Patricia Highsmith’s novels unfold like slow exhalations. They do not shout; they insinuate. A cigarette burns down, a train car hums, a glass of Campari is poured at a café in Naples. Beneath these ordinary gestures lurks unease, a sense that the veneer of civility is about to crack. For Highsmith, menace was not somethingContinue reading “Patricia Highsmith: Style, Menace, and the Art of Disquiet”
Category Archives: Literature
Oscar Wilde: The Art of Living and the Cost of Being
Oscar Wilde once wrote that “one should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art.” Few figures in modern literature have embodied that maxim as completely as he did. Dandy, dramatist, aesthete, wit, martyr: Wilde’s life was not merely lived but staged. He was at once a literary force, a culturalContinue reading “Oscar Wilde: The Art of Living and the Cost of Being”
The Bloomsbury Group: Rebels in Cambric Shirts
“They lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles.” In the genteel drawing rooms of early 20th-century London, respectability was still the reigning order. But in a cluster of shabby houses around Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, a group of young intellectuals tore down the rules. They questioned the empire, mocked Victorian morality, experimentedContinue reading “The Bloomsbury Group: Rebels in Cambric Shirts”
Virginia Woolf: The Stream of Consciousness That Changed the World
“Arrange whatever pieces come your way.” – Virginia Woolf She was born into the last glow of Victorian London, in 1882, in a house on Hyde Park Gate filled with books, paintings, and the chatter of intellectuals. Virginia Woolf came of age in a world weighted by tradition, but she would dismantle that tradition wordContinue reading “Virginia Woolf: The Stream of Consciousness That Changed the World”
Edgar Allan Poe: The Architect of American Shadows
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) remains one of the most singular figures in American letters: poet, critic, short story pioneer, and gothic visionary. His life, brief and tumultuous, has long been folded into the myth of his work — the impoverished genius, the tragic outsider, the writer of haunted tales who himself died mysteriously. But Poe’sContinue reading “Edgar Allan Poe: The Architect of American Shadows”
Christmas in Literature: The Season on the Page
Some of our strongest images of Christmas do not come from memory or ritual, but from books. From the glowing hearths of Dickensian London to the snowy Welsh villages of Dylan Thomas, writers have long used Christmas as both backdrop and metaphor. On the page, the season becomes not just a holiday, but a prismContinue reading “Christmas in Literature: The Season on the Page”
Joan Didion: The Cool Precision of a Literary Icon
Joan Didion was one of the defining writers of the 20th century, a figure whose cool prose, sharp eye, and unsparing self-examination reshaped the possibilities of nonfiction. From her portraits of California in the 1960s to her searing meditations on grief in the 2000s, Didion’s work remains a model of style, clarity, and depth. HerContinue reading “Joan Didion: The Cool Precision of a Literary Icon”
Proust & Bergotte
Marcel Proust on the Death of the Writer Bergotte The circumstances of his death were as follows. A fairly mild attack of uraemia had led to his being ordered to rest. But, an art critic having written somewhere that in Vermeer’s View of Delft (lent by the Gallery at The Hague for an exhibition of Dutch painting),Continue reading “Proust & Bergotte”
Tom Stoppard — 1937–2025
Tom Stoppard, one of the most influential and inventive playwrights of the modern era, died on 29 November 2025 at his home in Dorset. He was 88. Born Tomáš Sträussler in 1937 in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard fled the Nazi occupation with his family as a child, eventually settling in England — a displacement that would laterContinue reading “Tom Stoppard — 1937–2025”
The Brontë Family: A Furnace of Genius on the Yorkshire Moors
Introduction There are literary families, and then there are the Brontës—six children raised in a remote parsonage on the Yorkshire moors, who transformed personal grief, imaginative play, and strict Victorian constraints into novels that altered the course of English literature. Their story is not simply about genius blooming in isolation; it is about a familyContinue reading “The Brontë Family: A Furnace of Genius on the Yorkshire Moors”
My World of Interiors 