a letter (and I hate letter-writing as a general rule)’. Some 1400 letters later, you might be forgiven for questioning the applicability of […]
Harold Pinter’s two most recent plays have both been supplied with a part-ironic kind of self-definition by their casting. No Man’s Land is an allusive work, full of references to literature outside itself, integrated with a deftness that makes Stoppard, by contrast, look like The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations; but the strongest reference is the […]
At last – the Lawrence book we have been waiting for. Since Lawrence’s death in 1930 hundreds of critical studies of his work have been published and innumerable copies of his novels sold, yet there is still no reliable edition of his writings or comprehensive collection of his letters. It is, of course, much harder […]
Britain’s most famous criminal courtroom, Court Number One at the Old Bailey, can seem surprisingly intimate. The decor is heavy and Edwardian, with the dock only a few feet behind the barristers’ desk and the witness box almost within touching distance of the jury – or at least that is how it seemed to me […]
The Kyrgyz journalist and human rights activist Azimjon Askarov has been in prison for almost a decade. A member of Kyrgyzstan’s Uzbek minority, Askarov has spent his journalistic career exposing corruption. He was arrested on various trumped-up charges on 15 June 2010 during the inter-ethnic violence that swept Osh and Jalal-Abad provinces in southern Kyrgyzstan. […]
How different a story Romeo and Juliet would have been had the star-crossed lovers been able to text one another. Tess of the d’Urbervilles, too: had Tess used WhatsApp, there would have been no need for her letter to Angel Clare to go unnoticed since she’d have seen at a glance whether he’d read the […]
Speaking about his first novel, The Fishermen, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, Chigozie Obioma said that he was interested in the forces that can destroy a family. Centring on four brothers who fish in a polluted river near their home in Nigeria, the novel tracks the breakdown of their relationship, sparked […]
There’s no lone star in Bryan Washington’s Lot, just a cast of characters as drab as the Houston neighbourhoods they inhabit. ‘There’s the world you live in,’ says the narrator of the title story, ‘and then there are the constellations around it, and you’ll never know you’re missing them if you don’t even know to […]
On the Road, famously, was written in just one month, and secured Truman Capote yet another entry in the Oxford Companion of Bitchy Put-downs when he remarked, ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing.’ Nell Zink, it seems, shares Kerouac’s metabolism, having turned out several of her previous novels inside four weeks. ‘No one expected Rembrandt to […]
A passing familiarity with block universe theory might aid understanding of Deborah Levy’s seventh novel, The Man Who Saw Everything. In keeping with the laws of quantum space-time (block universe theory deems that past, present and future all exist simultaneously), memories and intimations of the future merge in the mind of the historian Saul Adler, […]
The destruction of innocence is one of the most powerful and universal of all themes, and Edna O’Brien has been dealing with it throughout her impressively long and productive life as a writer. Her great subject has been the various ways in which the lives of women, especially young women and especially in Ireland, where […]
It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or two later, turns out to be science fiction. The opening gives it the whole nine yards: ‘Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our
That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always been a guy thing and, like many other guy things, has seemingly had its day. Ducks, Newburyport, the seventh novel by […]
Hugo Williams has been writing elegantly crafted and accessible poetry for over fifty years. His tone of voice today is not appreciably different from the one that first asserted itself in the 1960s. He hasn’t lost the comic timing that has been a hallmark of his work since the beginning. He can sometimes court the […]
Some 50 per cent of the world’s people live in cities right now. It has not always been so. Nor is the city – at first glance – a natural human habitat. So what got us hooked on cities? That is the question Monica Smith sets out to answer in this book. In telling the […]
Years ago, as a hardcore cyclist with miles in my legs, I used to dash along with the Dunwich Dynamo, an overnight mass cycle ride from Hackney to the Suffolk coast. By far the most daunting obstacles were the drunks and geezers pouring out of the nightclubs of Romford
Like any mention in the magical world of Harry Potter of Lord Voldemort, whose name others fear to speak, in ours simply uttering ‘calculus’ leaves many people with a rising sense of panic, triggering flashbacks of dreaded maths lessons in their schooldays. Among the things I was never taught at school was that without calculus […]
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Last Tweets