Georg Lukac’s fan-club has been dwindling steadily over the past decade. Spurned by liberals as a Stalinist hack, he has also drawn increasing flak from an oedipal Left which, weaned on his writings, has now sought to oust him. Theoretically, Lukács has been denounced as an Hegelian humanist in Marxist clothing, a latter-day Quixote who […]
The essays collected in Against Interpretation date from 1961-65, and created enough of a stir to be republished in book form in 1966. In the preface to that edition, Sontag points out that they belong to a ‘period of search, reflection, and discovery’ between the writing of her first and second novels, and she returns […]
Katharine Worth offers her readers a European perspective on Irish drama and a celebration of Yeats as a master of 20th century theatre. With elegance and lucidity she traces the influence of Maeterlinck’s ‘static drama’ on the theories of Yeats, who conceived a horror of excessive physical movement on the stage. Lady Gregory taught her […]
It has been said by more than one Irish writer that the first duty of an artist is to insult rather than flatter his fellow-countrymen. J M Synge incurred the wrath of Irish nationalists for his healthy refusal to idolise the peasant at a time when most native politicians were demanding a drama which would […]
Novelists’ thoughts on their own work don’t always make very edifying reading. Among the Moderns, perhaps only James in his Art of the Novel – and, in a more intimate way, Conrad and Virginia Woolf in their respective Letters – have been able to shed any powerful light on the process and ‘ideology’ of their […]
Primo Levi was found dead at the bottom of a stairwell in 1987, having presumably thrown himself from the landing of his fourth-floor flat. The New Yorker announced that Levi’s act had ‘cancelled’ the value of his writing. The novelist William Styron claimed that antidepressants (to which he has attributed the salvation of his own […]
The formidable bulk of the new Oxford Shakespeare invites mockery, and the long time that elapsed between the publication of Volume One (the modernised text without a commentary), Volume Two (the text unmodernised but still without a commentary) which followed within months, and now the long promised third volume which has just appeared, invites suspicion […]
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Knowledge of Sufism increased markedly with the publication in 1964 of The Sufis, by Idries Shah. Nowadays his writings, much like his father’s, are dismissed for their Orientalism and inaccuracy.
@fitzmorrissey investigates who the Shahs really were.
Fitzroy Morrissey - Sufism Goes West
Fitzroy Morrissey: Sufism Goes West - Empire’s Son, Empire’s Orphan: The Fantastical Lives of Ikbal and Idries Shah by Nile Green
literaryreview.co.uk
Rats have plagued cities for centuries. But in Baltimore, researchers alighted on one surprising solution to the problem of rat infestation: more rats.
@WillWiles looks at what lessons can be learned from rat ecosystems – for both rats and humans.
Will Wiles - Puss Gets the Boot
Will Wiles: Puss Gets the Boot - Rat City: Overcrowding and Urban Derangement in the Rodent Universes of John B ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Twisters features destructive tempests and blockbuster action sequences.
@JonathanRomney asks what the real danger is in Lee Isaac Chung's disaster movie.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/eyes-of-the-storm